HOLY CRAP. I was just sitting at the dining room table and heard an auctioneer’s voice floating in from the street. Turns out one of the apartments across the street from us was for sale. I heard him call $840,000 as I went outside. My jaw dropped. In 2 minutes it was up over a million. Ended up going for $1,099,000! Another lady on the street was pumping her fist. “Was it your place?” I said, incredulous. “No! But I own a house in this neighbourhood!” Me: “ME TOO!” High fives all around.

(Yes, yes. The inner Sydney housing bubble is ridiculous. Totally agree. But hey, that random lady and I had a fun couple of minutes thinking about being paper millionaires.)

What Do You Know – Sydney
A few weeks ago I got an email from the fine folks at Web Directions inviting me to speak at their next What Do You Know event. They put these on a couple times a year, and it’s basically an evening of short lightning talks around any topic tangentially related to the web. Never one to turn down an opportunity to flaunt/embarrass myself publicly, I accepted. The organisers were aware I’d done a geeky knitting talk in the past and suggested something along those lines. (As the Snook joked: my talk was pretty much intended as comic relief.) With all that in mind, my topic was: Granny Was a Hacker: Knitting as Computer Code.

My slides are available here as a PDF that includes my speaker’s notes as well.

I wrote the talk over two nights and then spent a day or two practicing it. On Thursday I actually got half a dozen co-workers to watch me go through it in a conference room as a final dress rehearsal. My biggest fear was actually having a coughing attack in the middle of it, as I’m still getting over a cold from last week. But I’m happy to report that on the night my talk went SO WELL! Adrenaline kicked in and I didn’t cough or um or even hesitate a little bit. I had been a little worried how the topic would go over, given that the audience was 95% male and probably skewed very technical. But it ended up being a massive hit. (The Snook hypothesised that it was an advantage that pretty much nobody there knew anything about knitting, thus it was equally interesting to everybody.) I had lots of people come up to me afterwards to congratulate me! Here are some of the tweets and photographs from the night.

Watching @web_goddess slay the #WDYK audience with binary knitting, ‘creative mittens’ with QR codes, and more. Super fucking epic.

— Lachlan Hardy (@lachlanhardy) April 3, 2014

MT @Xavier_Ho: Thoroughly enjoyed tonight’s WDYK event by @webdirections. Tons of great ideas! pic.twitter.com/YtiKLDCYkM // I’m in polka dots!

— Kris Howard (@web_goddess) April 4, 2014

RT @Xavier_Ho: Encoding by Knitting @webdirections‘s What Do You Know. pic.twitter.com/JL99PqRkZB // Hey, that’s me! https://t.co/PN9kt09cBT

— Kris Howard (@web_goddess) April 5, 2014

RT @Xavier_Ho: Sony a99, CZ70200F28 in a dark setting, Adobe Lightroom 5 vs DxO Optics Pro 9. pic.twitter.com/RtRH6a5JQC // This is also me!!

— Kris Howard (@web_goddess) April 5, 2014

Thanks again to Maxine and John from Web Directions for inviting me!

Vatican to scan all their manuscripts – I can’t be the only one worried that they’ll accidentally release Moloch the demon onto the Internet?

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