While the rest of the shutterbugs are off slacking, Duncan Riley commits an act of journalism and quick-posts photos from Friday night's Crunchies party. Too bad I'm in half of them. Helpful hint, Duncan: Most readers prefer photos of pretty girls. If you hit Page Down a few times you'll get to soon-to-be-all-over-national-TV CNET reporter Natali Del Conte flashing that Britneyesque — and I mean that in the best possible way — smile of hers just before leaving for New York City. Lots and lots more photos at Helluvajob. That's Lane Hartwell's camera in the left of this shot, and I saw Brian Solis snapping away, too, so there'll be more pix over the weekend.

Click here to buy your $40 ticket to tonight's latest round of Web 2.0 awards. It had been sold out, but I just tested a purchase and there were multiple seats available for the balcony and dress circle section of the Herbst Theater. Full disclosure: TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington and I get along just fucking fine, thank you. Mike doesn't confuse me with Nick Denton — unlike certain other journalists I could name, except they picked up the tab so it's all cool.

After casting my daily vote for The Crunchies awards, I wondered: How does the site stop me from voting more than once a day? Does it just set a cookie, even though that's the first thing any Web 2.0 geek who wants to hack the vote will think of? Can I delete my cookies from vote.crunchies.techcrunch.com and vote again, as many times as I want? Bingo: I can now state with confidence that Digg will sweep this event.

Didn't TechCrunch just run some sort of honors event? They're holding another awards show in two weeks. The contest's Web 2.0 gimmick: The Crunchies' Ajaxified ballot lets everyone vote once a day, every day from sometime before Christmas until the contest closes a week from Saturday — a sort of Persistent People's Choice Awards. I predict Kevin Rose is going to win this one big-time.