LornaJane

Following on from last week's crochet lesson with the slip knot, today we get started with the crochet hook itself and the simplest crochet stitch - the chain. This demonstration uses double knitting weight wool and a 4mm hook.

We have a whole raft of birthdays in the family at this time of year. My sister and my dad share a birthday, and theirs is today!! Happy birthday Dad, happy birthday little sister. In addition, my not-brother-in-law and my niece have birthdays in the next couple of days too so there's lots of celebrating.

My sister is working abroad so I couldn't bake her a cake this year - so instead I sent her this:


I made it from this pattern which was featured on craftzine, it was really quick to make! I just sewed the seed beads on as a little after thought, they look so cute though :)

Last night I gave a talk at the Leeds Girl Geek Dinners entitled "Professional Development for Girl Geeks" - and you can find the slides on slideshare if you're interested.

Most of what I said wasn't on the slides, but the gist of it was along the lines of:

• Use the resources around you


• People can be resources


• Interact with resources


• Ask Questions - do it well and ask each question once

I had a great night and I hope everyone enjoyed themselves as much as I did - and if you were there, are you asking questions yet?

I don't use a mouse most of the time, because I have tendonitis in my forearms and find that I can use a keyboard for a whole working week without too much pain, whereas any mouse usage starts hurting badly in a day and half. As a web developer, I spend a lot of time with the Internet, developing on it, networking with it, reading on it, and so on - and I do it all without a mouse.

Spatial Navigation in Opera

The only browser I've ever managed to work with successfully is Opera, and most of my surfing uses the spatial navigation feature. Basically, you hold down shift, and use the arrows to jump around hyperlinks - much nicer than trying to tab around the place and getting stuck on some long list of links!

Keyboard Shortcuts

Opera has fabulous (and configurable) keyboard shortcuts. I could go on forever but my favourites are:
1 and 2 Next tab/previous tab
0 and 9 Make text bigger/smaller (its actually a zoom, so it works on pictures too)
6 Put the page back to the original size
Ctrl+t New tab
Ctrl+w Close tab
Ctrl+alt+z Open a tab that was closed, with all data still intact (I love this one!!)

With all of these put together, I can do pretty much everything.

Accessibility

The upshot of this is that I consider myself to have "accessibility requirements". I don't use a mouse, so I can't click or mouseover. I use dropdown boxes by focussing and then arrowing down - so if yours triggers stuff at onchange, then I probably can't use your site. I have javascript turned on most of the time, but plugins turned off (I can't click on anything anyway) - and I regularly use Opera's shortcuts for enabling/disabling CSS and images (ctrl+g and ctrl+i respectively) if I can't see what's going on. Opera also saves my preferences per site - so I can fiddle with settings for scripting and plugins on a per-site basis which is really helpful.

So there we go, if you have RSI problems, try using the 'net from your keyboard. And if you thought "accessibility" went with "disabled", think again.

I am a big fan of pretty much anything Nintendo, particularly Zelda and Mario Kart. I loved mario kart doubledash and this was the first driving game I really got into (I still can't do technical driving games, only kiddy ones). So when Mario Kart was launched for Wii, we got it on launch day.


When we first got the game, it seemed like I couldn't play as my favourite character from the other Nintendo games, Princess Daisy. I grumbled a bit and played as peach instead, similar character but pink dress instead of yellow dress. It is actually way more than that of course - Peach is pink and blonde and a bit mainstream. Daisy is sassy and usually unsuitably dressed, I love her :) I looked round for reviews and discovered I could unlock Daisy - she's in the Special Cup on 150cc.

Well, I'm not a brilliant gamer, but I really really wanted Daisy and off I went, time trialling each course to get myself up to speed, and then working through unlocking all the tracks on 50cc, 100cc, 150cc ... along I went, taking more and more preparation and attempts each time, until finally I had the cup I needed. Except, its not that simple. You have to win that grand prix to get it, whereas you only need to be placed (1st, 2nd or 3rd) to unlock the next race. Well that was about 8 weeks ago.

I was coming 2nd in the cup pretty consistently but just couldn't nail that top spot. I time trialled, tried to sort out manual sliding, played against the ghost data, and tried the cup over and over thinking that if I was lucky I'd do it, to the point where I'd pretty much stopped playing completely. And then, today, after a long sleep last night and Sunday Lunch in the pub, we had a quick game on Mario Kart and I beat Kevin on all 4 tracks ... so I gave that special cup another shot - and won it!! So now, I finally have Daisy and shouting "come on Daisy" at the TV works so much better when it really is Daisy in the car :)

I often get asked what "crochet" is ... well, you can read about it on wikipedia, but actually its really easy ... so I'll teach you :)

Here's the first task, all you need is a bit of yarn, or string, or anything really.



Part 2 coming soon ...