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personal blog of Kris Howard

Another video time capsule from the early aughts!

I love the story of a one-hit wonder who is unshamed of their one-hit wonder. (I do think their cover of Erasure’s “A Little Respect” is underrated though!) I had to laugh a little when he got really offended that they wanted him to censor “gun,” because the song had such deep personal meaning for him. I mean, I guess so. Also, I had no idea that the song and album was such a flop in the US, and it only really took off in Australia and the UK. It reminded me that Rodd and I actually saw them play in London during that tour, 25 years ago. Fun times.

And of course, it reminded me of D’Hundskrippln’s banger of a cover “Gloana Bauer.” How have I never blogged this before? Rodd somehow found it and sent it to me when we lived in Munich, and I became obsessed with it. Still sad we never got to see them play in Germany. Goddamn I love this video. I once asked a Bavarian friend to try to translate it for me, and even he could only get like 50% of it. (Note to self: get some Lederhosen for ME.)

YouTube suggested this to me last night, and it was a HOOT.

I have been aware of the Figwit thing for a long time but somehow managed to miss the fact that Bret McKenzie’s wife made a documentary about it way back in the early 2000s. I love it so much. It’s a time capsule: early internet culture and the World Wide Web; blueberry iMacs; Peter Jackson and other LotR folks playing along; Elijah Wood in a terrible hat; Taika Waititi (credited as Taika Cohen) just, like, hanging around on a couch like proto-Korg; Hebridean dolphins; people being kind and funny about geek culture and not toxic and snarky… So good.

The official Moomin site has a new character quiz! It’s really weird though. I went through it the first time and got Mr. Brisk, who is a character I’ve never heard of and doesn’t actually sound all that much like me or the answers I put in. I did it a second time and got Snorkmaiden, which still feels slightly off but I’ll accept it. I do relate to her sense of style, her beautiful fringe, and her devotion to Moomintroll. She’s also resourceful. I would also have accepted Sniff (particularly his love of shiny trinkets) and Little My (I like to bite).

And Rodd got Hemulen, which… checks out.

Echofeed is shutting down. Damn. I get it; maintaining software for customer is a huge hassle. I don’t blame Robb at all for throwing in the towel. I’ve still got a few months before my subscription runs out, so I’ll be on the lookout for a replacement. It’s been very handy to automatically share my blog posts on Mastodon and Bluesky. If you know of a good replacement that isn’t Jetpack, please let me know! (I’m tired of Jetpack’s enshittification as they cram probabilistic automation in everywhere.)

LOL, remember when I distributed my crappy homemade blogging software 24 years ago? Even supporting that was a pain, and it was free…

“More than 15.5 million Australians could have no say in who inherits their superannuation” – What a misleading title! All you have to do is send in a form. I read a similar article a few years back and realised that we were in that boat. We sent them in and now we have a binding beneficiary in there. It’s really easy, so if you haven’t done it you really should.

The best way to recover after a long ride? Hot sauna, cold plunges, and warm mineral baths with the ladies.

Distance: 31.56km
Time: 129min

I took the Light Rail to the starting point. It was meant to be a 30km ride, and I didn’t want to tire myself out before the good bit!

Our turnaround point was the Georges River Sailing Club in Sans Souci. Here I am looking back into Botany Bay. Stunning view; shame that they somehow took more than half an hour to serve us our coffees!

This is the start of the Muddy Creek Cycleway, which opened late last year. I was very excited to try it out. Sydney’s cycling infrastructure keeps getting better!

Joining another long group ride today along the Cooks River to Sans Souci and back. Marlene and I were very excited to meet our new friend Sprocket!

Just filled out our household Census form for 2026. Very smooth experience! I was trying to remember what the 2021 version was like… and then realised we missed it, because we were in Germany. Had to answer a few questions differently than in years past:

Income – way down! Due to…
No job! Yay!
Volunteer work? Yes, plenty.
Did I spend time in the last two weeks “providing unpaid care, help or assistance to family members or others because of a disability, a long-term health condition or problems related to old age?” I was honestly disappointed that “You’re goddamn right I did” wasn’t an answer.

Self, you have a perfectly good mechanical keyboard. There’s no need to get another one, even if it’s soooooooo preeeeeettttttty.

I recently frogged these and started over, this time knitting them toe-up. That way I can use up every bit of the yarn without worrying I’ll run out. I’m also doing a Princess sole again too. (And my awesome WW Birthday Cake tote is from Made590!)

Distance: 6.7km
Time: 27min

Clearing out the open tabs…

How to keep sea-monkeys alive – Mike Monteiro slays me again with his take on AI. “AI is Sea-Monkeys. AI is hope in exchange for something that’s dead.”
Netflix Is Adapting Miles Franklin’s ‘My Brilliant Career’ Into Its Next Big Australian Drama Series – I listened to the audiobook last year and loved it, except for the ending which enraged me. Now another generation of women can be likewise annoyed.
Did you know that Mariska Hargitay is Jayne Mansfield’s daughter? I did not. #nepobaby
In ‘Office Space,’ Texas’ suburban hellscape is a character all its own – I also didn’t know Office Space was set in Texas. Between that article and the stapler meme, I think the universe is telling me I need to rewatch this movie. (It did prompt me to listen to “Damn It Feels Good to be a Gangsta.”)
Frank Reynolds Joins the Fellowship of the Ring – This so stupid, and so well done, and it made us laugh and laugh.

I’ve had a couple people reach out to alert me to this news: Roald Dahl’s original sketches to be auctioned. These are drawings that Dahl himself made prior to publication of his memoir Boy – Tales of Childhood. Apparently Quentin Blake was booked up, so Ian Craig from the publishing house Jonathan Cape did the final artwork and even suggested the title of the book.

The auction actually happened a couple days ago, and it looks like the lot went for £23,940. There were a couple other Dahl-related lots sold as well, and you can find out more over at my Dahl site.

This is a new-to-me technique I’ve just discovered for handling long floats in fairisle knitting. Seems super useful!

It took me a while, but I finally managed to unlock my little robot dog in Palia. Isn’t he cute?? He follows me everywhere, and he can take stuff home if my backpack is too full.

When the Snook pimps his mee goreng, he doesn’t mess around.

There are only two weeks left in the Australian financial year, so that means it’s a great time to use up any remaining budget* you have for charitable donations. If you need some ideas, here are the Aussie institutions we’ve supported in various ways over the last year:

Dementia Australia – Dementia is a shit of a disease, and if it’s touched your life, you have my total sympathy. It sucks.
Australian Data Science Education Institute (ADSEI) – Linda wants to teach kids to change the world by helping them with critical thinking, problem solving, and data literacy.
Ovarian Cancer Research Foundation – These folks run Frocktober. Enough said.
The Cancer Council – My friend Steve has participated a couple times in the Shitbox Rally. It’s a good cause and a fun event.
Tangaroa Blue – We watched David Attenborough’s Ocean recently on Disney+ and got inspired to help.
Thread Together – This group gets unsold clothing from retailers and makes it available to those in need. They’ve been extra busy with the recent east coast flooding.

And of course, the State Library of NSW. In the past few months I’ve had the opportunity to see up close how the library supports our communities across the state. One program I only learned about recently is multicultural book loans. This means that if you live in rural NSW and you need books in a language other than English, the State Library can send them to your local library. Last year, this program loaned out more than 82,000 items. With more than 29% of the NSW population born overseas and over 280 languages are spoken at home, this service is pretty crucial!

* I know, I know. Cozzie livs. I get it. If you don’t have spare cash, there are other ways to make your community a better place.

When I was doing my daily link cleanup, I found a couple links that Rodd sent me back in 2004 that are A) still active and B) still hilarious: “I believe you have my stapler” and “What’s new, Khan?” He walked in to find me cracking up listening to them. We both agreed that YTMND’s humour is probably unexplainable to the youths, much as skibidi toilet is to us olds.

For the record, my sister is the one that told me I had to read the dragon porn.

Stuff I’ve shared with the Snook this week…

The hunt for Marie Curie’s radioactive fingerprints in Paris – Neat! He actually went to the Curie Museum while we were in Paris for one of my last work trips in Europe.
Royal Australian Mint releases coins inspired by Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book – Actually, he sent that one to me. GENIUS! Honestly kind of tempted…
‘Nobody wants a robot to read them a story!’ The creatives and academics rejecting AI – at work and at home – Yep. Related Bluesky post that hit me right in the feels.

Me: Wow. On this day in 2009, we went to the Lansdowne for dinner and you ate a $6 steak. SIX DOLLARS!

Rodd: Cozzie livs, man. Cozzie livs.

I’m a big fan of the Finnish design house Marimekko. They’ve been making gorgeous fabric prints and homewares for 70+ years. The only problem is that their stuff can be very, very expensive (especially here in Australia). A few months back though they had a clearance sale, and I picked up a couple meters of the iconic Unikko print cotton at 40% off. Today I decided to use it to make a couple cushions for our new couch.

We already had a pair of old IKEA cushions with covers that were starting to fall apart. The feather inserts were still good though, so I removed the covers to see how they were constructed. They were rectangular — 59cm/23.25″ long by 37.5cm/14.75″ wide — with a lapped zipper along the bottom edge. I decided to make the new covers a little smaller so they’d feel a bit plumper. (They’d lost a couple feathers over the years!)

At this point Rodd was like, “So are you going to reuse the zippers?” I realised that was an excellent suggestion, so out came the seam ripper.

Once I worked out what size I wanted the new covers to be, I added on a bit for seam allowance and then cut out 4 panels from my fabric. I then used my overlocker to finish all the raw edges.

I’ve installed a few zippers in my time but I’m by no means an expert. I found this tutorial from The Sewing Directory to be really helpful. Once I had the zipper joining two panels together, it was very simple to sew around the other three sides.

And here’s the finished cover showing the lapped zipper! Why yes, I did sew one side of the zip with red thread and one with white, thank you for noticing.

Here’s a cushion in all its plump glory. To buy one would probably be like $90 AUD, so my version came out a fair bit cheaper. (That’s discounting my own labour though, which you should never do if you’re actually selling stuff you create!)

Don’t they look lovely on the new couch? I might need to make some more…

In 2024 we embarked on a pretty major home renovation, and once we were moved back in I spent a lot of time thinking about how I wanted to set up my office. I knew that I wanted a dedicated sewing table where I could have both my sewing machine and overlocker set up, with all my tools and supplies in easy reach. I also wanted a cutting table (preferably height adjustable), and somewhere to set up the ironing board for a sewing session. I also needed storage for my fabric and wool.

In terms of assets I had an existing IKEA Bekant standing desk, which serves as my computer workstation but can also conveniently double as a cutting table. I have a large cutting mat that I leave on it, and I can pretty quickly clear away everything when I need to cut something big. I also have a rolling office chair. Beyond that, the room was a blank slate.

I did a lot of googling at what others had done, and I was very inspired by this Garage Workbench DIY. I realised that the IKEA Lagkapten/Alex desk combination was a good starting point, but it had one significant drawback — durability. The Lagkapten has a honeycomb core, and apparently it will sag over time if you put a lot of weight on it. (That’s why IKEA always show a center leg on any of the longer desks.) And guess what? Sewing machines are pretty heavy. I read a lot of posts about people using “stiffening rods” and such to try to reinforce them, but eventually realised it would be a lot simpler to just use an actual wooden desktop. Bunnings make a pre-finished timber panel that I realised would work perfectly. With all that in mind, I used SmartDraw to mock up the floorpan and see how everything would fit.

Once I had the plan, it was time to go shopping! Protip: before you make any major IKEA purchase, check to see if you’re able to access any discounts. We learned that Macquarie Bank sell IKEA gift cards at 6% off, which was a nice savings for not much effort.

Thankfully, we were able to find everything we needed. First step: protect the floor.

I wanted to protect our lovely new wooden floors from the rolling wheels of my chair. This is the IKEA Vedbäk rug. It’s not real wool, but I don’t mind so much in here. We put out an underlay first to keep it from shifting around, and then unrolled the rug. I put some boards and boxes down on it overnight so help it flatten out.

Then it was time to start assembling.

I started with two Alex storage units. Here they are put together and set aside. I made sure that the door openings mirrored each other. The Alex units come with a panel with pre-drilled holes that you can use as the top or the bottom, depending on how you want to set them up. Here I made sure the holes were at the bottom. (You’ll see why in a bit.)

I knew that I didn’t want to just rest the desktop on the units, but instead to bolt everything together so it would be rigid. Before I put the other two Alex units together, we wisely had the idea to use one of the bases to mark out holes for pre-drilling the desktop. We also attached the base plate for the Adils leg. (While I knew my desktop would be strong enough without it, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to have it. We pushed it as far back in the center as we could.)

Here you can see Rodd marking the holes for drilling. The Alex unit bases have 4 holes, and we decided to use the inner set for securing the upper units (on the top side of the desktop), and the outer set for the lower units (on the bottom side of the desktop). That way the screws had no chance of hitting each other. We lined the base up flush with the back and edge of the worktop and used a pointy screwdriver to mark the spot.

Here’s Rodd drilling one of the holes. We worked out the depth needed based on our wood screws and the depth of the Alex base plate, and he put a piece of tape on the drill bit to show him how far to go.

We also had the idea to put something in between the Alex units and the desktop, to add some cushioning and to protect the desktop a bit (in case we wanted to use it for something else in the future). I’m not really sure this step was needed, to be honest. But I bought some of IKEA’s Variera drawer liners and used the Alex bases to cut out appropriately sized pieces.

Here you can see one of the drawer liner pieces, ready for final assembly.

For the bottom supports, I went with two of the Alex drawer units. For these, I made sure that the base with the holes was on the top since we’d be screwing into the desk. I was a little worried about how well they’d stand up to the weight we’d be putting on top (desktop plus another Alex unit). IKEA don’t really seem to recommend stacking them. I decided therefore that a little extra support couldn’t hurt. We bought a couple packs of these corner braces at Bunnings…

And I screwed them into each corner on the back of the Alex drawer units.

You can also see that we purchased Eket feet to use on the bottom units. These are adjustable, so I knew that would help to level the whole thing given that the front would be sitting on the rug. Happily, the screws for the foot base plate didn’t run into the ones for the corner braces. Here’s one of the bottom units upside down. Important note: while you can use longer screws for the outer holes since they run down into the sides, you need to use pretty short ones for the inner one to avoid breaking through the base.

Hopefully this will help illustrate what I mean.

And now it’s finally time to start putting the thing together! We set up the bottom two Alex units, placed the drawer liners on top, and then placed the desktop on top of that. Then I reached up from the inside with a hex key to screw in the wood screws. (These are the ones that come with the Alex and would normally be used to attach it to the Lagkapten top.) I had to first poke through the drawer liner, of course, and then it was a bit of faffing about to get the holes exactly lined up with the ones we predrilled. But eventually I managed to get them screwed in. Remember, on the bottom we secured just the two outer holes, front and back.

Here’s what we had so far. So that’s two Alex drawer units on the bottom, each with reinforced corners (on the back side) and Eket adjustable feet underneath. The desktop is screwed to the top of each from inside the top of the Alex units (using the two outer holes). There’s also an Adil adjustable leg at the center back.

Next it was time to stack the upper Alex units. I put down my pre-cut drawer liners and then carefully placed the upper units. Again, I had to poke through the liner and then laboriously shift things around until I had the holes exactly lined up. But eventually I was able to get each one screwed down, this time using the two inner holes.

Here it is with one upper unit attached…

…and now with both upper units attached and all the drawers inserted!

The space in between the upper units was perfect for two of the Skådis pegboards. We first used some of the connectors to mount them directly to the desktop…

…but I realised quickly that this wasn’t ideal. There was no opening for the power cords for my sewing machines, and because the pegboard was so low I really couldn’t make full use of it. So the Snook kindly broke out his hammer drill and helped me mount the pegboards directly to the wall.

And this is my favourite thing of all. I discovered that some nice person designed a sewing thread spool holder that fits the Skådis pegboards, and which can be 3D-printed. My awesome friend Bobbie printed a dozen of them for me, which allows me to store 60 spools of thread!

And here’s the end result! Raising the pegboard makes it much more useful, and allows me to run the power cords down the back of the desktop. My sewing machine sits on a special vibration mat that it came with, and the overlocker is sitting on a spare cutting mat. I picked up a couple Eket cubes off Facebook Marketplace that I simply stacked on top of the Alex to add some additional storage for all my prettiest wool skeins. I’ve also got a ring LED light that I can turn on to add light when I’m sewing. And the ironing board can be stored and set up on the left, with a power strip down at the bottom to plug in the iron.

I bought a bunch of the different Skådis accessories to hang and store my tools. I’ve had a lot of fun figuring out the most efficient place to put things! I also organised my circular knitting needles by size into Ziplock bags, which I then threaded onto split key rings and hung from a hook. Very tidy!

The upper right Alex unit has my fabric stash, with scraps on the bottom and project-sized pieces on top. (Not pictured are the two giant boxes of old fabric that I donated to The Sewing Basket. I’m working on hoarding less stuff, and making sure that what I have is useful.)

On the left is my stash of knitting wool and supplies. This is the utilitarian wool, while the prettier stuff is in the Eket boxes on display. (Again, I donated a bunch of old stuff to charity.)

For the sake of completeness, I’ll show my desk as well. It’s got a large self-healing cutting mat, and on top of that I have a large gaming pad under my keyboard, mouse, and duckyPad. My Mac Mini sits on the bookshelves next to the desk, and I’ve got a USB dock in that corner where all my stuff is plugged in. When I want to use the desk as a cutting table, I can pretty quickly shove everything back in that corner and raise the desk up to a comfortable cutting height. Depending on how big a piece I’m cutting, I may not even need to move the monitor!

I also managed to fit in a Svenarum shelving unit alongside my desk. I especially like how it gets thinner towards the top, which helps feel like it’s not crowding the doorway too much. This allows me to show off my vintage sewing machines (the bottom two belonged to Rodd’s grandmother and mother), as well as my craft books and some of my Roald Dahl collection.

And here’s the finished office/craft room! In the Alex drawers, I’ve got various sewing supplies all stored on the right side (buttons, trims, zipper, tracing paper, etc). On the left is general office and crafting supplies. I’ve got two plastic floor protectors over the rug that allow me to roll my chair easily from the desk to the craft station. I’m really happy with how it’s turned out. Together with the closet, I’ve got ample storage for all my projects and everything I need is within arm’s reach.

This is old but I only just discovered it: an NPR interview all about EB White and his famous book Charlotte’s Web. This is one of my all-time favourite books, and I can still remember exactly where I was (the babysitter’s house before school) when I read about Charlotte’s death. I sobbed my little heart out. Apparently, so did EB White.

I knocked out a quick sewing pattern this week: a new Arkie shirt in some Liberty Tana Lawn I bought in Tokyo back in June. (This is the same pattern I used for the AWS Shirt last December.) I made the biggest size, but it’s fairly roomy and I think I could easily go down a size and still be fine. I think I did a decent job setting in the sleeves, even if I did use a million pins. I left off the front patch pockets, mostly because I didn’t think they’d add anything and you wouldn’t even see them with the busy print. For buttons, I just used four small pearlescent ones from my stash.

The thing I’m proudest of though is that for once I remembered to sew in a label! I’ve had these for ages and never used them before.

I also realised in the course of sewing the shirt that I had never changed the needles in my overlocker. I dug out the manual, started flipping through it, and realised that I’d never actually serviced the thing ever… in nine years. Yikes. After a quick trip to Spotlight for a new bottle of oil and a packet of needles, I got to work. I unthreaded the machine, removed the old needles, cleaned out all the dust and lint, oiled her up, and then rethreaded. I discovered that using all 4 threads is probably overkill for most of my sewing, so I cut it back to 3 and just a single needle. Once I had everything put back together, she was purring like a kitten! I also cleaned out the lint on my sewing machine. I’ll have to put in a recurring task to do this more often.

This is a write-up of a talk I gave at the October 24, 2024 meetup of Sydney Technology Leaders. While it wasn’t recorded so this isn’t an exact transcription, I’ve written out my notes and the information I gave as best I can remember. It also builds on and expands a previous blog post I wrote, so you may want to check that out too.

For those that don’t know me, I’m a dual American-Australian citizen. I’m 47 years old, and I’m a DINK—double income, no kids. I’ve worked in the Sydney technology industry in a variety of roles for more than twenty years, but I haven’t worked a day in the last 3 months. It’s been glorious.

Before I get to the HOW, I want to first acknowledge that this is a pretty awkward thing to talk about. I’m very, very lucky. Everyone in the room tonight—unless you were digging ditches today—is very lucky. We live in a country with national healthcare, and you don’t have to worry about your kids being shot at school. We earn good wages. We are at a social gathering, eating free food and drinking free booze. The older folks in this room came of age with the Internet, and we were lucky enough to get in on the bottom floor of all of that.

My point here is I don’t want you to think that I think that if you just follow what I did, you’ll have the same outcome. Your circumstances are your own. But I also don’t want you to think that it’s all just dumb luck, and that it’s not worth putting in the effort. My husband and I both come from families of labourers. I was never taught anything about personal finance growing up. I had a part time job from the moment I turned 14 years old. I was the first on both sides of my immediate family to go to university, which I technically only finished paying off in 2020.

My point is that hopefully everybody, no matter their circumstances, can take something practical and useful away from this today.

You may have heard about the FIRE movement. That stands for Financial Independence, Retire Early. Let’s park the early retirement for now, as that’s not necessarily a goal for everybody. I want to spend a bit of time focusing on just the FI part—financial independence. I’ve pasted in the Wikipedia definition here, but what it really comes down to is not having to work for money. Imagine if you didn’t need the pay check from your current job. What would that get you?

It would give you agility. (I’ve tried really hard throughout this talk to put things in terms technical folks will understand!) Agility means you can change your priorities up at any time. Maybe you want to start your own business, change industries, or relocate to another country. If you aren’t reliant on that pay check, you can do that. You can even quit your job—tell your boss to eff-off, effectively—at any time, and know that you’ll be okay.

So where does this FI concept come from?

The guy generally acknowledged as the godfather of this movement is JL Collins. His philosophy is pretty simple: “Spend less than you earn—invest the surplus—avoid debt. Do simply this and you’ll wind up rich.” He gave a talk about it at Google that’s up on YouTube, which was how Rodd found out about him. Meanwhile I started reading blogs like Get Rich Slowly and Mr. Money Mustache more than a decade ago.

So in practical terms—how do you make FI happen?

First there’s one more caveat: this talk is based on the assumption that we live in a capitalist society. Earning, spending, and investing money involves political and ethical considerations. Every one of us has their own moral Rubicon that they won’t cross, and I completely respect that. (You are not going to hear one goddamn word from me about crypto in this talk, for instance.) But if you see all property as theft and want to dismantle the system, good for you. I will 100% sign your petition and support your right to protest. But me, I like living in a nice house and buying a new computer every couple of years and going on the occasional vacation. I accept that if and when the revolution comes, I’m going to be fairly far towards the front of the queue for the firing squad. For now, I can live with my choices.

So the four steps I’ve outlined here are Tracking, Budgeting, Investing, and then possibly Retirement.

Let’s start with Tracking. How much do you spend on groceries every year? How about electricity? Dining out at restaurants? Buying clothes? You probably have a rough idea – but do you have DATA?

For each of the steps, I’ve compared them to an analogous AWS Well-Architected pillar. For Tracking, I’ve gone with Operational Excellence because it’s all about monitoring your running systems and processes, and defining standards for your daily operations.

Way back in 2007 Rodd and I started to think about buying a house, and we used a mortgage broker to help us work out what we could afford. We didn’t have a lot of financial discipline, but we got very lucky and found a place that wasn’t beyond our means. We knew we needed to get a better handle on where our money was actually going. And like good nerds, we looked to technology for a solution.

Really what we wanted was to build a data lake by logging our spending. We also wanted to create dashboards and reports to get visibility on where our money was going, and to help make things easier at tax time. We tried out a few different apps along the way, as well as shared Google spreadsheets to bring things together. Nowadays many banks allow you to categorise transactions, but you might have multiple accounts. So for us, having a standalone app was important, and we needed one that works for both iOS and Android. We considered automation for pulling in bank transactions but ultimately decided that the exercise and discipline of manually entering transactions would be good for us, and it only takes 15-20min a week.

Ultimately the solution we went with is You Need a Budget and we’ve been using it for more than a decade. They have a blog and YouTube channel where they shared a lot of content around financial education and getting out of debt. It does cost money though, but we’ve found it to be well worth it. I’ve included a referral link if you want to get a free trial.

This is how I know exactly how much money we’ve spent on groceries each month. It’s really easy to create reports or search through the logs to see what you’re spending. (Note: I showed the real graphs during the talk, but for the blog I’ve blurred out the actual numbers for privacy.)

Once you get some data and visibility on where your money is actually going, it’s time to actually get insights from it. What targets should you be aiming for? What do you need to increase or reduce? That’s where Budgeting comes in.

The Budgeting step is analogous to Performance Efficiency and Cost Optimisation. It’s all about making sure that everything is right-sized and cost effective.

First and foremost, think about how you can scale up your income as much as possible. Look, maybe you don’t ever want to work for a FAANG company. That’s understandable. But if there’s a way you could double your income NOW—and put that extra money to work—that’s going to make a massive step towards FI. Maybe you could move to a new role, or pick up some on-call shifts.

Next, you want to scale down your expenses. This doesn’t necessarily mean living on lentils, but think about where you could cut things without making a big difference to your life. For us, that means flying Economy class. We cook a lot and make coffee at home. Our pets were rescues. Our furniture has always been IKEA or Facebook Marketplace. We generally subscribe to 2-3 streaming services at a time rather than all of them, and we rotate them around.

I’d also like to suggest trading CAPEX for OPEX wherever you can. This means not buying a thing when you only need it every now and then, but instead just paying for use. We don’t own a car. Instead we’re members of GoGet and we simply rent one whenever we need it. In addition to saving money, it also means we can rent out our carspace and earn some extra cash. (Granted, this is heavily dependent on where you live and whether public transport/car share are available.)

When we started out, we had no idea what our target level of savings should be. Do you know that according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, personal savings in Australia averaged 9.29% from 1959 until 2024, reaching an all time high of 24.10% in the second quarter of 2020 (because it was Covid lockdown and nobody was going anywhere or spending money). Right now, it’s sitting at 0.6%. Ouch.

If you’re just starting out, one useful model you can use is the Balanced Money Formula. I learned about this from the Get Rich Slowly blog, but it comes from a book written by Senator Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi. It’s a simpler alternative to having a really detailed budget. You may also see it referenced as the “50/30/20 rule.” The idea is that no more than 50% of your income (ideally, more like 35%) should go to Needs – these are things you have to have, like housing, food, transportation, medicine, insurance, etc. And you want to save at least 20% of your income, leaving 30% for Wants.

We used YNAB to roll our spending up to these categories and found out that in 2010, we were at 52% Needs, 13% Wants, and 34% Savings. Not bad!

This is a very simple model, but it can be useful to get you going. As a first goal, having at least 3 months of expenses in the bank as an emergency fund is recommended. But this model is about achieving “balance”; it won’t necessarily get you to Financial Independence.

For that, you’re going to need to be more aggressive.

This screenshot is from the Mr. Money Mustache blog and his famous post “The Shockingly Simple Math Behind Early Retirement.” In it he says that your time to reach retirement depends on only one factor: your savings rate, as a percentage of your take-home pay. To illustrate this:

At 100% spending, you can never retire unless someone else is doing the saving for you (like superannuation or wealthy parents).
At 0% spending (like someone else is paying all your expenses), you can retire right now.

In between, there’s a graph… but the interesting thing is that it’s not linear. Because once you start investing your money, it starts earning money itself. It snowballs. So the graph ends up curved. This is a long post and I highly recommend you read it, and it includes a chart that I’ve pasted in here. If you want to be really aggressive about FI, Mr. Money Mustache reckons that if you can save 50% of your income, you can achieve FI in 16 years. And in truth, that’s pretty much about how long it took for us.

But you don’t just stick it in the bank in a savings account! You have to put it to work. And that brings us to Investing.

BUT FIRST – A MASSIVE DISCLAIMER.

I am not a financial advisor. Rodd is not a financial advisor. I actually looked it up, and to be a financial advisor in NSW where we live, you have to do a degree and pass a certification. We’ve done neither of those. This is not investment advice. I am simply telling you what we learned from our research, and what we’ve done in our own financial independence journey.

I have likened Investing to the Reliability pillar, because it’s all about ensuring reliability and availability of your future financial resources.

For us, we started by focusing on paying off our mortgage as quickly as possible. We have a Mortgage Offset account and have reached the point where it equals the outstanding balance, and it simply deducts every month. This is a contentious topic in FI circles, because some folks think you’re better off investing that money in something that brings a higher return. We’re fairly risk averse though, and we preferred knowing that we were never at risk of missing a mortgage payment due to a market downturn.

Next, we were fortunate to work for employers that regularly awarded us shares through Employee Share Schemes. I knew a lot of folks at AWS who proudly told me that they had never sold a share. We did the opposite of that. Every time we vested shares, we sold them. The reasoning is simple: if both your current income and your retirement savings are tied up in the same company, what happens if there’s a downturn? You’re at risk of being laid off, as well as your retirement fund value going down. You’ve literally got a single point of failure. Instead we immediately sold the shares and invested them in low-fee index funds, which basically track the performance of the market as a whole. (Historically the stock market has seen 8-10% growth over the past century, on average.)

Because I’m a dual citizen and we have future goals of supporting family in the US, we have also spread our investments across multiple markets. There are also restrictions on what financial instruments Americans can own, so some things are in my name and some are in Rodd’s. We also have interest earning accounts at a few different local banks, ensuring that we’ve got access to cash if one of them has an outage.

And lastly, we are currently looking to engage a fixed-fee financial advisor to look over our plan and see if there’s anywhere we could optimise. (Those cross-border tax gotchas are a real pain for expats.) Many advisors will charge based on a percentage of your assets, and you don’t want that. Look for someone with a set fee instead.

Here’s some historical data showing our breakdown across Needs, Wants, and Savings over the period from 2010-2022 when Rodd retired. What’s interesting to me is that our Wants are fairly consistent, around 20% of our income. There were a few years when it was more, mostly due to renovating our kitchen and garden. The bumper years were 2016-2019, when we saved more than 50% of our income every year (and my income massively increased due to going to AWS). 2020 ended up being one of our lowest savings years, simply because of paying off my final student loans and our relocation to Germany.

You’ll notice this is a Google spreadsheet graph. I created a couple graphs for myself that I found really motivating over the years.

One of them showed the balance in the Mortgage Offset account versus the amount outstanding. In Google Sheets you can extrapolate a trend line, and I loved seeing the intersection in the future and having a date to work towards.

Another was for Retirement. When we started thinking this was maybe a goal, we picked a number that we thought would be a useful target and then I tracked our progress towards it. The goal number turned out to be a little lower than what we needed in reality, but it was a nice round number to aim for. Note: This isn’t your total Net Worth, but rather the value of your income-producing assets. (You don’t get income from your house; you live in it.) So while this graph wasn’t totally accurate, it still showed progress and helped indicate to us when we were getting close to FIRE.

And so at last we come to Retirement, possibly Early depending on how aggressively you’ve been saving.

The FIRE movement actually includes many different flavours of FIRE. There’s LeanFIRE, for those who want to cut their expenses to the bone right now in exchange for getting to FI as quickly as possible. These are the folks happily living on lentils now, who are happy to live on lentils forever. Then there’s FatFIRE (and ChubbyFIRE), where the goal is to save enough to be able to live luxuriously in retirement. These are the folks who want to fly Business class always. CoastFIRE is where you’ve saved enough in your retirement accounts that they are snowballing, and they will eventually grow to the target you need for retirement. So you can stop saving now, and switch to a lower-stress, lower-income job that just covers your current expenses. And lastly, there’s BaristaFIRE, where you have saved enough to retire but still work at Starbucks for their health insurance. (This one happens mostly in the US; you don’t need to do that in Australia.)

There are various calculators and spreadsheets that will help you work out what your goal should be for any of these.

Whichever FIRE model you go for, it’s all about ensuring Security of your assets and future lifestyle. The general advice you’ll see on the financial blogs is that you should aim for 25x (25 times) your annual expenses. This assumes a 3-4% drawdown rate over 30 years. This 4% Rule basically ensures that you can draw down a steady income even in the face of inflation and economic downturns. Of course, it’s safest if you can vary your spending. If you go LeanFIRE and you’re retiring on very little income, you don’t have a lot of wiggle room. Whereas in our case, we know that if the market drops, we can cut back on eating out or overseas vacations.

This is also where having a financial advisor can help, because you might have future goals beyond just covering your monthly expenses. Rodd and I have parents who will need support in the future, as well as nieces and nephews we’d like to help out with their education.

In 2022 we realised that we were at a point where retirement was an actual option. Rodd had a good long think about it, and in August 2022 he left Google after his 10 year anniversary there. This photo was taken on his last day. He hasn’t had a full-time job since.

I continued on for 2 more years, with the amazing perk of having my very own househusband. This helped pad out the fund even more, and also covered the cost of the home renovation that we’re doing.

Finally in April this year, I decided that I was burnt out and would join him. I finished up at the end of June and have been retired for nearly 4 months now.

Lastly, here are a few considerations and gotchas you should take into account if you’re thinking about retirement. A big one is that you don’t get work perks anymore! For me, that meant no more company healthcare or mobile phone plans. I had to sign up for my own. It means not being surrounded by free snacks and food at work, if you’re lucky enough to work in an office like that. It means no more branded swag. (Do you know how many AWS t-shirts and jackets I have?!) And the big one—no more racking up frequent flier miles on your employer’s dime. I have my KrisFlyer Gold status for another year, but then I know it’ll probably drop down and I’ll be sad.

There’s also the risk of being bored, and lacking motivation or purpose. Some people love work, and they need that to fuel life. Rodd has been perfectly content in retirement, and he’s found plenty to occupy himself: getting a part-time job as a beer tour guide, volunteering, being on the apartment Strata committee, and organising our renovation. I used to think I would struggle more, being an extrovert, but I feel like the pandemic really changed my values quite a bit. I don’t necessarily feel like I need to be up on stage anymore to feel fulfilled. I have a long list of projects to do at home, and so far I’m enjoying doing them.

You may also experience pushback from family and friends when you tell them you’re retiring. Most folks have been lovely, wishing us well or indicating that they wished they could retire too. But we’ve also run into a couple folks who just could not get their head around it—some come from a culture where you work until you’re 70 to take care of your parents and family. Others don’t understand not wanting to make as much money as possible, forever. They thought we were making a huge mistake. Not much you can do there.

And lastly, retirement shows you how much of the world is organised around work. We flew in from overseas in September and I had to fill out Australia’s Incoming Passenger Card. And right away I hit that field that says Occupation. What do I write there now?! (I went with Consultant. That always feels safe.) Whenever you meet new people, they always ask you what you do for a living. If you register for any tech events, it’ll ask you your company and job title. And of course, it can get awkward when your friends and family have work problems or get laid off. You want to support them but worry that you’ll be annoying or they think you won’t be able to relate.

Just stuff to think about.

Time to sum it all up. I talked about Financial Independence, and how it can give you agility no matter what your ultimate goals are. To get there, you need to first understand your spending. That means you need to start Tracking today, if you aren’t already. Once you’re Tracking you can start Budgeting, and actually being proactive with your hard-earned dollars. We talked about the Balanced Money Formula, and how ultimately FI comes down to saving as much of your income as you can. Once you’ve accumulated some savings, you need to put it to work through Investing in income-producing assets. And ultimately, if you want you can work towards early Retirement, where you can quit your job and live off your retirement savings, assuming you’ve hit your FIRE goals.

Thanks!

All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan

As you probably know if you’ve followed this blog or any of my social media accounts, back in 2018 I worked for Amazon Web Services and I had the idea to sew myself an AWS dress to wear to tech events around the world. It was so popular, my colleagues even made t-shirts and stickers! In 2023 I raised the bar with the AWS dress v2, which had matching sneakers.

As of 2024 though, I’m retired and it seems a bit silly to hang on to these dresses. Why not turn them into something fun and raise money for an important cause? So the dresses have become 14 Smart, Sensational, Sun-Protecting (S3) Bucket Hats, and you can win one by donating to this fundraiser.

Dementia is a terrible disease that has affected our family in recent years. It really, really sucks to watch someone you know and love just change and disappear. I’d like to help other families going through this, and hopefully even work towards a cure.

To do that I need your help! Please make a donation to support my efforts and help me reach my goal to beat dementia. You can donate through:

My Facebook fundraising page
My standalone Dementia Australia fundraising page
Or if neither of those options work for you, feel free to donate to a dementia-related charity in your own country*.

All funds raised (through channels 1 and 2 above) will support the work of Dementia Australia to provide vital support services for people living with dementia, their families and carers. These services include counselling, support groups, education and training.

For every $25 AUD you donate, you’ll get one entry into a raffle for one of the 14 hats. I will draw the winners at random on November 1st, 2024*, and I will cover postage anywhere in the world. Please make sure you are contactable if you win! You can donate as many times as you’d like but you can only win one hat, and you don’t get to choose which one you get. (They’re all the same size anyway.)

If you donate via option 3, please email me a screenshot of your donation and I will ensure you are entered into the draw. You’ll get 1 entry for the equivalent of $25 AUD in your own currency.

Disclaimers: Obviously I don’t work for AWS anymore, and I don’t claim ownership over their logo or any of their service icons. The hats were made by me from the dresses I wore as part of my employment for AWS, and I won’t ever be making any more. If I can’t contact you within a week, I reserve the right to draw a new name and send the hat to somebody else.

Thank you for your support.

PS for the sewists: if you’re curious about the pattern I used you can download it for free here! Each hat is fully lined, which means I actually had to sew 28 hats (30 if you count the prototype I made).

I’ve been casually playing Palia on my Switch for the past couple months. I’d heard it described as a “cozy” game, and I’m all about the cozy. You are a human in a fantasy realm, and you build a little house and farm. You hunt; you craft things; you cook food; you go fishing. There are some quests and puzzles along the way, but you don’t have to do those if you don’t want to. Nothing attacks you, and if you do manage to kill yourself (like by falling into deep water) it just resets you right nearby with no damage. I’m enjoying it.

Playing on the Switch has some downsides though. Eventually I noticed that in the chat, other players were sharing where special items could be found. But typing messages with a game controller is painful. It seemed like most other people were probably playing on their PCs. But I don’t have a PC. I have a Mac mini, and Palia doesn’t have a Mac client yet.

BUT! Apparently this is no longer a problem these days? I found some Reddit posts where people mentioned getting it to work on Mac using Whisky, which seemed doable. Then I found this Palia on Mac launcher that handles a lot of the setup for you. I kicked it off and installed Whisky, and followed the steps to setup a “bottle.” First problem: my bottle disappeared. I’m not sure what the issue was, but I tried it several times and they’d just vanish (but I could see the folders in the Finder). Eventually I reinstalled Whisky directly (rather than going through the launcher), and I went into the Finder and deleted the extra bottles. Suddenly my original one appeared. Yay! Then I went back to the launcher to finish the setup and download the game files. Second problem: the downloads would seem to hang with, like, no visual feedback what was happening. It looked like other folks on Reddit had similar issues, and that the key was just to keep restarting the launcher and it would continue where it left off. After leaving it alone for an hour or so today, it managed to get everything and the “Run” button appeared!

The game looks fantastic compared to the Switch. Mac mini is a lot more powerful, obviously! I was prepared for some glitchiness, but it was really minimal. I had one crash, but otherwise everything worked really smoothly. Rodd suggested I change it to play in a window rather than full screen, as on my wide monitor it was actually making me motion sick. But I’m going to just try to get used to it, because it looks so gorgeous.

At first I tried playing with keyboard and mouse, which took some getting used to. I just don’t have the muscle memory yet. I could see that it was really great for some things – choosing stuff from your inventory, moving around the map, chatting to other players – but for other things it felt a bit awkward. And fishing sucked – there was so much lag that I lost every fish I hooked. Eventually I hooked up a Bluetooth controller, and that gives the best of both worlds. I can run around and catch fish, but also easily switch over to the keyboard for tasks that need it.

Anyway, if you want to try it out, you can use my “Refer a friend” code and I might get some in-game swag for it. The game is free to play, but apparently you can use real money to buy, like, funky outfits and stuff. (You don’t need to though; I haven’t paid a cent!) Let me know if you start and I’ll friend you in there!

When I handed back my work laptop a few months ago, it occurred to me that I needed a new computer. My 2015 MacBook Air is still going strong but it’s many, many years old, and I knew it would struggle with streaming or playing games. So off I went and merrily started pricing new MacBooks when I suddenly wondered… maybe I don’t actually need a laptop?! It was a strange feeling. But I’ve got the Air and an iPad, and it’s not like I need to do work on the road. So I ended up choosing a Mac mini M2 Pro, and so far I’m really happy* with it.

I realised today though that I needed to update my duckyPad. Many of my shortcuts were related to work and therefore obsolete, and I also noticed that a few macros weren’t working anymore. So I downloaded the latest Mac ARM Configurator app and fired it up. Unfortunately it failed to connect to the duckyPad. Hmmm. I went through the troubleshooting and added some permissions, but that didn’t fix it. I also dug around in the official Discord to see if anybody had similar issues. I figured maybe there was some issue with the latest Macs, so my next approach was to plug it into the old MacBook Air, which still had an old version of the Configurator on it. That’s when I remembered that with the old version, you didn’t connect to the duckyPad directly but instead used an SD card reader. D’oh! As soon as I did that, it told me that my firmware was out-of-date. Makes sense.

I went back to the Mac mini and followed the instructions for updating the firmware, which included using Brew to install a utility. That worked perfectly and I was able to then flash the firmware, and as soon as that happened I was able to directly talk to the duckyPad. Brilliant! I was able to remove all the old work macros, set up some new ones, and fix the old ones. (It turns out that I was using “HOLD” in some of them, which has since been replaced by “EMUK.”) The only challenge is that the Configurator is oddly unresponsive when you’re editing. I had to often click multiple times to get it to register or to change focus. Not sure why that is. It works; it’s just super super slow. When I was done, I hit “Save” and the new config was written to the pad.

And incidentally – there’s a new duckyPad Pro coming! It’s got more keys, and knobs. I don’t really need it, but it looks cool.

My only complaint about the Mac mini is that without a Mac laptop or keyboard, I don’t have Touch ID. That gets really annoying when typing my long master password into Strongbox. I’ve seen a few folks though that have hacked a standalone Touch ID button though… A project for another time.

This word means the tendency to forget names. This is something I’ve struggled with a LOT in recent years. I’m not sure what the cause is: the fact that my jobs at YOW and AWS meant meeting so many people? Did I get long Covid? Or is it one of the many joys of perimenopause? Or maybe it’s just getting older… At any rate, it’s incredibly frustrating to be able to picture someone or something, to know you know the name, and just not be able to grasp it.

I’ve been on a real gaming tear this year. Back in January I wrote about Dave the Diver and Unpacking, and I thought I’d mention a few more Nintendo Switch games that I’ve been playing lately and really enjoyed:

Yoku’s Island Express – Rodd found this one recommended on Reddit for people who like no-stress platformers. You play a little bug postman who pushes a ball around an island, and it’s like a platformer crossed with pinball, two things I LOVE. The artwork and world building is really cool too.
Steamworld Dig 2 – Another fun platformer where you play a little robot exploring a (mostly) underground world, digging minerals and trying to solve a mystery. There were one or two places were I got stuck and had to look up how to solve something, but I managed to defeat the end boss today all on my own. Good times!
Palia – Anybody else playing this? I literally just rolled a character tonight. I’ve heard good things about it…

We also spent some time playing Breath of the Wild (a friend lent it to me) and I can see why it won so many awards. It just wasn’t for me, though. I struggled with all the different mechanics, and every time I picked it up I had to relearn how to do everything. There was just too much. I like something a bit more casual and low stress. If you’ve got recommendations, please share them!

For the past month, I’ve been establishing a new nightly routine. First, at 10pm I have an automatic reminder to write a journal entry. I’ve been using the iOS Journal app for this, which allows me to easily incorporate photos and maps from the day. I haven’t been using any of their prompts, but rather just jotting down what I did. I like being able to look back at everything I’ve done.

And then come the puzzles! Nothing like a little brain exercise to close out the day.

Both Rodd and I do the NYT Connections. Maybe this is a humblebrag, but I’m always surprised when I see people complain that it’s hard! We’ve actually been challenging each other to find the purple category earlier rather than leave it to last.
We also both do the five different daily puzzles over at Word Nerd. I’ve only managed to get all 23 Words like twice, and most days I struggle to hit 10. Rodd’s much better than me at that one! Maybe I’d have better luck earlier in the day with some caffeine in me. We also compete to see who can do the shortest Word Chain.
I do the Daily Waffle and Waffle Royale (and every now and then the Deluxe Weekly Waffle). These are Scrabble-style letter tile switching games, with a fun mechanism that highlights when letters are correct or jumbled up.
Rodd likes the OEC’s Pick 5 and Tradle games. These are where you have to identify which countries export certain goods. He’s really good at them both, but he thinks the Pick 5 is more fun.

Have you got any fun puzzle recommendations for us?

When I was working full-time, I was fortunate in that my Australian employer had a generous mobile phone benefit. To maximise that, I did what most of my colleagues did – go to the nearest Telstra store and get a handset with the biggest plan that came under the cap. Now that I’m not working, I have to pay my own bills… and I know the Telstra plan is massive overkill for what I actually use. So I called them up, found out cost to pay out the rest of my contract, and worked out that it would be far more effective to switch over to a pre-paid 12-month Boost SIM. It uses the Telstra network and for $230 you get 170GB of data, unlimited Australian calls and texts, as well as unlimited calls to the US. I bought one of the SIMs at Coles and was able to port my number over and be up and running in less than an hour.

HOWEVER! I did have one issue with my iPhone, and I thought I’d mention here in case it helps someone else. See my Settings here? Even after my existing number was ported, the Mobile settings still showed the phone number that came with the SIM (that +61 6… one). It wasn’t a huge problem; I double-checked by calling and SMSing Rodd that my ported number was being used correctly. It did screw up iMessage and FaceTime though, as my ported number wasn’t listed as an eligible Receiving option. I tried changing it (both in Settings -> Mobile and also Settings -> Phone -> My Number) but it wouldn’t save. I restarted the phone multiple times. I contacted Boost, who couldn’t see any issue on their side. The agent said he thought that something was just cached, and it would eventually fix itself. But it stayed that way for weeks… until I finally figured out the solution myself.

If you find yourself in the same situation, just go to Settings -> General -> Transfer or Reset iPhone. Click the Reset button (a bit scary, I know!) and then the “Reset Network Settings” option. It’ll ask you to confirm before it does it. And that fixed it! My ported number was finally showing for the SIM, and I was able to add it back to iMessage and FaceTime.

(And if you’re curious about the overseas SIMs showing there, those are eSIMs that I use when travelling. I’ve been using Airalo for my overseas data needs for the past couple years and I’m very happy with them. Much cheaper than paying Telstra’s $10/day charge!)

Friday night fun: watching a 90min documentary on “The Oregon Trail” educational video game. (I’m not even kidding. This was a massive nostalgia trip for me and I learned heaps about the Minnesota tech industry in the 70s and 80s.)

Trivia – The phrase “You have died of dysentery” never actually appears in the game!

This is fascinating. I also really like the way they explain it, which makes it super clear and easy to understand!

One of the hardest skills for new knitters to master is recognising and fixing errors. If you catch something quickly, you may be able to just un-knit (or “tink“) the last few stitches and fix it. But if you spot it a few rows later and you can’t face the thought of tinking all those stitches, you’ve really only got a few options: you can pull the needle out and rip several rows, but then you’ve got to pick all the live stitches back up. This can take a while, and depending on how thick/thin and fuzzy/smooth your yarn is it can be a real chore. (If you’re knitting anything complicated like lace where you have a high change of screwing something up, it’s highly recommended to put in lifelines every so often.) The other commonly used option is the nuclear one – ripping out the whole project and starting over. If you’re near the beginning, this may well be the fastest method.

But there is another way. Let me illustrate.

I spent a big chunk of hours yesterday working on a baby sweater. The body is stocking stitch, and then the top half has a pattern with columns of cables and garter stitch motifs. Here’s the photo I took at the end of the day:

When I was looking at the photo, I suddenly realised I’d screwed up one row of the pattern. Can you spot the mistake? Here I’ve isolated the two diamond motifs, outlined by the yellow and red stitch markers:

Even if you’re not a knitter, you can probably spot that they don’t match. I’ve somehow missed 4 purl stitches right through the middle of the motif on the right, which include the points at either side of the diamond.

The error occurred like 8 rows back, and while this yarn (Morris & Sons Empire 8ply in Aquamarine) would be relatively easy to pick up if I frogged those rows, reknitting the motifs would be a pain… and I’d be just as likely* to make a mistake again. So I decided instead to use the surgical method of dropping just the columns of stitches with the missing purls to correct them.

I don’t think this technique has a pithy name like tinking or frogging, but it’s often called “laddering down”. To illustrate, I’ve fixed 3 out of the 4 missing purls already and this photo shows me ready to correct the last one, the missing point of the diamond on the left. I’ve highlighted it in yellow. That knit stitch (looks like a V) should be a purl (looks like a horizontal bump). I’ve also shuffled my stitches around so that the column of stitches with the error is at the end of my left needle.

Now it’s time to drop that stitch and allow it to “ladder down” to the spot of the error. (It’s called laddering because each row you undo leaves a horizontal bar.) This wool likes to stick to itself, so I encouraged it where needed with the use of a spare needle.

And here it is, down to the spot of the error. I’ve caught the live stitch that needs to be fixed with a crochet hook.

Now it’s just a matter of changing this knit to a purl, and then working my way back up the ladder again. For each stitch, you pull the lowest rung of the ladder through the current live stitch. For knits, you go in from the front and pull the ladder through from the back. For purls, you come in through the back and pull the ladder through from the front. You can use spare needles for this, but a crochet hook makes it really fast. (The photo below looks like I’m about to knit the stitch, but rest assured I moved the hook around to purl instead.)

Here it is halfway along, showing the corrected purl and then the column of knit stitches above:

I made a short video showing the last couple stitches:

And here’s the completed motif after the repairs:

The only tricky bits are making sure you don’t drop down too many rows, and ensuring you don’t skip any rungs of the ladder on your way back up. I’ve even used this method to fix miscrossed cables! (Just drop down all the cable stitches, catch the live stitches on a spare needle, rearrange them correctly for the cross, and then ladder each one back up.) This technique can result in some wonky tension either side of the repaired column of stitches, but I find that a couple tugs on the work will fix it (and it’ll resolve itself during blocking anyway).

Much faster than tinking or frogging!

The reason I made the mistake is that the damn pattern is an older one and it’s written out row-by-row without a chart. A chart would have taken up way less space and allow me to visually check for errors must easier. But this is something I’ve ranted about in the past…

From Metafilter I discovered this long retrospective on the Breeders and consequently went down a rabbit hole reading about the lineage from Throwing Muses to the Pixies to the Breeders and then Belly. I was a latecomer to these groups, getting first into the Breeders thanks to Last Splash and then moving on to Belly. I can remember driving home with my sister after high school tennis practice, belting out Belly’s King along to my car’s crappy cassette player…

A lovely little video of the Breeders performing some of my favorite songs – mostly acoustically – among the redwoods in Big Sur.

Still can’t believe I sold them craft supplies 14 years ago without realising who they were.

If you have a coffee machine, you probably want to watch this video, even if you think you already know how to do the required maintenance.

In totally unrelated news, Rodd has spent the last hour cleaning his coffee machine.

After six years at Amazon, it’s finally time to move on and try out early retirement.

As a few folks have guessed, we’ve been proponents of the FIRE movement for a long time now. I am not in a position to give anyone else financial advice and your circumstances are certainly unique to you, but here are some of the resources we used along the way. (Note: where possible I’ve given you a referral link as we both get a benefit.)

Get Rich Slowly – JD Roth has written a lot of excellent posts and articles about personal finance. One that I found really helpful was on the Balanced Money Formula, and we’ve been using the Needs/Wants/Savings categories for our spending since 2013. We’ve tweaked it a bit over the years, but it’s a good high-level framework to get you going.
Mr. Money Mustache – A more fun (and sweary!) look at financial independence, this blog has given us a lot of ideas and inspiration over the years.
J L Collins – Pretty much the godfather of the FIRE movement. He gave a talk at Google one year that Rodd found really helpful, and his site has a lot of useful resources.
Reddit – Rodd’s recommendations in particular are r/Bogleheads, r/ChubbyFIRE, r/EuropeFIRE, r/ExpatFIRE, r/fiaustralia, and r/financialindependence. He notes: “r/ChubbyFIRE is for people targeting a particular range of retirement spending. There’s FatFIRE for the >$10M crowd (“Is NetJets worth it, or should I just fly first class?”). Also LeanFIRE for people happy to eat rice and beans for life if it means not working.”
You Need a Budget (YNAB) – I’ve written about this budgeting app in the past, and we’ve been using it for 10 years now. It’s mostly geared towards people getting out of debt (using the envelope system), but it also has really good tracking and reporting tools. It has both Android and iOS apps, and you can have separate budgets in other currencies (which we made use of in Germany). In some countries it can pull in your bank transactions automatically, but Aussie banks aren’t supported so we manually put them in every week.
Sharesight – We use this online portfolio manager to track all our different investments. Rodd says it’s particularly useful when it comes time to prep our tax returns.
Google Drive – Before we landed on YNAB, we had a shared spreadsheet that broke down our income, spending (Needs and Wants), and savings every month. This means we have our spending data all the way back to 2010. We also have a spreadsheet that covers all of our different accounts and investments. (Rodd doesn’t like how Sharesight handles cash/savings accounts, so he prefers to consolidate them here.) We also have a shared folder where we put all our payslips and tax-related docs every year.

A lot of retirement planning is based on your income. We realised quickly that that’s silly; we needed to set our goals on what we wanted to spend. By tracking our spending over time, we had a pretty good idea of what we needed each month. Then we could work out a target that made sense, and put all our efforts into hitting that. Our Google spreadsheet had a graph that tracked our net worth vs. that goal, and it gave me such satisfaction to see the little line marching up every month. Both of us were lucky enough to receive stock from our employers, which we sold as soon as it vested and put into low-fee mutual funds and other long-term investments (spread across US, EU, and AU to reduce risk).

In truth that red line is a little bit of a lie, because we hadn’t accounted for lifestyle inflation and a few other things. It was a good motivational symbol though. It became clear a couple years ago that we had the option to stop work if we wanted to, and in 2022 Rodd opted for it. He’s been out for nearly two years and is really happy. He managed our move back to Australia, got a part-time job leading craft beer tours, organised the renovation, and has managed the household and our lives to free me up to focus just on work. I’m a bit more anxious, so I kept going to pad things out a bit more and cover the cost of our renovation. By the beginning of this year, I was starting to feel really tired and ready to stop. I love my team and my job, but the pandemic really prompted me to think about what’s important. My values have changed. I want to slow down; to focus on my creative pursuits; and to get healthy. So a few months back I told my manager that I was done, and the time to say goodbye finally arrived.

I am not naive enough to think this is possible for everyone. It involved a huge amount of luck and privilege. While we both needed loans for college, we graduated at a time before tuition costs skyrocketed. We are extremely fortunate to have landed in our particular careers at this particular time in history. Between us we had 40+ years in the tech industry, nearly half of it at some of the biggest companies in the world. We were also incredibly lucky to buy a house for a decent price in a neighbourhood where we don’t need to have a car. We don’t have kids, and we live in a country with strong national healthcare. We haven’t had to deal with relationship breakdown or serious illness. And despite me saying “we” throughout this post, most of the long-term investment efforts have been managed by Rodd. I’m incredibly lucky to have a partner that is interested and capable of navigating this stuff. Obviously we can’t know what will happen in the future, and I’m not ruling out getting a job again at some point. But right now I’m excited to have our time be our own, and to enjoy life for a while. I’m looking forwad to catching up with friends, and to moving back into our house once it’s finished. We’re also exploring options for volunteering, to start to pay it forwards for others.

And of course… expect a lot more blogging! I can’t wait to get back to it.

Oh man, I really loved this post from Ludicity: “I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again.” (Language warning, obviously.) I’ve had a lot of conversations on that theme over the past six months, though obviously with less threads of violence.

Sydney Sweeney Knows Her Boobs Drive People Crazy – LOL. Good for her! I want that sweatshirt.
The Man Who Killed Google Search – Deliciously scathing post about the enshittification of Google Search. Guess what? AI-generated content is only gonna make it worse.
27 Takes On What It Means To Be a Serious Person – Both Rodd and I agreed that “purpose” is really critical and that neither of us have it, which is but one of many reasons why we are not serious people. Great piece.
Any John Cage fans? “This is may be the most beautiful accidental explanation of the power of a work of art I’ve ever read in my life.” Agree. I also rather liked this reply.

You didn’t think I forgot about the Oscars, did you? With one week to go, I’m happy to announce the fifteenth (semi-)annual Web-Goddess Oscar Contest has officially launched!

Time to put on Dua Lipa so you can dance the night away with Barbie and Ken…

This year you get two monkeys, each of which have two outfits. Barbie has her iconic pink gingham outfit from the start of the movie, as well as her Venice Beach rollerblading kit. Ken has his rollerblading kit too, as well as his Mojo Dojo outfit complete with custom fanny pack and fringed vest. And if you’re going to do a patriarchy, of course you need a fur.

Contest results: Congrats to Shilpa Anand, who got 12/13 predictions correct and tied with 3 other people for the top spot. It then went to the In Memoriam tiebreaker, where Shilpa managed to guess the EXACT number – 51. CONGRATULATIONS SHILPA!

More monkey construction info: The monkeys each have blue button eyes and (lots of) yarn hair. For the rollerblading outfits, why yes, that is the exact psychedelic neon print from their movie outfits, thank you for noticing! I found it on Spoonflower and had a fat quarter printed, which was more than enough. For the neon pink and yellow fabric, I bought some cheap high-vis shirts at Kmart and cut them up. Ken’s vest is made of fake leather from an old handbag, and his mohair coat is a Kmart cushion that I disassembled.

Web-Goddess Oscar Contest Sock Monkey HistoryTwenty-one years ago (), I thought it would be fun to run a contest and give away a sock monkey. I then kept that up for 10 years running, and you can see the history of my creations below. These days I only do it when the inspiration strikes…

2022 – Spider-Monkeys
2021 – Schitt’s Creek Sock Monkeys
2019 – Freddie Monkcury
2013 – The Avenger Monkeys
2012 – The Monkey with the Dragon Tattoo
2011 – Black Swan and White Swan ballerina monkeys
2010 – Sparkly Emo Vampire Sockmonkey playset
2009 – Batman and Joker monkeys
2008 – Striking Writer Monkey
2007 – Trio of Dream Monkeys
2006 – Gay Sock Monkey Cowboys
2005 – Soctopus
2004 – Plain sock monkey
2003 – Oscar the Sock Monkey

I had such fun making Rodd’s Trigg Shorts for New Year’s Eve that I decided to make another pair. I’ve had this chambray in my stash for a few years, thinking it might make a nice pair of shorts. And guess what? It does!

I asked the Snook if I needed to make any size adjustments, and the only thing he asked for was a slightly bigger waistband when fully stretched out (like when he’s pulling them on). Consequently I made the same size as before – size D – but this time I extended the waistband piece by about an inch. (So I added around 2″ in total.) I still cut my elastic the same length, which meant that I just needed to stretch it a bit more when sewing. As you can see, you can’t really tell at all but it makes it a little stretchier. The only other change I made was to use machine-sewn buttonholes for the waist tie, rather than metal eyelets.

I decided to get a little whimsical with the pocket bags and used some red polka dot from my stash. Cute, huh?

I’ve had some fun combining LEDs with textiles before, most notably with my Canva Three Commas Cushion and my light-up CampJS beanie. Both of them required laborious hand-sewing though, so I was very excited to see Steph’s newest project – GlowStitch LEDs. These use conductive tape rather than thread, and can therefore be machine sewn. AMAZING! I’ve backed the crowdfunding campaign, and I can’t wait to get them and have a play. I especially liked Steph’s project log where she talks about all the decisions along the way, the mistakes she made, and the lessons she’s learned. Very cool…

My dear friends Josh and Jamie welcomed their new baby son Taos this year, and I decided that I wanted to make him a little quilt. I’ve had this Moda Fabrics “Mixed Bag” Brushed Cotton charm pack in my stash for a long time, and I realised it would be perfect for a little one. (A charm pack is a set of precut 5”x5” fabric squares, all from the same fabric line so they coordinate.) I started googling to get inspiration and spotted this Building Blocks pattern. I realised that I didn’t even need the pattern; I could just design my own using the same idea.

I settled on a design of 4 columns of 10 blocks each against a white background. I played with a few different layouts on my dining room table and got Rodd to give his opinion. I decided to go with the one on the left here, which was organised vertically by colour.

Piecing the quilt top was very quick! I used a plain white cotton for the background, which contrasted nicely with the brushed texture of the blocks. I sewed it together in horizontal rows, making sure each alternating row was offset by using a half block at the beginning or end.

Once I had all the rows done, I simply joined them all together. Charm packs certainly made the process go faster. I had the whole thing put together in less than a day!

The back side of the quilt was more challenging. I thought it would be fun to use another fabric from the line, but it’s so old that I could find very little of it available online. I finally found one of the zigzag prints at the Remnant Warehouse; it’s not brushed but it’s fine. I still had 2 squares left over from the charm pack so I decided to break it up. I inserted a row of white along with the two squares and a plain one with some embroidery. This meant I got to do some playing around with the fancy computerised features of my machine…

It was a lot of fun, even if the final version still came out a little crooked. I figure that gives it charm.

For the quilting, I sandwiched the front and back with a thin cotton wadding. (It’s too warm in Sydney for anything else.) I decided on long vertical lines but I deliberately made them a bit wonky and wandering. I thought that tied in nicely to the “wobbly blocks” theme I had going on. Then I used more of the backing fabric for the binding around the edge. I had fun doing the final slip-stitching by hand up at the Snook homestead in front of the fire.

Here’s the final quilt front:

And the back (I put a little “handmade” label on as well):

We met up with Josh and Taos in November and I got to give them the quilt. I told Josh my Mom’s standard Quilt Gift Rule: it comes with lifetime repairs, but only if you actually use it! Josh later sent me a photo showing baby Taos having a play on his new blanket.

A few months back, I won a Nintendo Switch in a contest at work. I haven’t owned a video game console in a long time, so it’s been fun messing around with it. I signed up for a yearlong Switch Online membership so I could play some of the NES games from my childhood, but before long I got sucked into Tetris 99. This is an online “battle royale” version of Tetris where you play against 98 other people and try to be the last person standing. So far my best performance is 2nd place, and I’m still hoping to win one someday. (It’s hard. You have to both play Tetris but also strategically target your opponents to dump garbage blocks on them at the same time.)

I was surprised by how expensive games are these days. The top tier ones are well over $80 each! I didn’t want to jump into one of those without being sure I’d actually play. Then last month I started reading lists of the best video games of the year in search of one to try out. I kept seeing Dave the Diver mentioned, and it seemed like a fun idea – harpooning fish and running a sushi restaurant. I downloaded the demo and quickly fell in love. When I spotted it on sale, I jumped on it.

THIS GAME RULES. When I wasn’t sewing over my Christmas holiday, I was probably playing Dave the Diver. At first I felt a bit overwhelmed between fishing and running the restaurant, but the game does a good job of slowly introducing you to different features and tasks. There were only a few times I had to resort to looking things up (e.g. the advantages and disadvantages of using the “Auto-supply ingredients” option when creating your nightly sushi menu). The cutscenes are hilarious, and more than once I laughed watching Bancho put together his latest masterpiece or Duff upgrade my underwater rifle. I couldn’t believe the wide variety of mini-games and gameplay mechanisms, from petting manatees to solving underwater puzzles with laser beams and mirrors to competitive seahorse racing to cooking food for a televised chef battle to a fever dream anime popstar rhythm game. You can even decorate the restaurant! I remember the terror at facing down each of the bosses (especially the Great White Shark and the Giant Gadon), and my annoyance at that goddamn narwhal that kept spearing me. (Let’s just say that once I levelled up my skills, narwhal sushi featured on the restaurant menu heavily.)

I finished the main story of the game on Christmas Day. It has a surprisingly touching end scene, and I actually felt a little sad that it was over. Thankfully you can keep playing to complete your fish collection, and it took me another couple of days to track down the last few. (That bonito was a real pain!) Now I’m working on getting three-star versions of everything, which means catching them in a net rather than harpooning them. I also received a surprise new task – there’s apparently one more secret boss I can take on during the next stormy night. So I’m not done with Dave yet! I really, really recommend this game, and it was well worth the price in terms of the hours of fun it delivers. My only complaint is that I had a couple game crashes along the way, most frustratingly after I’d completed some difficult task that I then had to redo. It only happened a couple times though, and the auto save mostly worked. (I’ve seen the developers pushing updates, so hopefully they’re addressing this.)

After I finished Dave, my friend Amy recommended Unpacking. This is another game I’d seen recommended in recent years. It’s a very simple concept, barely even a game at all really: you have a series of rooms where you unpacking moving boxes and put things away. That’s it. But as you go, you start to learn things about the main character. You see the things she carries from house to house, and you learn about her hobbies and her passions. I don’t want to spoil anything because this is really a game that needs to be experienced to have the proper effect, but there was one point – where she was moving in with her boyfriend – where I had a realisation that really pissed me off on her behalf. And then when I saw where she was moving to next… I think I actually said “OH NO” out loud in my living room. It’s a lovely game, especially for people who maybe don’t think of themselves as gamers. I’ve never experienced anything like it. It’s quite short – you can finish it in just a couple hours – and it’s very satisfying in the end. I was also really pleased to learn that the game was made by an Australian studio! Definitely worth checking out.

Happy 2024! We spent the evening at the Marrickville Bowlo with our friends Jody, Alayne, and Meredith watching Smooth Sailing ring in the new year with yacht rock classics of the 70s and 80s…

Of course, I had to make us special outfits for the occasion. I’ve been wanting to make Rodd a matching short set for some time (inspired by Taika Waititi’s pineapples), and I happened to have the perfect fabric in my stash (courtesy of my mother): Robert Kaufman’s Seersucker Coastal Print with tiny pink flamingoes. For the shirt, I used my tried and tested Seamwork Negroni pattern, just straightening the side seams and grading out a size at the waistline for some extra roominess. For the shorts, I used the Trigg Shorts pattern and modified them to have a full lining (because the seersucker was a bit see-through). I used some plain white cotton to sew a version without any pockets, and then inserted that into the seersucker before joining on the waistband. Worked great!

For my outfit, I decided to go literal with the Charm Mariner Top. This was my first time sewing princess seams, so I wisely opted to make a muslin first with an old bedsheet. I’m glad I did, because the fit was Not Great. Turns out that Charm revised their sizing a few years back, and they have two separate ranges now: the old one from 2-20, and the new one from 18-34. I happen to fall in the overlap. My first muslin was using the new range, so I decided to try the old one for comparison. That second one was better, but still needed some tweaks. I ended up removing half an inch at the top of each shoulder, and half an inch in width at the underarm as well. Not gonna lie – it was a fiddly pattern and I felt clueless as I tried to figure out how to improve it. Happily, the end result more than justified all my efforts:

The fabric for the top is a navy cotton piqué I got at the Fabric Store, and I LOVE it. It’s woven but had a lovely thickness and drape to it. For the collar, I used white cotton lawn (sandwiched with some interfacing). You’re meant to use ribbon for the decoration, but I realised I had some navy bias binding that would work perfectly. I simply folded it in half and then edge stitched two rows around the edge. Here’s a photo halfway through, when I realised it was going to look awesome…

The red knot tie is a piece of actual silk that we found in the remnant box for $10. It was quite sheer so I used a double layer of it. Once I knotted it, I sewed a safety pin onto the back so I could pin it to the shirt. That way I can take it off for laundering. I paired the top with a pair of navy shorts from Uniqlo.

Aren’t we cute?!

If you’ve met me at a tech event in the past 5 years, there’s a good chance that I was wearing my AWS dress.

This was something I made in 2018 to celebrate and thank everyone that donated to Frocktober that year. The fabric was designed by me and printed by Spoonflower (4yds of Cotton Poplin Ultra), and the dress itself was a Colette Rue. I made my own piping for the waist panels. The fit on the Rue is/was notoriously weird though, and I struggled to get a version that fit me and would sit where I wanted it to. In the end, the bust is rather baggy and the shoulders are so wide I have to use fashion tape to stick them to my bra straps. (And I have wide shoulders!) I also wasn’t thrilled with the fabric, which wrinkles easily and looks a bit like bedsheets. But everybody seemed to get a big kick out of it, so I continued to break it out for AWS events over the subsequent years. I even got a selfie in it with Amazon CTO Dr. Werner Vogels!

This past February, I went to Singapore to co-present a big keynote for one of our AWS Innovate events. To my surprise and delight, my colleague Ethan handed me a special t-shirt to wear. How cute is that? It’s got a little illustration of me in the dress! I later asked him for the original image file, and I had some stickers made up to hand out at events. This thing was really taking on a life of its own.

That said – I was tired of the white, and I felt like it was past time for a new version. So I created a new design using 28 AWS service icons, arranged in a brick formation along with the AWS logo. I picked icons for my favourite services as well as ones that I thought just looked cool, and with a goal of getting a nice range of colours. Then I sent it off to Spoonflower to get printed onto 5 meters of their Organic Cotton Sateen fabric. It’s a heavier weight with almost a shine to it, thanks to the thicker weave. (Note: I found though that it’s very easy to create a visible snag when pinning, so I tried to only pin through the white bits where it’s less noticeable. Using better pins would probably help too, I think.)

Once I had the fabric, it was time to choose a design. I had deliberately purchased enough to make a full skirt if I wanted, and I thought for a while about doing some sort of retro style shirt dress. (I’ve had my eye on McCalls 6696 for a long time now.) But once I had all the pattern pieces printed out*, I realised that it was a bad choice. Any style that involved lots of seaming or shaping would either distort the printed icons, or result in me spending hours trying to line things up perfectly. I needed a simpler design that would show off the print to maximum effect. After a lot of research, I landed on the Seamwork Benning. It’s a loose and comfortable fit, with a simple shape (mostly rectangles) and not too many seams. No need for a zipper, and YAY RUFFLES!

*If you don’t sew or haven’t bought a pattern in decades, you might not realise that you can now buy patterns as PDFs! I’m a big fan, though it does mean you have to spend the first hour gluing all the pages together…

I wisely decided to create a prototype first to make sure I had the size correct, and that I understood all the steps. I used some random tropical light cotton fabric I had in my stash. I didn’t have quite enough meterage for the full version so I shortened the bottom ruffle. It was a quick project… but the shape ended up pretty sack-like on me. It looked better with a belt for waist definition, but the style isn’t actually meant to be belted. This showed me that I definitely needed to go down a size in the real version!

So finally it was time to start the real version. I spent a lot of time laying out the pattern pieces. I needed to make sure the icons weren’t upside-down, and I carefully adjusted the placement so that the two horizontal seams (at the waist and the second ruffle) would fall between rows of icons and thus not cut any in half. I also ensured that the repeat would be properly maintained the whole way down the dress. I actually overthought this a bit, as I also tried to make sure the horizontal pattern would be correct… before realising that the gathers for the ruffles would mess that up regardless.

Once I had the fabric cut out, it was time to assemble the bodice. There is a side bust dart to provide a little shaping. This dress is not fully lined, but instead has a simple facing around the neckline. This is like a partial lining, a bit of fabric that is sewn around the neck opening and then flipped to the inside. This gives you a nice finish around the neck and helps the garment to lie flat. I used some white cotton from my stash, along with some iron-on interfacing to give it a little extra weight. As you can see in the photo, I used my overlocker machine to finish the bottom edge of the facing.

One of the advantages of this design is that the sleeves are “cut-on,” meaning they’re part of the bodice so you don’t have to sew them on separately. So once you’ve sewing the shoulders together and attached the facing, you can go ahead and hem the sleeves and finish the side seams. I decided to be fancy and use French seams, just to challenge myself and to give a nicer finish. This way all the raw edges are fully encased on the inside of the garment.

And with that, the bodice is done! You can see that the facing wants to flip out a bit, despite my understitching. I think this is something I just need to practice more.

The next step was to assemble the skirt. The middle section has the pockets (of course it has pockets!), so I again French seamed those and inserted into the side seams. For each ruffle, you run a few rows of basting stitches and then pull those tails to create the gathers. I was really paranoid about my gathers being even, so I used a LOT of pins.

Yeah, these seams took a long time to sew. I made a little video.

Once the first ruffle seam was finished, I used the overlocker to finish the raw edges. Then I had to do another even longer one for the bottom ruffle!

Then all that was left was a quick hem, and it was ready to try on. The moment of truth…

Hm. I was pleased with my sewing and finishing skills, but not so much with the fit. Even going down a size, it was still giving less “breezy summer dress” and more “giant Victorian nightgown.” I decided to shorten the bottom ruffle by chopping off the bottom row of icons. I also performed some very delicate surgery on the waist seam. I carefully unpicked just the center portion of the front waistband and created two small matching vertical darts, each of which took in 1/2″. Then I redistributed the ruffles and resewed the seam. That meant I took out an additional 1″ at the front, which is subtle but really helps it look less like a tent. Much better!

After finishing the dress, I still had a fair bit of the fabric left… and I decided that I needed to craft some accessories. That’s when I discovered SneakerKit. This company will sell you everything you need to make your own pair of shoes! While most folks use them to make leather shoes, I could see on Instagram that many people were also creating fabric shoes. I ordered my kit from Maker’s Leather Supply in Australia, along with a packet of the metal eyelets.

The first step is to prepare your pattern. I downloaded the Classic 3 in 1 and chose the high-top. Then I had to cut out my pieces.

The SneakerKit site has really good instructions, but they’re intended for working with leather. To use fabric, I had to do some research and figure things out myself. Most of the blogs I’d read about making fabric shoes suggested using some very thick interfacing to help stiffen the sides. So my next step was to trace my pieces onto my thick iron-on interfacing. I used a bit of masking tape to join the two side pieces together at the heel. You have to remember to flip each pattern piece over to create the mirror-image piece for the other foot. (I marked mine with L and R to keep track.)

Next I cut out the interfacing pieces.

I decided that the insides of my shoes would just be white fabric. So I took the interfacing the ironed it to white cotton, and then cut out around the interfacing. Note: I left 1/4″ excess along every edge that would be sewn to use as seam allowance. (You can see this better on subsequent photos.)

I then used the interfaced lining pieces to cut out the exterior fabric. For the tongues, I decided to use some of the leftovers from my v1 dress, and I tried to line up the pieces so the AWS logo would be nicely visible on the toebox. Once I had them placed, I cut them out.

For the side pieces, I made sure to line the heels up exactly between two icons so I could ensure both shoes looked the same.

Now it’s time to sew! I sewed each piece together going just around the edge of the interfacing. (All of the bits along the bottom of the shoe are left open so you can turn them inside out afterwards.)

Then I trimmed down the lining piece seam allowance by half just to make it lie flatter when I turned it inside out.

And then I turned each piece out and gave it a good press to make sure it was flat and all the corners were properly turned out.

I placed the pieces on the rubber soles just to get an idea of what they were going to look like. Hey, this is pretty good!

I decided to some topstitching around each piece. This means I sewed a decorative line 1/4″ from the edge around the tongue and each side piece. (Again, I left the bottom edges unfinished.)

For the side panels, I discovered I had some red ribbon that would work perfectly for the loop at the heel (to help you pull them on). I cut out appropriate length, doubled it over, and sewed it down as I was doing the topstitching. (You can see it in the photo below.) Then I used the overlocker to close off the bottom of each piece. Later I went back and sewed down the edges of the ribbon to make sure it was extra secure.

The pattern has a LOT of little holes marked on the sides that need to be transferred to the fabric pieces. I started by using an awl (a very pointy tool) to poke holes in the paper pieces, using some cardboard to protect my worktop.

Then I placed the paper piece on the fabric panel and used a pen to make the placement of the holes.

For the laces, I didn’t have the recommended tool for cutting the holes and setting the eyelets. Instead I used a regular paper holepunch to make the holes, which thankfully were the right size. It actually worked pretty well! Occasionally it had trouble completely cutting out the hole, but I was able to use the awl and some scissors to fix it up.

To set the eyelets, if you don’t have the tool you can use a hammer. I’ve done this in the past and had a couple of the little hammer tools in my craft box. I tried it in the house on a piece of plywood, but I needed something a bit firmer. I ended up doing it outside on the pavement, with a bit of cardboard to keep the fabric from getting dirty. I only mangled one of the eyelets, which necessitated using needle-nosed pliers to peel back the little bits and remove it to try again. So do your best not to screw any of them up!

With that, all of the pieces were complete and ready to be sewn onto the soles!

The rubber soles have holes marked around the edges, but you need to use a thick, sharp needle to pierce through and open them up. Note: sewing through rubber is really, really tiring on your hands! I had to take frequent breaks.

Now it’s time to sew the pieces to the sole. The SneakerKit comes with heavy waxed thread and a long sharp needle to help you out. I had to watch the video many times to make sure I was doing it correctly. (There’s a very specific order you’re meant to sew the holes in.) As you work your way around, you sew on the tongue as well.

Again, this is murder on your hands. I found that even with pre-poking the holes, they were hard to find in the rubber and for every stitch I had to dig around to find it.

When you finish the stitching, have to use a lighter to melt the threads on the inside. Then you simply put in the insole, lace them up, and you’re done! (Well, except there’s a whole other shoe to assemble. )

I managed to find some AWS Training & Certification laces in my swag bag, which went perfectly. I also bought a can of Scotchguard and gave them a good spray to help repel stains. They’re pretty comfortable, but I’m not sure yet how long they’ll last. If I were doing it again, I’d try to get even stiffer interfacing, as this is still pretty soft. I figure if/when they fall apart, I’ll pull the tops off and try something else!

But guess what? I still had some fabric left over, and with less than week left until AWS re:Invent, I decided to make a shirt.

I had to piece a few bits together, but I just managed to eke out a Tessuti “Arkie” shirt. Again, I used white cotton for the facing and for the underside of the collar. No French seams on this one as I was flying to finish it in time!

My AWS capsule wardrobe should hopefully be enough for the near future. Let me know if I’ve inspired you!

So many trips to document! After a quiet January settling back in Sydney, in February I headed to Singapore to help deliver the opening and closing keynotes for AWS Innovate AIML edition.

I headed into the office to meet with a few colleagues. The view is pretty nice…

For the keynotes, we were going to stream them live from a greenscreen studio. I headed over early in the morning for hair and makeup, where I found a special surprise waiting: my colleague Ethan had created a special t-shirt with me wearing my AWS dress!

How cute is that?? We spent a very long day of finalising the content, rehearsing, and pre-recording a dress rehearsal. That night, I headed out to Brewerks in Clarke Quay for dinner. Singapore is such a pretty city.

I had a very early start the next day for the actual live stream. It went really well. Thanks to Ethan and my awesome co-host Dean for making everything so fun!

The weather wasn’t great in Singapore that week, but I did manage to work by the pool for a few hours.

I also attended the AWS Singapore meetup one night, which we held in our offices. Massive turnout, and a really great evening of talks.

The next day, I met up with the two members of my team based in Singapore – Cathy and Donnie!

We also hosted a dinner for some of the AWS Community members in Singapore: AWS Heroes, AWS Community Builders, and user group leaders.

On my very last night, I went out for dinner with my good buddy Gabe and his wife Alex. They took me to a local place that was super crowded, insanely tasty, and so cheap. Singaporeans are spoiled for food, I tell ya.

It was a quick trip – just a week – but it was great getting to catch up with all these folks!

A couple weeks later, the Snook and I bought flew to Melbourne where I’d be delivering the closing talk of ServerlessDays ANZ.

We made it just in time to attend the speakers’ dinner that night, and then had a lovely walk back along the Yarra.

The next day was the conference. The venue at Federation Square was gorgeous! My buddies Lars Klint and Pete Hanssens were on the organising committee and kicked things off.

Great crowd!

Here are some of the amazing other speakers! The talks are all up on YouTube.

My session was the last one of the day…

Thankfully it went realy well and I was happy that it was so well received! Thanks to my colleagues Paul, Stephen, Gregor, and Derek for all their help with the event.

After the conference, we all headed to a nearby bar for the afterparty…

The next morning we headed out into the city to be tourists. We mooched around the Queen Victoria Markets and enjoyed the sunshine. The hot weather helped us justify stopping off at Brick Lane Shed for a sneaky beer!

We also had a late lunch of some very tasty bagels from Bowery to Williamsburg.

We had a plan to meet someone at ACMI but had some time to kill, so we decided to check out the “Story of the Moving Image” exhibition.

Then we headed up to the lab to meet my friend J Rosenbaum and check out their fascinating new artwork Gender Tapestry. We took selfies that were uploaded and featured in some of the creepy generated faces.

That night, the Snook – a notorious hater of musicals – gave me a lovely birthday present of attending & Juliet with me. (It helped that I told him all the songs were from the catalogue of Max Martin, Swedish Pop producer extraordinaire!)

I LOVED IT. It’s a retelling of Romeo and Juliet with loads of pop song mash-ups, a gay romance, great costumes, fantastic dancing, and Rob “Millsy” Mills as Shakespeare. I mean, WAS THIS WRITTEN FOR ME?!

Afterwards, we headed to trendy Bar Ampere for dinner and cocktails.

On our last day, we headed down to St. Kilda to enjoy the sunshine and check out the markets.

We were delighted to discover the nearby St. Kilda Community Gardens. Lovely place!

We went for a walk along the beach. I always think of the line from the Paul Kelly song – “Where the palm trees have it hard.”

We finished our trip with a spot of furniture browsing in Collingwood followed by beers at The Craft & Co.

And that’s where it would have ended, a nice ending to the weekend… except for a little accident on the way back to the hotel. Here’s how I described it to my sister:

So Rodd and I were briefly walking back to our hotel in Melbourne so we could head to the airport. Down one of the busiest shopping streets, people everywhere.
I walk over, like, a manhole or something.
And my left foot lands crookedly
And I start stumbling forward
And I can’t get my feet under me
And it’s like slow motion, and I’m like, yep, I’m going down.
And rather than try to land on my knees or my hands, perhaps sensing that I could risk breaking something that way, instead I face plant.
Literally belly flop on the pavement, taking the brunt of the fall on my boobs.
The Asian couple in front of me were like horrified “ARE YOU OKAY?!?”
And Rodd helped me up and I’m okay
Skinned my elbow a tiny bit
But I suspect my chest is gonna hurt tomorrow.
So that’s me. Still falling on my face, as a grown-ass adult.

Over the course of the next week, my chest started to feel increasingly sore. I didn’t have any visible bruising, but sleeping on my left side was impossible and it got harder and harder to breathe. Finally I started to get worried that something was really wrong, so we headed to the hospital.

A few hours and a couple X-rays and an EKG later, they confirmed that I wasn’t having a heart attack. The doctor couldn’t rule out a cracked rib, but didn’t see one on the X-ray. The only thing I could do was wait until it stopped hurting, which took a few more weeks. In retrospect, seems likely that it was a case of costochondritis, where the cartilage between the ribs gets inflamed. I’m super grateful to the Australian health care system and the doctors for helping me rule out anything more serious! (Oh, and it didn’t cost me anything. )

I think these socks win the prize for the longest time from start to finish, and they probably also set a record for the number of times I frogged and restarted! My initial cast-on was way back in April 2021 – back when I was still livestreaming my knitting – and I finally handed them over to the Snook yesterday.

The yarn is Drover Self-Striping from Colagirl Collective that I bought from Convent & Chapel many years ago. I can’t find any record of the colorway name or number, but the lime/grey/black reminded me of Minecraft. My original plan was to do the Undulating Rib socks, but I realised after casting on that it was fighting with the self-striping. So eventually I frogged them and started over. I settled on a simple broken-rib pattern, which gave a sort of pixelation effect and kept me from being too bored. :

Row 1: K2, P2 repeat to end
Row 2 & 4: Knit
Row 3: P2, K2 repeat to end

I knitted them toe-up with a circular needle (using the Magic Loop technique). Normally I prefer to knit both at the same time, but the wool was pre-balled and I had no way to access the other end. That meant I had to knit them one-at-a-time, and of course I lost my notes during the long gap after finishing the first one. It was only really an issue on the heel, which I decided to knit using a traditional gusset and heel flap (but in reverse). I suspect that my numbers are slightly different on the two of them, but I was already knitting these as fairly baggy house socks so I figure a few stitches either way doesn’t really matter.

The Snook was pretty happy to receive these, as the weather has turned decidedly Autumnal and the floors are feeling a bit cool in the mornings!

I spent a good twenty minutes today playing with the browser demo of Jane Austen’s 8-bit Adventure. It’s awesome! Can’t wait for the full version to drop.

Over at RoaldDahlFans.com, I finally wrote down my thoughts about the whole rewrite controversy over the past couple weeks. I was quoted in the Telegraph article that broke the story, and it was honestly a little scary to get pulled into a culture war. For the record, I don’t support the changes, but only because they let Dahl off the hook for his indefensible and wrong attitudes. Dude wasn’t a saint, and if society has evolved past his racism and misogyny, let’s leave his books in the past where they belong.

Photo by Iñigo De la Maza on Unsplash

A few months back, I read an article about how to be healthier that suggested you should eat 30 different plants (fruits and veg) a week. It’s not just about the vitamins you get from the food itself, but also about encouraging a healthy gut biome. “Holy moly,” I said. “I reckon 30 in a week would be tough.” Rodd was hyperbolic in his skepticism. “I don’t think there are 30 different plants in the world!” he joked.

I kept seeing this advice over and over though, along with shocking stats like this one from a recent Guardian article:

“Of the 6,000 plant species humans have eaten over time, the world now mostly grows and consumes only nine, of which just three – rice, wheat and maize – provide about 50% of all calories humans consume. Add potato, barley, palm oil, soy and sugar to the mix, and you have 75% of all the calories.”

Well, this simply wouldn’t do. I made a New Year’s Resolution to start tracking the variety of plants I eat each week, and I began jotting them down in a Note on my phone. I set a few rules: the item has to be relatively unprocessed (no counting cocoa beans in a chocolate bar!), and there needs to be a decent mouthful of it (no tiny amounts of spices). To my surprise, getting 30 a week wasn’t as hard as I feared.

A few things have helped. We’ve begun getting a box delivered from Box Fresh each week, which includes a wide variety of fruit and veg. So far we’ve been happy with the quality, though it does mean you have to plan your meals and eat at home so you get through it all. I’ve also been making a point of going into the office a couple days each week, and there’s always fruit there for a healthy snack. Overall we’ve been a lot more aware about getting variety, and I’ve consciously chosen options (like salad for lunch) that maximise my chance of getting new items for my weekly tally.

I’ve also moved on from the simple Note for tracking, and I’ve built myself a pretty spiffy app that uses a Google Form to collect data in a spreadsheet. That sheet automatically keeps track of the overall variety and the breakdown per week. It also creates the chart you see above, which should continue to update throughout the year as I add more items.

So far this year I’ve eaten 79 different plants, and here’s a peek at the ones I’ve eaten most frequently:

Plants I’ve eaten every week this year: Cabbage, Coffee, Lettuce, Rice, Tomatoes. (I’ve lumped all lettuce into one category, but I’ve actually had several different varieties in there.)

Plants I’ve had nearly every week this year: Avocado, Capsicum, Carrot, Coriander, Cucumber, Potatoes, Red onion

Let me know if you’re interested in setting up something similar for yourself! I’d be happy to share my Sheet with you so you can set up your own tracking form.

One of the things we promised ourselves when we left for Germany was that when we got back, we’d finally renovate and redecorate the house. We did up the kitchen in 2012, of course, and then the garden in 2013-2014 and the en suite bathroom in 2016. Before we left in 2020, we replaced the carpeting in our offices and the ceiling lights. But the rest of the interior is basically the same as when we moved in, and all our furniture was mostly cheap IKEA stuff we’d accumulated over the years. We saw the move as the opportunity to get rid of a lot of things, and to start to invest in actual interior design and “grown-up” furniture. We also have a few structural things we want to do, like refresh the main bathroom, redo the closets, pull down the ceiling cornice (if we can), and change the window treatments.

So of course, I’ve started a Pinterest board. Rodd’s sister also brought us a giant stack of design magazines.

Here’s the thing – we both really like mid-century design. We’ve got a couple pieces that we know we want to keep: our bed, our vintage sideboard, Rodd’s Grandma’s cupboards and my rocking chair (both of which can be seen here), and these funky little shelves. We’ve also got some art for the walls. But other than that, everything else can go. We’ve set an arbitrary rule that we’re allowed IKEA things in the bedrooms and offices, but not in the main part of the house.

I find myself scrolling through endless photos of mid-century shelving systems and conversation pits. (Did you know the conversation pit “is back”?) We spent hours today watching Architectural Digest videos on YouTube. But I don’t want to just create a pastiche of the Miller house, you know? I think it also needs to be more modern and us, and of course we’re limited by the concrete box floorplan that already exists.

If you know of a good Sydney based interior designer, please let me know. We’ve put out feelers to a few, but always looking for more recommendations!

PS – We did visit the Miller house back in 2019, and it’s amazing. (Rodd really, really wants that wall of built-in shelves.) If you’re into that type of thing, highly recommend you visit Columbus, Indiana and watch the excellent John Cho film…

Rodd and I have both had the same Australian mobile/cell phone numbers for more than twenty years, and we didn’t want to lose them when we moved to Germany. After investigating a few different options, Rodd set us up on a Hosted PBX plan with Aussie company MBit. We both ported our mobile numbers to them, and for $11/month the numbers remained active the entire time we were gone. Any SMSes we received were delivered to email, and they came through quickly enough that we could use them for two-factor authentication. (That was one of our main requirements.) We were also able to receive voicemails, which came through on email as attachments.

Note: I’m not sure if MBit are still advertising this service, so if you’re looking to do something similar, you might want to talk to them directly.

When we returned to Australia last month, we both needed to get new mobile plans so we could then port our old numbers to them. I figured this would be simple, but I ended up running into a few issues with mine that I thought I’d document for posterity’s sake.

My employer covers my mobile cost (up to a cap) so I decided I’d upgrade my phone at the same time I got my plan. I don’t change my phone that often, and I’d had an iPhone 11 for a couple years at this point. After doing some research, I decided on an iPhone 14 Pro 512GB on a plan from Telstra. I went to the Telstra shop at Broadway the first weekend we were back but they were out of the 14 Pros. The guy told me that he thought the Apple Store might have them though, so I headed up there.

Happily, the Apple Store had some in stock (in purple; I didn’t care) and they started the process of signing me up for my Telstra plan at the same time. We ran into some issues with my Telstra customer ID – I’ve had various Telstra plans over the last twenty years, and I was in their system multiple times. I ended up going back and forth between the Telstra shop and Apple to sort it out, but eventually we got there. The solution involved me reinstalling the My Telstra app on my phone and using my old login for it, and then creating an ID from that.

Then as the final step of doing the order, the Apple Store guy asked if I wanted to use an existing number. I said yes. He went through the porting steps, and was a bit confused because he didn’t recognise MBit. Then he asked for my account number. We didn’t actually have this, and MBit had closed for the holidays. So here’s what I should have done: walked away and started the purchase again once I had that info. Instead the Apple Store guy told me we could still set it up with a new number, and then I could call Telstra once I had the MBit account number to switch it over. Reader, I believed him. He set up the plan with a brand new number, and I walked out of the Store with my new iPhone.

Back at home, I transferred everything from my old iPhone to my new one. That process worked really well, and other than logging into some apps again, it was completely seamless. I didn’t bother to tell anybody about the new number, because I’d only have it for a few days, right?

A few days after Christmas, MBit were able to provide us with our account numbers. Rodd went with a simple pre-paid Boost plan and bought a SIM at the supermarket, and he was able to port his number without issue.

I called Telstra and explained what I wanted to do, and ran into an immediate roadblock. Telstra’s systems will allow you to port a number ONLY during the initial plan setup. Once you are on a plan, it’s impossible to port a number to it. The customer support person told me that I’d have to pay out the entire contract (LOL NO), so I resigned myself to just having to change to the new number. Then right before we hung up, they said:

There’s no option for us to port in your number to an existing mobile service however, you can request to change the number to an old one.

You just need to contact our voice team at 132200 and they will be the one who will process it for you.

Intriguing. I called them the next day and after fighting through different levels of menus and waiting on hold for a while, I got through to a nice bloke in Brisbane. He confirmed that yes, you can change the number associated with a plan, but only if that number has already been ported to Telstra. He therefore came up with the solution – I’d have to sign up for another plan and port my old number to Telstra as part of that setup. Once it was active, they could do the switch between the two plans. Then we’d cancel the new extraneous plan, and he kindly offered to refund any charges associated with that new plan.

It was complicated but my only option. So he went through the whole process of setting up my new plan (the cheapest post-paid we could do over the phone) and I gave him the info to port my old number to it. Then a few days later, I got a delivery with the SIM card. I had to put that into the phone to activate it, and within a few minutes of doing that, I got a notification that my old number was active on it. I had Rodd send me an SMS to test that it was working. Success! So now we just needed to swap the numbers.

I put the SIM for the new number back in and called Telstra again. This time got a nice guy in Perth. It took him a while to understand the whole convoluted plan, but we got there. (If you are in a similar situation, make sure you write down the reference number each time you call.) He explained that to change the number on a Telstra plan, the number you’re swapping in has to be in their archive pool. When you deactivate a number in Telstra, they put it into an archive pool for six months in case you want to claim it back. So the next step was to deactivate the new plan with my old number, which he did. He then went to do the change, but the system wouldn’t let him immediately apply my old number. He tried a few different things, but ultimately we decided that we needed to wait while systems updated to show that my old number was available to be applied.

That meant I had to call back again the next day. This time I got a nice lady in Brisbane. I again walked her through the whole saga. She then went to do the changeover, and to both of our surprise, it worked pretty much instantly. I didn’t have to change SIMs; my phone just automatically changed it to show the old desired mobile number. Success! She then applied the refund for the extraneous plan.

Sidenote: I really can’t fault Telstra at all through this process. The guy in the shop was a bit clueless, but the folks on phone support were knowledgeable and helpful. I did have to wait probably 20+ minutes each time I called, but it was worth it. They do try to punt you out to using the support chat in the mobile app, and I tried that the first time. However, the support agent I got did not understand my issue at all and I gave up quickly. It was definitely worth the time to get an actual human being on the line.

Right, so everything should be hunky-dory, right? Not so fast, friend. Even though my SIM had updated and I could receive calls and SMSes on my old number, I noticed that iMessage and FaceTime were still picking up the (now deactivated) new Aussie number. It took me several days to figure out how to solve this problem. I went through all the usual voodoo you find by googling: I turned the phone on and off; I took the SIM out and put it back in; I turned iMessage and FaceTime on and off multiple times too. I went into my iCloud settings and made sure the old number was showing there. Nothing worked. No matter what I did, I could not get my old number to appear as an option in Send & Receive. It would show my German number (which presumably had synced from my old phone) and the new Aussie number, but never my old Aussie number.

Today in desperation I asked on Mastodon…

And @randolph@app.net came through! It turns out there are two places in System Preferences where you need to update your number – “Name, Phone Numbers, and Email” AND “My Number.” I had only done the first, mostly because it’s the first option you get when you search for “Num” in the System Preferences.

Once I updated “My Number,” I turned off iMessage and FaceTime once more. Then I put the phone into Airplane mode and powered it down. I waited a few minutes and turned it on again. I took it out of Airplane mode and turned on iMessage. And it picked up the new number! I was finally able to select it for both services.

So thanks to Telstra and thanks to Randolph for solving my dilemma. I’ve got my old number back, and nobody needs to update their Address Book. Woohoooooo!

My home office in Sydney is still empty, but I’ve set up a workspace at the dining room table in the meantime. One of the Christmas presents I bought myself is a mechanical-switch keyboard. I’ve been wanting one for ages, and then I read this CNN Underscored rating guide that covered a lot of the best. I decided I didn’t need a full-sized keyboard as I’ve got my duckyPad I can use for a numpad. Based on the guide – and what’s available in Australia, and what I wanted to spend – I ended up getting a Keychron K8 Pro with aluminum frame, RGB backlight, and blue Gateron switches. (MSY has it for $179 AUD and had it ready for pickup in 3 days. The guy there was like, “I didn’t even realise we sold Keychron stuff!”) It’s pretty sweet.

The first thing I noticed when I picked up the box was that it was heavy. This thing is seriously sturdy, which is great because I have been known to pound on keyboards. The K8 Pro can be used either wirelessly with Bluetooth or plugged in via USB. (I expect I will mainly use it plugged in, but it’s nice to have the option.) It comes with the Mac keys installed already, but they provide the corresponding Windows keys along with the tools to swap if you need to. I haven’t gone down the custom keycaps route yet, but believe me, I am tempted. (Why are so many of them white though? I remember back when I had a Mac keyboard with white keys it was a constant struggle to keep them from looking grimy.)

I plugged in and started typing. And friends, the blue Gateron switches in this thing are gloriously clicky. I’m probably giving Rodd a migraine, but I love it. Everything feels very solid, including the space bar. Then I noticed there are a couple special keys in the upper-right corner…

With the default Mac layout, the little “crop” icon invokes a partial screenshot (i.e. the same thing you get by hitting Shift-Command-4). I’d long since built up the muscle memory for the shortcut, but since I usually move my right hand for it anyway, I reckon I could switch to the button.

The middle button has a microphone on it, and I got excited thinking it was a physical mute-microphone button. Instead though it invokes Siri or Spotlight search (i.e. Command-Space), which is disappointing. I never really use Siri, and it’s much faster to just use the shortcut for Spotlight. Park that for a second.

The third button has a lightbulb on it, and it controls the RGB lighting effects on the keyboard. When you click it, it cycles through the different options. If you hold down the Fn key while you click it, it turns them off/on. Okay, useful.

Back to that microphone button. One of the best things about a keyboard like this is that it’s completely customisable. I decided to remap that key to become a mute microphone toggle. Of course, Apple still doesn’t have an OS-wide shortcut to mute the microphone, which means you have to get creative. Previously I used Mutify to create a shortcut for the duckyPad, but I decided to see if I could do it without installing anything new on my machine. It took me lots of trial and error, but I’ve finally got it working! Here’s how I did it.

The first thing you need to do is set up a Quick Action using Automator. This extremely thorough article will walk you through every step of the process, including how to test that the integration is working. I decided on Shift-Command-0 for my shortcut, as I don’t use any of the apps that use that one. I tested it out, and I could see that it was working! But there was one problem. There’s no feedback when you invoke it, so it’s hard to remember whether you’ve engaged it or not. (Mutify had a little menubar icon that would turn red.) Then I realised I could use system notifications for that purpose…

Here’s the AppleScript I ended up using in Automator:

on getMicrophoneVolume() input volume of (get volume settings)end getMicrophoneVolumeon disableMicrophone() set volume input volume 0 display notification "Microphone has been muted." with title "Mute Hotkey"end disableMicrophoneon enableMicrophone() set volume input volume 100 display notification "Microphone has been unmuted." with title "Mute Hotkey"end enableMicrophoneif getMicrophoneVolume() is greater than 0 then disableMicrophone()else enableMicrophone()end if Then go to your Notifications & Settings pane in System Preferences and check that Script Editor is set to Allow Notifications.

If you leave the style set to Banners, they will show briefly and then disappear. I decided it was more useful to change them to Alerts, which will remain on the screen until dismissed. That way I can tell at a glance whether my microphone is “hot” or not. The notifications end up stacking up in a little pile, and you can dismiss them all at once when you want to clean them up. (I might play with the wording a little bit to make it even more obvious what the current state is.)

So now you’ve got a system-wide shortcut that will turn your microphone input off and on. If you’ve got a configurable keyboard, you can then map that shortcut to a single key press. For the Keychron K8 Pro, there are a couple ways to do that but the easiest way is to use VIA, an open source keyboard configurator. I had to go to caniusevia.com in a browser (important note – has to be Chrome due to the extensions required) and click the “Start Now” button. (You need to be plugged in for this, not using Bluetooth.)

You’ll then click the Authorize Device button, and an alert will appear asking you to confirm which device you want to connect to.

This is where I came unstuck the first few times, because I’d do that and then… nothing would happen. Then I realised I needed to RTFM. Keychron’s key mappings haven’t been approved by VIA yet, so you have to add them manually. This isn’t as scary as it sounds. I went back to the Keychron K8 Pro product page and scrolled down to “Get the keymap working on VIA.” Then I clicked the button to “Download K8 Pro ANSI RGB keymap JSON file” and unzipped the download.

Keychron’s instructions are written for the desktop version of the VIA app, but as far as I can tell it works exactly the same in the browser. So head back to Chrome, click on Settings, and tick the option to “Show Design tab.”

Then click on the Design tab, and you’ll see a place to upload that JSON you just downloaded. You’ll also want to make sure the “Use V2 definitions (deprecated)” option is ticked.

If it worked, the screen will update to show a keyboard.

Now switch over to the Configure tab and you should see your actual keyboard layout. The “Layers” refer to different configurations, and the Mac configuration is Layer 0 by default. (You may need to switch to Layer 1 for Windows.) Click on the Macros link in the upper-left.

Macros allow you to type multiple key presses at the same time, so that’s where we’re going to save our shortcut. I put mine in Macro 0, but you may want to use another number if you’ve already got some in there. For each key, you’ll enter the appropriate alias from the documentation. Here’s what mine ended up being for Shift-Command-0.

{KC\_LSFT,KC\_LGUI,KC\_0} Note that the keys are separated with commas, and I’ve wrapped the whole thing in curly braces. Make sure you click the Save button once your shortcut is in there. Now click back on Keymap in the upper left.

This is where you’ll actually map your new Macro to the appropriate keypress. (Protip: take a screenshot before you do anything else. You’ll see why in a minute.) In the upper part of the screen, click with your mouse on the key that you’d like to remap. It will start blinking slowly. (You can see mine in the upper-right.) Then on the bottom part of the screen, click the Macro option and then select whichever one corresponds to the Macro you created in the previous step. I chose M0, which is why the keymap changed from “Siri” to “M0” on that key.

And that’s it. It’s active pretty much instantly, so you should be able to try it out right away. You can also use the Key Tester tab; when you click the key on your keyboard, it will light up what you’ve mapped it to. Now here’s the warning: once you click an option on the bottom part of the screen to map a key, the selected blinking key will move to the next one on the upper keyboard. It’s really easy to not notice this, and to click another option on the bottom part (like if you accidentally hit the wrong one). This means you might be merrily going along and remapping heaps of keys without noticing. (I’ve done it a couple times already.) So just be careful! That’s why I suggested a screenshot, so you can repair any damage if you accidentally remap a key and can’t remember what it was before.

The really awesome thing about keyboards like this is that the configuration is saved on the keyboard. It’s not tied to the particular laptop, like if you configured it with an app. You can plug it into other computers and it will still work. Really cool, huh? There are lots of other configuration options in there, including changing the lighting and invoking specific OS features. I’ve really only scratched the surface.

So yay! I’ve got a very clicky keyboard and a physical button to mute the microphone across all apps, along with a visual reminder of the current state. If you have any suggestions or want to share how you’ve modded your Keychron, please get in touch.

Every New Year’s, there’s a happy moment when I remember that the latest Best of Bootie compilation is out! We’ve been listening to it for the last hour, and my favourites are definitely “We don’t talk about Backstreet” and “Take it as it was.”

And OMG we just got to the last track and I did not expect that.

Huh. I just learned a new knitting technique from Reddit, of all places! Rather than weaving in all the ends from your fairisle colour changes, you leave them long and then you essentially French braid them down the seam on the inside.

What the video doesn’t show is what happens at the end. Presumably you have some length of braid from your last few changes, and you… what? Put a rubber band on the end and have it hanging outside your sleeve? I’m guessing it’s something like: “fold it back on itself and weave the last few bits back into the braid,” but it’s annoying that they didn’t cover that bit.

It’s the last day of 2022, and we’ve been home in Australia for two weeks now. It feels… truly surreal.

For the last month or so in Europe, I kept having conversations with people who either A) didn’t realise we were moving back to Australia or B) thought we’d already left. For the record, the plan when we moved to Munich back in 2020 was always to return in a couple years. I had a vague idea that it would likely be in 2023, and that’s the time frame we shared with our German landlord, our Australian tenant, and my manager at AWS.

Things suddenly got real in January 2022 when my manager asked me to call him. It turns out that my buddy who headed up the AWS Developer Relations team in Asia-Pacific had decided to resign and go work for a startup. My manager wanted to know if I was interested in the role. On one hand, it was a promotion of sorts, and it would be the #1 role I’d have wanted if I was moving back. But on the other hand, this was way ahead of schedule. I also knew that if I didn’t go for it, they’d hire someone else and that role wouldn’t be available when I eventually did move. I asked my manager if it would be possible to do the role remotely for the rest of the year, and he said it was as long as I was willing to deal with the timezones. I interviewed for the role, got it, and officially took it on in April 2022. For the last 8 months I’ve been managing a team of Developer Advocates in Asia-Pacific from Germany, which has meant being on calls at 6am and late into the evening.

We left the timeline vague as long as we could. We knew we wanted to experience Oktoberfest and as many Christmas markets as possible, and I wasn’t sure yet whether I’d need to go to AWS re:Invent in November. Then the Snook resigned from his job at Google and finished up at the end of August (after 10 years!), which meant he only had a couple months to stay in the country legally on his visa. Our tenant Kelly let us know that she wanted to go visit family in Perth for Christmas, which meant that we’d need to arrange someone to look after Petey. Honestly, that made everything a lot simpler. On October 1st, we gave notice that we’d be out before the end of the year and we booked our flights for December 14th.

In early November Rodd started organising for the furniture shipment and we had to decide what to keep or get rid of. We quickly decided not to keep the giant TV that we’d shipped from Australia, and I sold it to an Amazonian. We also sold off our gaming chairs, my IKEA desk, the Sodastream, my bike, and a bunch of other houseware items we didn’t need in Sydney. We also donated a bunch of old clothes that we hadn’t worn in ages to charity.

We got back from our trip to Paris and Luxembourg exactly two weeks before our return flight to Sydney. There was so much to do! We made a “punch list” of sorts to make sure we didn’t forget anything.

We used the same shippers we had two years earlier – OSS – and they were scheduled to arrive one week before we left. We set out all our suitcases and started filling them with the things we knew we wanted to carry back to Australia.

Then we started pulling together everything that would get shipped back. The challenge was that we had rented our place furnished, so we had to make sure we didn’t inadvertently ship back anything that belonged with the house. (Thankfully the Snook had taken very detailed photos of every drawer and cupboard when we moved in, which helped a lot!) Everything we were shipping from the kitchen went onto the dining room table, along with the coffee machine, grinder, and KitchenAid.

We also had designated areas upstairs and downstairs so the movers would know exactly what to take.

Rodd also turned off the server and packed it up with the other things from his office, including his standing desk.

The movers turned up on time and got to work packing it all up in boxes. They were finished within a few hours and carted it all away. It was only about five cubic meters in the end. It will eventually be loaded into a shared shipping container in Rotterdam and then begin the long journey back to Sydney. The normal estimate is up to 20 weeks, so we’re not going to see that stuff for a while!

To my delight, two days later it began to snow in Munich. It was like the city wanted to give us the perfect send-off.

My old team in Europe hosted a fun goodbye session with a special trivia quiz themed all around me. They even got Rodd to help them out with some questions! The highlight was definitely the one about Rodd’s favourite type of nut, to which one of the answer options was “Deez.”

On our last weekend, we had one last Weisswurst Frühstück at the Augustiner Bräustuben. It’s an odd feeling, knowing that you are doing something for the very last time. I felt really emotional.

We went into the city to do some final shopping. Rodd was very keen to buy himself a Janker before we left. This is the traditional collarless Bavarian jacket. We went to several different shops trying them on before he found the perfect one in Lodenfrey. It’s a grey-green linen, which we figured he’d get more wear from in Australia.

It was snowing very prettily in the city, and we took the opportunity to enjoy the Christkindlmarkt one last time.

We took the U-bahn to Poccistrasse and walked across the Theresienwiese. It was snowy and foggy, so much that you couldn’t see the far end. It felt like another world. Hard to believe a few months earlier it had been heaving with millions of people at Oktoberfest.

Our last few days in Munich were a flurry of cleaning and packing, with occasional breaks to look at the snow outside. We cleaned out the fridge and cupboards, and I returned my work laptop and some office furniture I’d borrowed. I gave the rest of our liquor to my colleague Viktor. We rehung our landlord’s artwork and restored the place the way we’d found it. We set up mail forwarding.

And then we were ready! The suitcases were packed full and just within the weight allowance. We did a final inspection and handover of keys the night before the flight, and then headed to an airport hotel for our final evening.

On the 14th, we walked over to the airport and dropped off our bags. We were flying Thai Airways through Bangkok, and we’d splurged on a business class upgrade. (It was the cheapest we could find.) We were chilling in the lounge when Rodd groaned. “The weather forecast,” he said, “is not looking good.” Something about blizzard ice.

We went to the gate at the nominated boarding time, but it was pretty clear we weren’t going to be getting on the airplane anytime soon. Eventually we started hearing announcements that Lufthansa were cancelling all their domestic and short-haul flights, and we saw lots of frustrated travellers lining up for rebookings. Our crew were optimistic though that the long-haul international flights would eventually make it out. After a few hours we started to see some activity from the snowplows on the tarmac.

Four hours after our original boarding time, they announced we could finally board the plane! Everybody cheered.

We settled into our seats and I hit the button on my goodbye post. The Thai business class seats were comfy but nowhere near as over-the-top as the ones on Qatar on the way there. The attendants told us that we’d be waiting a bit before the wings could be de-iced. We ended up sitting there for two hours! Eventually it was our turn for the de-icer, and then we could finally take off.

Once we were in the air the flight was proceeding smoothly. We were a good six hours behind schedule so I knew we’d miss our connection in Bangkok, but it was out of our hands at that point. I was just hoping that we’d be still be able to stay in business class on whatever flight they got us on.

Right as they were serving dinner, one of the attendants from Economy came running into our cabin and said something frantically to another in Thai that included the word “choking” in English. Clearly a passenger was choking(!), and there was a lot of dashing about and getting first aid kits and such. At that point, I honestly expected them to announce that we’d be turning around and landing somewhere to get the guy medical attention. That didn’t happen though, and our attendant told me later that there was thankfully a doctor onboard and the passenger was okay. Eventually they brought him (in an oxygen mask) and his wife up to sit in two of the free business class seats. Phew! It felt like the universe was really trying to keep us in Europe.

As we got closer to Bangkok, we paid for wifi so we could check whether we’d been rebooked. Nothing yet. I look tired here, but I did manage to get some sleep. A lie-flat bed helps enormously, and I’m happy to report that at 5’10” (178cm) I just fit in the Thai business class seat.

When we deplaned in Bangkok, we immediately spotted a Thai Airways attendant holding up a sign with our names on it. She collected us and another guy who’d missed his flight as well. She explained that we were being rebooked on Qantas and helped us clear Security and get into the Lounge. We spent several hours in the Lounge waiting for our new tickets to be reissued. (The Lounge was nice enough, but I was disappointed the showers weren’t open.) Eventually we got our tickets, and as expected we’d lost our Business class seats. Not only that, but we were going to be sitting in the middle two seats of the middle block of four. But I tried to look on the bright side – the staff at Thai had done everything they could, and we were almost home!

Right before we boarded the Qantas flight, we got a notification on the app that our seats had changed. They moved us to a bulkhead row! Those are the seats that they reserve for people with infants, but there weren’t any on the flight so they bumped us up. That was really nice and had us feeling better about the nine-hour flight. We settled in for the final leg…

We landed in Sydney on schedule and were through immigration and customs quickly. Before you know it, we were in a taxi heading back to town. We had actually booked two nights in a hotel, knowing that the house wouldn’t be in a state to immediately move back in.

We dropped off our luggage at the hotel and then headed to the house. Kelly had moved out a few days earlier but had been coming by to feed and water Petey. We found him in the closet, and thankfully he seemed to forgive us pretty quickly for leaving him.

It was honestly a little depressing to return to the house. It was in decent shape, but two years of unprecedented rain had taken a toll. There were spots of mold on the ceiling (despite Kelly cleaning it repeatedly), and everything we had put in storage was either musty (at best) or covered in mildew (at worst). We also didn’t have much furniture beyond our bed and dining room table. Kelly had left us an old couch (that Petey had torn to shreds) and a small TV with a broken remote. Rodd said exactly what I was thinking: “This feels like camping.”

We set to work unpacking and cleaning. I tackled the bedroom and the bathroom while he worked on the kitchen. The washing machine broke on the very first load, but we persevered and ordered fresh sheets from Amazon. By Saturday night, we were sleeping in our own bed again. On Sunday we were restocking the kitchen and signing up for new mobile plans.

Unfortunately by Monday it was clear that I was sick. I started to feel a lot of chest congestion, and then my nose stuffed up completely. By Wednesday I was blowing green goo and I couldn’t smell anything. Repeated Covid tests were negative, so I went in to see my GP. He reckoned it was a sinus infection and put me on antibiotics, with some codeine to help me sleep at night. That knocked me out for the rest of the week, and I couldn’t really do anything but knit. It made for a quiet and rather depressing Christmas. The only highlight was that my sense of smell came back on Christmas Day so I could celebrate appropriately:

Petey eventually left the closet and became very, very clingy. He wants to make sure we never leave him again!

I am finally on the mend, and the house is starting to come back together. The washing machine repairman came out and estimated a thousand bucks for a new motor for our 14yo machine, so we said “Stuff it” and bought a new set on Appliances Online. They delivered them two days later, hooked them up, and took the old ones away. Yay for clean laundry!

We also took advantage of the Boxing Day sales to get a new OLED 4K TV. Hooray for overly giant televisions! (He claims it’s the same size as the old one. )

Rodd was very happy to get back to his induction stovetop, and he has used it to cook me some very excellent meals over the past fortnight. We’ve made a couple trips to Coles as we begin to restock the pantry, and I’m once again blown away by the quality and variety of produce we get here in Sydney.

And finally this week I was well enough to go into the AWS office. I picked up my new laptop from IT and started tackling a backlog of emails and overdue tasks.

So… we’re back, and people keep asking me what it feels like. It feels weird. It feels like we never left. It feels like if I didn’t have physical proof that we were there – mainly in the fact that our house is still missing most of its furniture – I’d think it was all a dream. We were gone for 842 days. 120 weeks. Two years, three months and change. Did it actually happen? How did it go so fast?

I’m happy to see Petey. I’m happy to see my friends and neighbours and family again. I’m happy to not struggle daily with a foreign language, and to hear the Ocker accent again. I’m happy to see the ocean, eat amazing Asian food, watch the cricket, and drink a beer that isn’t a Helles. My hair texture has already changed for the better. (Munich water is very hard.) Australian cafe culture breakfasts are the best in the world. These are all good things.

But it’s really hard not to miss Munich. I miss having four distinct seasons. I miss the lack of humidity. I miss riding my bike all over the city and not having to worry about an irate driver hitting me. (Sydney is not cycle friendly.) I miss living in a city that is beautifully maintained, where piles of rubbish and empty storefronts are rare. I miss cheap and convenient public transport, and high speed rail between cities. I miss frozen, bake-at-home giant pretzels. I miss not needing to drive a car, pretty much ever.

I completely realise how all that sounds. Believe me, every single European thought we were crazy for being sad about coming back. And I know – I know – how incredibly fortunate we are, no matter where we live. This is just the normal comedown you have after a fabulous vacation, except that the vacation lasted 842 days. We’ll be all right.

Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.

Thanks to everybody who helped us out along the way. Thanks to our family and friends who supported us in the move, and to our employers who made it possible. Thanks to our European friends for welcoming us so heartily. And thanks to Kelly for looking after our place and our dear Petey Cat.

It’s nice to be home.

One of my goals before leaving Munich was to hit as many Christmas markets as possible before leaving. We had been to the Munich Residenz Weihnachtsmarkt and the Köln Hafenweihnachsmarkt when we visited in November 2019, but all Christmas markets were cancelled in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic. And even though I knew timing would be tight in 2022 since we would be leaving for Australia in December, I still wanted to try.

We ended up visiting 7 of them!

The first was the Praterinsel Weihnachtsmarkt. I had noticed a big sign for it when riding my bike down the Isar in November, and with an opening day of Nov. 10 it was by far the earliest one. That happened to coincide with a visit from our friends Emily and Clare, so we took them along that weekend.

Truth be told it barely qualified as a market, it was so small. It consisted of a couple stalls near the river, and there were a few dozen people standing about drinking glühwein. Still, it was festively decorated and we felt like it was a cheerful start to the holiday season.

A week later was the opening of Das Weihnachtsdorf (“The Christmas village”), the market at the Residenz that we had visited in 2019. We were having dinner with some friends in the city so managed a quick visit beforehand. The market takes place in the inner courtyard at the palace, and the entrance is lit up with neon.

Inside they have lots of stalls selling food, drink, and gifts. It was pretty crowded even though the weather was cold and drizzly.

One corner is set up as a Märchenwald (“Fairytale Forest”) with animatronic holiday scenes from stories for little kids. The giant robot mouse in the beautiful colourwork sweater was a particular favourite.

We had Glühwein as we had done three years earlier. We were standing there sipping our hot mulled wine and feeling quite relaxed when suddenly we realised we had made a major error on our first visit. All of the Glühwein stalls serve their drinks in real mugs, and you usually pay a couple extra euros deposit (“Pfand”) that you get back when you return the mug. Back in 2019… we did not understand this. We thought the mugs were commemorative and that we had purchased them. Whoops. And that’s how we ended up with two Residenz Weihnachtsmarkt mugs in our cupboard for the past three years! (Sorry!!)

Our third Christmas Market of 2022 was “La Magie de Noël” in Paris, which you can read all about on that blog post.

The fourth market was actually two of them – the Lëtzebuerger Chrëschtmaart and the Wantermaart – in Luxembourg. Again, more photos on the blog post.

The fifth market was back in Munich on Dec. 2 – the Mittelalterlicher Weihnachtsmarkt (“Middle Ages Christmas Market”). Rodd had found out about this one somehow, and it was right around the corner from my office. We checked it out in the evening, and it did not disappoint. If you’d have asked me ahead of time to imagine a Middle Ages Christmas Market, this is pretty much exactly what I’d picture.

There were rough-hewn wooden stalls selling “ye olde” gifts like drinking horns, medieval dresses, fur slippers, honey candles, and weaponry. All of the vendors were dressed in robes and costume.

You could buy jewelry, dolls, and gear for knights and princesses.

There were also lots of food stalls, including one that was roasting a whole wild boar.

There was glühwein, of course, but beyond that there were several stalls selling more obscure medieval drinks. This one offered Hypocras, a Roman drink of spiced wine that was thought to have medicinal properties.

The one I was most excited about was the Feuerzangenbowle (“Fire-tongs punch”). I had seen people drinking out of these odd ceramic cups and was excited to try it. It’s a hot mulled red wine, but the cup has a little bowl set into the lip that they set a rum-soaked sugar cube in. And then they light it on fire, and the hot melty sugar runs down into your wine. How bad-ass is that????? (You wait until it goes out to drink it, of course.)

While I was indulging my pyromaniac tendencies, the Snook only had eyes for one stall: the Metschänke (“Mead Tavern”).

He ended up with a tankard of hot spiced mead.

Incidentally, the deposit on these fancy ceramic mugs was €10 each, so there was no way we were walking off with these!

It’s Germany, so there was also beer of course.

We were hungry so we hit up the Knödel (“dumpling”) stall for dinner and ate it with sauerkraut hunched over a barrel like medieval peasants.

We went straight on to our sixth Christmas market that same night – the Munich Christkindlmarkt (“Christ Child Market”). We walked over to the Marienplatz and joined the huge crowds checking out all the stalls in front of the Rathaus.

There were lots of stalls selling Christmas decorations, ornaments, toys, and gifts.

Did I mention it was crowded??

We made our way up Kaufingerstrasse, checking out the stalls along the way. There were a lot of stalls selling hot roasted nuts, food, and drink. The Willenborgs Crambambuli place was very popular, offering their fancy organic mulled wine.

I was also delighted by this glühwein stall that had a mini Frauenkirche on its roof, set up right in front of the actual Frauenkirche.

Mmm, sausages.

Eventually we reached the end of the stalls as we got to Stachus, and there ahead of us was the Münchner Eiszauber (“Ice Magic”) – an outdoor ice skating rink with several bars!

We went up to the second floor to have a look at the skating. Lots of folks were sitting up there having drinks.

Our seventh and final Christmas market came two days later on December 4th – the Tollwood Winterfestival. We had attended the summer version of this arts and music festival back in July. The winter version was set up on the Theresienwiese, near our house.

There were several music venues and a covered market, as well as lots of outdoor stalls.

Since it’s an arts festival, there are also large scale artworks dotted throughout the grounds.

A few folks were on the Eisstockbahn playing Eisstockschießen, a German winter sport similar to curling. There was no ice though, so it was really more like shuffleboard.

Time for sustenance! We went over to the crepes stall and shared one with applesauce and cinnamon sugar.

They also had a Feuerzangenbowle hut, which was hilariously decorated with wooden flames all over the roof.

We wanted to try something new though so ended up at the Met-Amensis stall. This is yet another meadery, and the Snook ended up with one of their GoldenDark mead beers. I chose instead their “Drakenbluod” (Dragon’s Blood), a hot spiced mead with cherry juice and ginger. It was delicious and warming on a cold day.

On our very last weekend in Munich, we made a final visit back to the Christkindlmarkt for some shopping. Amazingly, it was snowing.

It was perfect. We picked up some Schmalznudel (fried Bavarian-style doughnuts) and ate them along with glühwein in the Viktualiensmarkt.

It was a lovely way to say goodbye to the city. You know, I love an Aussie summer Christmas: cricket on the telly; fresh mangoes; maybe a trip to the beach. But there’s just something special about the holidays in a snowy climate. I’m so glad we got to experience it once more time before we left.

Some random links I’ve had open in my web browser lately:

The BBC have been broadcasting daily episodes of a dramaticization of Susan Cooper’s book The Dark is Rising. It’s also available as a podcast (on pretty much all the platforms), and we’ve been listening along and really enjoying it. If you’ve only seen the terrible 2007 film, you should listen to this and then go out and read the whole series. (Rodd and I have also been having fun casting an imaginary version of this for Netflix. He reckons Peter Capaldi for Merriman.)
The Most Popular Series Eats Recipes of 2022. I’m amused how many of these are just simple potato recipes. And hey, it includes Tartiflette! I will definitely be making that pork and bean stew next winter.
Mapping Sydney Billboards: Every QMS advertising panel in Sydney. I saw this linked on a Mastodon thread griping about the new electronic advertising panels. We’ve only been home for 2 weeks and already these things are annoying me. They’re huge and intrusive, and they take up disproportionate space on Sydney’s already narrow footpaths.
How to Sew Like a Mathematician. Making continuous bias tape has already been a favourite sewing trick of mine – I have a whole blog post and video about it – but I hadn’t thought very deeply about the topology of it. That post goes deep into the details and then tries an interesting technique to start with a regular torus, resulting in “almost” bias tape.

I’m still enjoying Mastodon and staying the hell away from Twitter, and it seems like more and more folks are making the switch. If you use AWS and want to follow more folks in the developer community, my colleague Gunnar has curated several lists of employees, Developer Advocates, AWS Heroes, AWS Community Builders, and User Group leaders. Here’s how to get the latest lists and import into your own Mastodon account:

Click on the the Actions tab on Gunnar’s Github repo.
Click on the latest workflow, whatever it happens to be.
Scroll down on the page to the artifacts and click on the list to download a Zip file.
Unzip the file. Then go to the Settings page within your Mastodon instance and select “Import and Export” and then “Import” options.

Leave the Import type to “Following list” and Merge so you don’t overwrite your existing followers list. Then select the list you want to import and hit Upload. Easy peasy!

Incidentally, you can see my Mastodon profile at https://aus.social/@web_goddess and follow me if you like, or you can subscribe to an RSS feed of my posts.

At the end of November I had a couple work commitments a week apart in Paris and Luxembourg, so we decided to combine them into a single trip – the last and biggest of our time in Europe. (I suspect it’ll also be the longest blog post!)

We kicked off with a very early (6:45am!) Sunday morning TGV train from Munich.

We bought coffee and pastries to have breakfast on the train, and we just relaxed and watched the scenery as the sun came up.

By 10:30am we were crossing the Rhine into France.

The train had been moving pretty fast through Germany, but you could definitely tell when we crossed over and started really moving. (That’s about 200mph.)

The French countryside is very pretty.

We arrived at Gare de l’Est around 12:30pm and caught a taxi to our hotel. We were staying at the Hyatt Regency Paris Étoile in the northwest of the city. Not an especially touristy area, but it was fairly close to my office. After we dropped off our stuff, we headed out for a walk and ended up at the Arc de Triomphe.

We took the underground passageway and popped out right at the base of the arch.

The Arc de Triomphe honours those who fought and died for France in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Those carvings there amused me, as the ones on the right are meant to be bearded Germans while the ones on the left are the French. In the middle under the archway is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier from World War I.

Hey, there’s the Champs-Élysées! While it’s considered the most beautiful avenue in the world, on a rainy day with lots of traffic it just looks like any other street.

We next headed towards the Seine, passing by some very fancy shops. Mr. Snook was looking pretty fashionable himself in the Belstaff.

We crossed the Seine at the Pont de l’Alma and got our first glimpse of the Tower.

We walked along the pedestrian promenade towards the Tower and passed by the Memorial National de la Guerre d’Algerie.

And then we were at the Tower! There’s a lot of work being done around the base, presumably ahead of Paris hosting the Olympics in 2024.

We crossed back over the Seine at the Pont d’Iéna.

On the other side, we walked up past the Trocadero Gardens to the Palais de Chaillot. Our only previous trip to Paris had been in 2001 (21 years ago!), and we both had a vague memory that this had been where we posed in front of the Tower all those years ago. Unfortunately it was fenced off for renovations…

…but I peeked through the little window. Pretty sure that’s where it was.

The date was Sunday, November 20th, which means it was our 18th wedding anniversary. I had planned something very special for dinner that night – a river cruise with Ducasse sur Seine.

This is a beautiful glass restaurant boat docked right at the Pont d’Iéna. (Note: our Uber driver was confused by the directions as the wharves are below the level of the street. He ended up letting us out on the corner and we went down the stairs to the docks.) The host took our jackets and led us to our table, which had a perfect view of the Tower.

I had booked us for 4-courses with matching wines, starting at 19:30. That meant we had an hour before the boat actually left for the 2-hr river cruise at 20:30. We had both dressed up and we were feeling pretty special.

The menu from our dinner is currently on a boat somewhere between Amsterdam and Sydney, so I don’t have exact details on what we ate. (The online menu has been updated since then.) But we started off with some small bites along with bread and butter.

There was also a small soup… potato, I think?

At 20:00, the twinkle lights went off on the Tower.

For the second course, I had a beetroot and pomegranate dish while the Snook had a duck terrine.

At this point, the boat started moving! We slowly cruised east along the Seine. Here we are passing under the ornate Pont Alexandre III bridge.

We also cruised past the Tuileries Garden, where I knew a big Christmas market was happening!

Mr. Snook was enjoying himself.

The cruise goes all the way up to Île de la Cité, under the Pont Neuf, and around the island before heading back. Unfortunately the angles were such that we couldn’t really get a good view of Notre Dame.

For the mains, I had scallops while Rodd had lobster.

And then it was time for dessert! Mine involved chocolate and ice cream, while the Snook’s was clementine (orange) flavoured.

On the return trip we got to see the other side of the river (the Left Bank). Here’s the Musée d’Orsay.

And then the Tower came into sight, and we knew we were at the end of the trip. What a wonderful evening! Good food in an unforgettable setting, with my favourite person in the world.

The next two days I was busy with work and the Snook amused himself with some self-guided tours of Paris. He went to the Fondation Le Corbusier…

…and the Musée Curie (aka Marie Curie Museum).

He also ate steak tartare and collected photos of invaders.

On Tuesday afternoon, we left the work hotel and moved to the Hotel des 3 Poussins in the 9th arrondissement. That night we took the Metro to Concorde and had dinner at Le Florentin, mostly because the reviews said it had excellent French onion soup. We were not disappointed.

I followed that up with a glorious steak frites.

Then we walked back to the Tuileries Garden to check out the Christmas market – “La Magie de Noël.”

You could drop off your letters for Santa…

…and pick up some foie gras for the kids’ stockings.

The Snook was rather dubious about the VR “sensation,” and I can’t say I blame him.

They even had an ice rink!

This lived up to all my expectations of a French Christmas market. Stalls full of chocolate…

…and multiple different ways to eat cheese. Some stalls had dedicated special machinery for raclette, which they’d scrape onto bread or potatoes for you. Another had pasta that they’d toss for you inside hollowed out wheels of Parmesan.

This Christmas fun house was very popular, and every so often it would make noises and spew “snow” (aka foam bubbles) onto everyone walking past.

Of course, there were multiple places offering hot chocolate and “Vin chaud” (French mulled wine). I love it when there are stalls that look like Christmas pyramids!

We also saw the Ferris Wheel – the Roue de Paris – that I had spotted from the boat a few days earlier.

Definitely a fun Christmas market!

The next day, I worked from the hotel room and then that evening we went out for dinner and beers at 10 Pigalle, a tattoo studio and craft brewery. (Yes, really.) We definitely didn’t feel cool enough.

Thursday it was time to live out my Amélie dreams in Montmartre. But first, we found a Breton creperie for lunch.

Then we walked over to the Montmartre Funicular to ascend the hill…

…up to Sacré-Cœur Basilica. This is where Amélie returns Nino’s lost photo album, of course. It’s also a stunningly beautiful church with views over all of Paris.

Breathtaking.

We went into the Basilica and had a little look around. It’s a very modern church – only finished in 1914 – and I really liked the mosaics and stained glass.

Look at this handsome man.

Another view of Sacré-Cœur.

We started walking down the hill, trying to remember exactly where Nino stood when he saw Amélie with the book. At one point I even loaded the scene up on YouTube on my phone so we can try to pinpoint it. It looks like the landscaping has changed slightly in the decades since, and the telescopes are somewhat different now too.

I was delighted to discover that the Carousel is still in operation at the base of the hill. However, the telephone booths where Nino gets the call from Amélie have either been removed or were never permanent.

Back to work! We headed back to the hotel.

That night, we headed back to Montmartre. First we had to pay a visit to the most famous cabaret in the world, the Moulin Rouge.

Ooh la la!

Our next destination was where Amélie worked – the Café des 2 Moulins. It’s a real cafe, and we thought about going in for dinner. I wasn’t feeling very well though so we settled for walking past and grabbing a photo.

Not far away is Collignon’s Grocery. They’ve decorated the sides of the shop with photos from the movie.

Rodd had planned out the perfect way to end my Amélie adventure – taking our photos in a real analog photo booth. I hadn’t realised, but nearly all the photo booths you see these days just have colour printers inside. There are less than 50 analog booths left in the world, ones that actually develop your photos in the old way. #sohipster

There were several young folks already queued up, so we had to wait a while before it was our turn. The booth is tiny so we crammed in as best we could. It’s nice to have a souvenir.

Later that evening I was feeling better so we went out for a late night dinner at Domenico’s Sicilian restaurant. I had the best truffle ravioli I’ve ever had in my life!

And a giant piece of tiramisu. YUM.

Friday had the best weather forecast of the weekend, so we decided to go to Versailles. While I’m not really a Francophile, I’ve read a few books on Marie Antoinette (and enjoyed the 2006 movie). And since I saw where her life started in Vienna back in March, it only seemed fitting to see where she spent most of her days as Queen. We took the Metro to Versailles Château Rive Gauche station and then walked over to the palace and through to the gardens.

The famous fountains were shut down for the winter, but on the upside we didn’t have to fight our way through crowds. We listened to Rick Steves’ audio tour and walked through the gardens all the way to the Petit Trianon.

I was so excited to actually go inside. Not only did Marie Antoinette live out her shepherdess-cosplay fantasies there, but a replica also features in one of my favourite books, The Twenty-One Balloons. Here’s me on the main staircase of the Petit Trianon.

Marie Antoinette’s insignia is still everywhere.

After exploring the chateau, we went out into the gardens. We visited the nearby Temple of Love, that Marie Antoinette could see out her bedroom window.

We also walked over to the Hameau de la Reine (“Hamlet of the Queen”), a full-on fake rustic farm village where the Queen and her friends could act out their peasant cosplay fantasies. (Wikipedia says that’s a myth, but I choose to believe it because, hey, I probably would too.)

It’s basically like Belle’s village from the Disney cartoon, but in real life.

Needless to say, I loved it. The gardens are beautiful, and I can see why Marie Antoinette preferred to hang out here instead of at the palace.

We had to get back for our timed tour though! We booked it all the way back to the Palace, grabbing a couple baguettes for lunch along the way.

We made it back in time and joined our English-language guided group tour of “The King’s Private Apartments.” Our guide led us through a series of sumptuous rooms.

I especially liked seeing the Bureau du Roi (“the King’s desk”), a beautifully-decorated rolltop desk with lots of secret locked compartments for storing important papers.

We also saw the Porcelain Dining Room, which had previously been the site where a young Mozart played for Louis XV.

We were also very fortunate to get to duck into the Royal Opera of Versailles. This is the palace’s theater and opera house, and it’s where Napoleon hosted a banquet for Queen Victoria in 1855.

As our tour ended, we were free to visit the other parts of Versailles on our own. We went back to our buddy Rick Steves and his audio tour through the State Apartements. Here’s the ceiling from the Venus Room.

This was the Mercury Room, where Louis XIV’s coffin was displayed in 1715.

The windows from the upper floor offered beautiful views of the gardens.

And then it was time to visit the famous Hall of Mirrors.

I’d been told to expect wall-to-wall crowds, but happily it wasn’t too bad!

In addition to being a beautiful and decadent display of wealth and power, this is also the room where the Treaty of Versailles was signed to end WWI.

Our final stop was Marie Antoinette’s bedroom – the Queen’s Bedchamber. This is where she slept, got dressed each morning by her ladies-in-waiting, and gave birth to her children. Nineteen Princes and Princesses of the Realm were born in this very room.

Tired and overstimulated, we headed back to our hotel in Paris to crash. That night we went back to Montmartre for dinner to Le Relais Gascon. I had seen Tartiflette on offer at the Christmas market and was eager to try it out for myself.

It’s basically potatoes, cheese, bacon, and onions, and it was glorious. The Snook, meanwhile, opted for a steak.

The next day, Saturday, was our day for exploring the more touristy parts of Paris. We hopped on the Metro in the morning to the Cité station and walked over to Notre-Dame.

The sad faces are because the Cathedral is still closed due to the 2019 fire. This is pretty much as close as you’re able to get these days.

Again, we listened to Rick Steves’ audio walking tour. He pointed out some of the features on the west façade and we tried to spot them, including the famous gargoyle leaning on its elbows.

The tour led us around the south side of the Cathedral, where the rebuilding is much more obvious.

Here I am on the nearby Pont au Double.

The tour directed us to the very easternmost tip of the Île de la Cité, to the Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation. It’s dedicated to the 200,000 people deported from Vichy France to the Nazi concentration camps. From above, you just see some concrete and a narrow walkway.

Underneath are crypts that contain earth and bones from the camps, as well as 200,000 glass crystals with light shining through to represent each person who was killed.

The narrow passageways and prison-like feel really make you feel claustrophobic, like the sky is your only glimpse of freedom. It’s very effective, and it also reminded me of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin too.

We crossed back over the Seine to the Left Bank and walked down past all the booksellers (who were mostly closed) to Square René Viviani.

In the center of the square is the odd-looking Fontaine Saint Julien le Pauvre.

Also nearby is the oldest tree in Paris. Here’s the Snook checking it out.

We had a look in the church and down the nearby Rue Galande, a very old Roman road in the Latin Quarter with preserved medieval houses.

Only a block or two away, we discovered Shakespeare and Company, the famous English-language bookstore frequented by the Beat poets, Bertolt Brecht, Anaïs Nin, and many more. It’s also of course where Jesse holds his book reading at the start of Before Sunset. There was a massive queue to get in, so we continued on our way.

We continued our walk through the Latin Quarter down Rue Saint-Séverin.

We ended up in Place Saint-Michel and had a look at the fountain.

Next we crossed back over the Seine and walked past the Sainte-Chapell. It apparently has amazing stained glass windows, but the queues were all the way down the street (presumably everybody who couldn’t get into Notre Dame). We felt like staying outdoors, so we continued onwards past the Conciergerie. This was the former prison where many of the aristocrats (including Marie Antoinette) were held during the Reign of Terror before having their heads chopped off. There is a famous clock tower on the corner that was the first public clock in Paris.

The tour finished at the Pont Neuf, and we walked back over to the right bank to get a better look at the Conciergerie and the Palace of Justice.

We had a couple hours before our timed ticket for the Louvre so we explored more of the right bank. Here’s the Place du Châtelet with the Fontaine du Palmier in the center. It’s the largest fountain built during Napoleon’s reign still in existence

Next we spotted a strange lone tower and headed over to check it out. It’s the Tour Saint-Jacques, the last remnant of a very old church at that location. Nicolas Flamel is buried under the floor!

We walked through the 4th arrondissement, which was very pretty and had lots of people out doing their Christmas shopping.

And at last we came to our goal – the Centre Pompidou. I had learned about this building in a class on Post-Modernism in uni and had always wanted to see it in person. It hosts various arts-related museums and libraries.

The Centre was finished in 1977 and was the first major example of an ‘inside-out’ building with its structural system, mechanical systems, and circulation exposed on the exterior. We walked all the way around it.

There is meant to be sculpture by Alexander Calder in front of the center, but it’s definitely not there these days. Still, it’s a must-visit if you’re at all interested in architecture.

You know what I’m not interested in? NFTs. (That shop really does have something to do with Web3 and crypto. I couldn’t resist the opportunity to pull a face and send it to some colleagues.)

Time for lunch! We ended up at Bella Piazza for some really excellent pizzas.

The cake shops in Paris are next level. I’m still kicking myself that I didn’t get a Religieuse while I had the opportunity.

And then it was finally time for the Louvre! We marvelled at the Pyramid while we tried to figure out where the ticket entrance actually was.

Eventually we worked out that there was a system of various queues depending on your ticket time, and we found the correct one. It was pretty busy. I can’t imagine what it’s like during the summer peak season.

Obviously the Louvre is HUGE, and there was no way we were going to be able to see everything. So instead we turned to our buddy Rick Steves again, whose tour of 20-odd highlights takes a couple hours. We started off in Pre-Classical Greece.

The first major highlight is the Venus de Milo. We were able to get fairly close to her…

…and walk around as well. The audio tour made a big deal about how she was posed contropposto (ie with her weight on one leg). I also had not realised that the statue was discovered in two parts, and there is a fairly obvious seam just below where her robe is bunched around her hips.

Then we explored statues from the Golden Age of Greece, including this one I loved – the Athena of Velletri.

We checked out a few of the Parthenon frieze pieces (which they and the British really should GIVE BACK TO GREECE) and then headed on to Winged Victory. Honestly, this is just stunning and I could’ve spent an hour just staring at it.

From the Octagonal room, we had a good view out of the windows back towards the Pyramid and Tuileries garden.

We next went through the Galerie d’Apollon (Apollo Gallery), which houses (among many other things) the French Crown Jewels. I found the room itself more impressive than the exhibits!

Next came a succession of significant paintings. Here some that I particularly liked:

And then it was time to see the most famous painting in the world. There was a zig-zag queue to get close, and everyone in the crowd was holding up their camera to get a photo. (That seemed a bit pointless to me; you’ve seen this exact image thousands of times already.) I know lots of people say that they expected it to be bigger, but my reaction was that it wasn’t as small as I expected. We shuffled our way along and grabbed a funny selfie rather than fight our way to the front.

We saw a few more artworks – I especially loved seeing The Raft of the Medusa – but we were flagging. Our last highlight before we left were Michelangelo’s two statues of the Rebellious Slave and the Dying Slave.

It was dark by the time we left the museum. Many of the luxury Paris shops had incredible Christmas decorations.

The Snook had been craving cocktails, so we headed to Dirty Dick’s. It was super crowded, but we managed to snag a couple seats along the wall. The cocktails were very tiki and very delicious.

We were worn out and tired from such a long day, so for dinner we had empanadas at a little Argentinian chain.

And that was it for Paris! On Sunday morning we got up and headed back to Gare de l’Est for our train to Luxembourg. The journey took just over two hours.

We were staying at the Novotel Luxembourg Kirchberg. It’s not really in a touristy area, but it was very close to my office and to the conference I’d be speaking at. The Snook was also delighted to learn who else was staying at the hotel… (Bork bork bork!)

We wanted to head into the center of Luxembourg that night, and we spent like ten minutes googling how the public transportation worked. It turns out that it’s all FREE. That’s right; since 2020, all public transport in the whole country is free. We hopped on a tram to the city center and followed the stream of holiday revellers.

More Christmas markets!

This was the Lëtzebuerger Chrëschtmaart at Place d’Armes, the central square in the city.

We were very amused to find didgeridoos for sale!

We got some glühwein and stood around a wood fire. The nearby stall would sell you marshmallows on a stick to toast. It was all incredibly charming.

We wandered the city a bit more, following another stream of lights and folks…

…and we found another Christmas market! This one is the Wantermaart (“Winter Market”).

The smoked salmon hut smelled amazing and was very popular.

This market was pretty packed.

We snuck off to one side to take in the view. Hilariously, I thought the historical looking building behind us was a castle or fort, but it turns out it’s a bank headquarters!

I’m intrigued that so many of these markets have dedicated Christmas themed amusement park rides. How is there enough demand for that? What do they do with them the other 11 months of the year?!

We checked out a bit more of the center of Luxembourg. Notre-Dame Cathedral was lit up very prettily for the holidays.

The trees had star lanterns hanging from them. It was magical.

Here’s the Place de Clairefontaine, which has a monument in honour of Grand Duchess Charlotte.

The city was quite empty away from the Christmas markets, and it was lovely to walk around and check out the lights in peace and quiet.

On Monday I worked from the AWS office while the Snook walked all over Luxembourg checking out the medieval fortifications.

That night we hosted the first ever meetup of the AWS User Group Luxembourg in the prototyping lab. Here’s the organiser Jonathan kicking things off.

I was very excited! It was a decent turnout for a first meetup, especially on a Monday night. (Yes, the Snook joined us. He doesn’t work for the competition anymore. )

I gave a preview of my keynote talk (from the conference the next night); Jonathan talked about his company Ekonoo‘s microservice journey; and my colleague Moataz shared best practices for your AWS multi-account strategy.

Tuesday I worked from the office again, doing final run-throughs of my conference talk. At the end of the day I got dressed up and walked over the venue for the tech check.

The event I was speaking at was called the TNT Symposium and the theme was “Human.First”. I was the first speaker of the night, talking about how Amazon practices human-first innovation. I was a bit nervous, especially as I didn’t have any notes so I had to have it memorised! It landed pretty well and it’s mentioned in the event write-up here.

After a few more presenters, a group of stand-up comedians came onstage to get everyone energised before the drinks break… and proceeded to do an hours’ worth of comedy in French. I don’t speak a word of French. Have you ever had a nightmare where you’re in the audience and someone asks you a question in a language you don’t speak? Because I lived that. (Everyone else seemed to be having a rip-roaring good time though, which was nice.) At the drinks break, I made a bee-line for the cocktail cart.

It was actually a cloud-enabled Arduino-powered cocktail making robot! The guys at Accenture told me all about how it works. Very cool. I had an “Alexa’s Revenge.”

While I was hobnobbing with the Luxembourg tech scene, the Snook had again been exploring the city. He made it down into Grund, the part of the city that’s “down the hole” (as we referred to it), meaning the bit that’s not up on the plateau.

We ended up meeting up for dinner at a highly-rated local place called Bick Stuff run by a husband and wife. The food was excellent. I had chicken stuffed with escargot!

We capped it off with dessert and a glass of wine.

The next morning we headed to Luxembourg airport for the short flight back to Munich. I’m so glad we managed to fit this trip in, despite the stress of everything we had to do either side of it. It was the perfect capstone to our time in Germany and in Europe, and I loved every minute. I’m so grateful I get to have these experiences with my best friend.

Back in October, I was very honoured to be invited by some of my friends in the DACH (aka Germany, Austria, Switzerland) tech community to be the keynote speaker for AWS Community Day 2022. This was going to be their first time back in person after two years of virtual events, and I was very excited to finally meet some of them in person. Rodd was going to accompany me, of course, and he had planned out some fun touristy things for us to do as well.

We caught the Tuesday morning train from Munich. It was about a 4.5hr trip, including a short transfer in Leipzig. I mostly used the time to finish off my slides for the keynote!

On Tuesday night, the local AWS Dresden group were having a pre-Community Day meetup so we went along. Here’s my buddy Mohamed presenting about a couple serverless apps he built, as well as Martin from Groundfog sharing how they built a personalised web experience for visitors.

Wednesday was the big event, so we headed over early in the morning to the conference venue to help set up. My friends Linda (from Vienna) and Markus (from Munich) were going to be kicking things off in the morning.

Markus insisted that I wear the AWS dress. He was also going to be introducing me on stage.

Eventually everything was ready and the hosts kicked off the morning. I was very excited to see them launch the Förderverein AWS Community DACH, which brings together all the different AWS groups into a single association. (Bonus points for the pun in the logo – in German, “Dach” means “roof”.)

Markus gave me a very humorous intro in which he’d scraped some dubious photos from my social media accounts, but thankfully he ended with the nicest one.

My talk started out quite personal, talking about how isolated I felt in the first ten years of my career. It wasn’t until I started going to meetups and hackathons that I finally felt like I belonged. At that point, it turned into a big soppy love letter to the folks in the room, who were my first friends when we moved to Germany. I ended by talking about how much AWS values the external community, and some of our plans to support them even more in the future.

One last photo of me with Markus and Linda, who I’m going to really really miss.

We spent the rest of the day at the conference, going to sessions and meeting sponsors and attendees. It was a small but passionate crowd, and everyone was so excited to get back together in person. Thank you to the organisers for inviting me!

We were pretty tired that night but of course had to take advantage of the hotel sauna…

I worked from the hotel the next day, but Rodd got me out into the sunshine for a quick walk and lunch in the city.

We were very amused to see that there is actually an Australian restaurant in Dresden! The Snook was dubious, but hey, they serve kangaroo goulash soup.

We walked up to Brühl’s Terrace, a large elevated terrace overlooking the Elbe. It was a beautiful day.

Here we are with the Hofkirche (Dresden Cathedral), the most important Catholic church in the city.

We also found the Lego store, which had a “Selfie Point.” Okay, then.

Our hotel was very close to the famous Frauenkirche in Dresden. This Lutheran church was destroyed during the firebombing of the city in 1945 and left in ruins as a war memorial for 50 years. It was only rebuilt after German reunification and was completed in 2005. The darker stones you can see were salvaged from the original church and were able to be reused in the reconstruction.

We went inside to take a look as well. It was all soft pastels, trompe l’oeil, and extravagant carvings. Very pretty! The story of how they rebuilt it is truly amazing.

That night we had booked a special dinner at Genuss-Atelier, a local Michelin-starred restaurant. It was described as “rustic vaults” and it felt very cozy.

One of the coolest things was that the tables had built in drawers with all the cutlery you’d need, so the waiters didn’t need to keep bringing fresh sets. I’ve never seen that before.

We went with the six-course “Surprise” menu, and since it’s all seasonal and not printed, I tried to keep notes on my phone about what we had. We started with a couple small bites: pickled herring with potato chip, and felafel with yogurt.

The Snook enjoyed the little bread rolls and butter. (He may have also been drafting a post for We Want Plates.)

Our first proper course was beef tartar with sour cream and chives.

Next was a vegetarian course – turnip cabbage (aka kohlrabi), celery, and yuzu.

Next was the fish course – “eagle fish” (which we think is also called a “meagre“) with radicchio, celery, and capers.

For the meat course, we had lamb with pumpkin and polenta, and of course we opted for the extra shaved black truffle!

Everything was delicious and beautifully prepared. We were also having matched wines with each course, all of them from the local area. Rodd was amused when the waiter excitedly told him how one of them was matured in oak, which is something of a novelty in the region. (It’s very common in Australia!) Needless to say, we were having a wonderful evening.

And we finished with TWO desserts! First was “blueberry, butter cookie, and vanilla.”

And lastly, “banana, coconut, mango sorbet.” Yum!

Highly recommend Genuss-Atelier if you are ever in the Dresden area!

On Friday it was finally time to play tourist properly. Right down the street from our hotel was the Fürstenzug, a large mural of a mounted procession of the rulers of Saxony. In fact, it’s the largest porcelain artwork in the world.

We headed straight for the nearby Residenzschloss (Dresden Castle), which today houses several museums. We walked through the eastern courtyard with its beautiful colonnade.

Cute photo of me that Rodd took.

I liked the decorative horned animal heads at the top of each column. They made interesting shadows.

We found the main entrance to the castle just as it started to rain. Perfect timing!

We started out in the New Green Vault, which houses one of the largest treasure collections in Europe. I’ve been surprised over the last couple years seeing how many of these expensive treasures incorporate natural materials like coral, pearls, nautilus shells, and horn. I particularly liked this 16th century “drinking cup” from Abraham Jamnitzer that depicts the Greek myth of Daphne, who turned into a laurel tree to escape the advances of Apollo.

The museum also had several works by Johann Melchior Dinglinger, one of Europe’s greatest goldsmiths. This one is called “The Birthday of the Grand Mughal Aurangzeb” and features more than 100 figures, 5000 diamonds, and many other precious jewels.

I was intrigued by these ivory statues. They are both of Joseph Fröhlich, the legendary court jester of Augustus the Strong, and they were carved by Carl August Lücke.

One of the most precious items in the museum is the Dresden Green Diamond, a 41-carat natural green diamond. (Green diamonds are created by radiation!) It’s set into a hat ornament with 400+ smaller diamonds. It was very shiny.

We next headed to the Rüstkammer (Armoury) to check out the weaponry. Crossbows!

Giant swords!

This is some real Domingo Montoya lookin’ work.

I was also excited to see that the Armoury has a permanent exhibition of the Kurfürstliche Garderobe (Electoral Wardrobe), including several complete outfits worn by the rulers of Saxony more than 400 years ago. I was blown away by the “landscape cloak” of Elector John George I, which featured a hand-embroidered landscape of Dresden and the Elbe.

We also ducked into the Turkish Chamber, which has one of the largest collections of Ottoman art outside Turkey. The first thing you see when you walk in is a 20m-long tent made of silk and gilded leather. It’s gorgeous.

The ceiling of the tent is just stunning.

The Turkish Chamber also has loads of armour and weaponry. Here’s the Snook having a laugh at the “jousting sticks.”

We next headed to the Royal State Apartments of August the Strong. The restoration of these rooms was only finished a few years ago! They were very luxurious and ornate.

The throne room of Snookums the Strong.

We assumed all the way along that Augustus the “Strong” was simply an honorific, but then I spotted a small item in the corner that blew up that theory: an actual horseshoe that the King supposedly busted in two with his bare hands!

Our final stop in the Residenzschloss was the famous Historic Green Vault, a series of 8 Baroque rooms filled with precious objects. These tickets are timed and no photographs are allowed. It’s incredibly over-the-top. We also learned about the 2019 burglary when daring thieves broke in and stole a number of priceless jeweled pieces. The crime was still unsolved at the time of our visit, but GUESS WHAT?? Literally last week the German police announced they had recovered a significant portion of the stolen items! Wow.

We had dinner that night at the Red Rooster, a Dresden pub. It was a nice enough place, though I was surprised to learn smoking is permitted indoors. cough

The next day it was time to get out of the city! We had a lovely breakfast at Oswaldz Cafe…

…and then headed to catch a train. Our journey took us past the Yenidze building, which I had seen before and thought was a mosque or other religious building. Turns out it was a cigarette factory (!) that’s since been turned into an office building.

Our train journey took us southeast from Dresden along the Elbe. Our destination was the “Sächsische Schweiz” (Saxon Switzerland), a national park of sandstone mountains very close to the Czech border. Note: It’s nowhere near Switzerland, which kept confusing me every time Rodd mentioned it.

We passed by the Bastei Bridge, which we hoped to hike to that day. It looked pretty high up!

We exited the train in the spa town of Rathen and had a little wander around. The Snook was especially amused by Eisenbahnwelten, the “largest garden railway in the world” with more than 4km of track. (Of course, Minitur Wunderland in Hamburg has more than 15km of track, so we felt we had seen more than enough model trains by this point.)

To get to the Bastei hiking path, you need to cross the river by ferry. These run every few minutes, so we stood and admired the view as we waited. The day was cloudy but we were hoping that the rain would hold off for a few more hours.

The ferry only costs a couple euros and it literally just crosses from one side of the river to the other. We joined the small crowd and boarded.

A quick view down the river towards the Czech Republic. We knew we’d have a lot more river views later in the day!

The bit of Rathen across the river is very charming and touristy. There are a lot of guest houses. We followed the stream of people up into the village.

We followed our map to the beginning of the Bastei hike. Very few of the other tourists were brave enough to go that way! It started with a steep climb in the village.

There was a helpful sign pointing the way to the Bastei (and some other local attractions).

We quickly left the village and began climbing a path up through the trees.

The pathway was well-marked and honestly not too arduous if you’re reasonably fit. There are some steps though! My biggest worry was slipping on fallen leaves, but we did all right.

There are a few lookouts along the way where we stopped to catch our breath and take in the view.

I was really happy to see all the colourful autumn leaves. I knew I was going to miss that back in Australia!

Back into the forest. These hills are all sandstone, and you sometimes see huge towering trees growing right out of the rocks.

More beautiful Autumn views…

Still climbing. I realised at this point that my biggest error was in wearing (white) tennis shoes rather than hiking shoes. Even though it wasn’t raining, the ground was pretty wet and muddy.

More climbing. I was annoyed because there was a random guy in the forest singing opera in German, but he’d stop every time you got out a camera. Grrr. I think Rodd is listening to him here.

We’d been climbing for about 20 minutes at this point. Ooh, the path goes through a cleft in the rocks!

When we reached the top of those steps we realised there was another lookout off to our left along with an inscription engraved into the stone wall. This is the Tiedgestein, a memorial to the German poet Christoph August Tiedge.

And when you step around the Tiedgestein and see the view…

Wow. That’s Rathen and the ferry landing wayyyy down below us on the other side of the Elbe. I took a panorama of it as well.

If you’re thinking, “Kris, those clouds look pretty ominous,” you’d be right. But we were too close to the goal to worry about rain, so it was back to the path and lots more stairs.

Before you get to the Bastei, you first come to the ruins of Felsenburg Neurathen (Neurathen Castle). This was a castle literally perched on top of these high rocks, but it’s mostly gone now. For a couple euros you can enter the site and scramble across walkways between the archaeology.

We didn’t bother, as it was just about to start raining…

…and we were so close to the Bastei Bridge! That’s it, just beyond the cleft in the rocks up ahead!

At last, we made it to the Bridge itself. The climb from the river bank took us about 40 minutes all up, but that was for two fairly unfit people going slow and stopping frequently to rest and take photos. Here’s the Snook revelling in a goal achieved.

Nearby is the Jahrhundertturm (“Century Tower”), a big rock tower with some tablets on it commemorating centuries of Bastei tourism.

Of course, you can’t really get a good view of a bridge when you’re standing on it. Also, it finally started to rain. We crossed over the bridge and continued onwards so we could look back towards it and shelter a bit under the trees.

This guy was enjoying himself.

Me, not so much.

There is actually a hotel at the top of the ridge, just past the Bridge, and we had a vague idea that we might be able to get a bus back down to the bottom. I mean, how else did all those other people get up there? They weren’t on the hiking track! But we soon learned that actually most of them drive up, and there are plenty of car parks, but no actual public transportation back to the bottom. Not gonna lie – I was wet and tired and annoyed.

The only way forward was to go back the way we came. So we headed back to the Bridge, and thankfully the rain petered out enough to get a few more photos.

And then we headed back down the path. Obviously going down is less effort than climbing, but we needed to be careful on the slippery, muddy path. In the end we made it in less than half an hour, but my shoes were definitely the worse for wear.

Amazingly (and infuriatingly), the skies cleared as soon as we reached the river again!

The Snook had planned a very special way to return to Dresden – by steamship! We found the terminal for the Sächsische Dampfschifffahrt and waited with a few others for our boat to appear.

And there she is!

Right on time, we boarded the boat.

We found seats on the upper deck (under cover in case it rained again) and settled in for the 2.5hr trip back to Dresden. My mood had definitely improved!

It was fun to see the Bastei again, this time from far far below. (I can’t believe we actually climbed all the way up there??!)

Here’s where I zoomed in on the Bridge.

The view off the front of the boat was spectacular.

We saw lots of Autumn foliage.

We chugged past very charming little towns along the river and made stops in several of them.

The boat had a kitchen and bar on it, so we checked out the menu and opted for the “Flotter-Dreier” (“Threesome”): a cup of coffee, a piece of cheesecake, and a glass of white wine.

I was having a nice time.

Hey, we’re coming up on a bridge!

This town is Pirna, the gateway to Saxon Switzerland. It’s a cute little town with some very dark periods in its history.

Next we headed towards Pillnitz…

…and passed Pillnitz Castle. This is the Wasserpalais (Riverside Palace). There’s a lovely park and museum there.

It was getting a little bit cool as the sun lowered in the sky, so I had to put my warm hat back on! I also pulled out the knitting for a bit.

I had to go to the bathroom, which was located in the lower middle of the boat right next to the engines. I couldn’t resist the opportunity to make a little video as I returned to my seat.

He loves a steamboat ride.

For the past 30 minutes, he’d been regaling me with trivia about “The Blue Wonder.” This is another name for the Loschwitz Bridge. It was a technological wonder when it was built, and the SS even tried to blow it up at the end of WW2! It’s not very blue these days though.

We chugged past lots of vineyards…

…and palaces. This is Albrechtsberg Palace, a stately home and historic landmark that you can apparently rent out for events.

Just as the sun reached the horizon, the skyline of Dresden appeared.

I didn’t want the trip to be over!

Wow, Dresden is pretty. In fact, the entire Dresden Elbe Valley used to be a UNESCO World Heritage site, but it was stripped of that designation in 2009 when a controversial bridge was built.

We disembarked and walked up and over the Augustus Bridge. A busker was playing music, and it was just perfect.

At the other end of the bridge stands the Golden Horseman, Dresden’s most famous statue. It’s our buddy August the Strong again.

We finished the day at Watzke am Goldenen Reiter, a local brewpub. It was crowded with locals and tricky to get a table, but we managed in the end.

The next day we had another quick wander around the city before packing our bags and heading back to the train station for the trip home. Thanks for a lovely visit, Dresden!

Beer is expensive and pretzels are disappointing, but some things are definitely better in Australia.

A couple tabs I’ve had open in my browser this week:

Fine Points: Cleveland Yarn Shop Featured on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert – Apparently this is a running segment that features small businesses in silly sketches to give them a “bump.” Very cute idea!
Mike Flanagan is creating a TV series for The Dark Tower – Fingers crossed he can pull it off. The movie was such a disappointment, despite having nailed the casting of the main characters. I really need to see Susannah and Eddie!
Bourdain’s World Map – An interactive map of everywhere he ate across all his shows. It’s probably a good thing we didn’t have this at the start of our European sojourn or we’d be even chubbier and poorer than we are now!
99 Good News Stories You Probably Didn’t Hear About in 2022 – So much goodness here. I’m keeping this one open so I can read a few more whenever I get depressed.

When we got our apartment in Munich, one of the features we were most excited about was its proximity to the Theresienwiese. (We were literally a 5 minute walk to the Bavaria statue.) The Theresienwiese is the big showgrounds (historically it was a meadow) where Oktoberfest happens every year… except, of course, it didn’t happen in 2020 or 2021 because of Covid. This was a major blow to the city, both in terms of the economy and civic pride.

People, there was no way I was leaving Munich without getting to experience Oktoberfest. After our small taste at Frühlingfest in April 2022, we were so excited for it to finally happen in September. Strap in – this is going to be a long post with a lot of photos and videos!

One thing that surprised me was how early they started setting up. In May I was riding my bike across the Wiese and saw the new Pschorr Bräurosl starting to take shape. We found out later that this was because it was a new, larger design than it had been previously, and they needed to set up early so it could go through security tests and approvals.

It also doesn’t look like much of a tent, does it? They’re more like barns than tents.

By the start of July, the rest of the tents were going up as well. The Pschorr Bräurosl now had a roof and the walls were going up. The Schützen Festzelt was also taking shape, as well as the famous Paulaner and Löwenbräu pillars.

A month later in August, things were still further along. I was surprised by the Nymphenburg Sekt tent; I hadn’t realised there were tents for drinks other than beer. (“Sekt” is sparkling wine.)

The last thing to go up were the fair rides in early September. By this point most of the Wiese had been fenced off as the final touches were put in place.

And then I had to head off to Bangkok for a work trip… I landed back in Munich on the morning of Saturday, September 17 – the very first day of Oktoberfest. I caught the train home from the airport and was delighted to see loads of folks in Tracht on the train and in the stations. Many of them were carrying large boards, which I later found out were the trays serving staff use to carry food.

A few hours later I was at home when a large BOOM rattled the house. I realised it was the traditional 12 o’clock opening gun salute and ran to the window to get a video.

We didn’t plan on going to Oktoberfest on the first day, instead frantically cleaning the house ahead of the arrival of our guests the next. Around 5pm I heard drumming and watched as a drum corps marched past behind the house in the pouring rain. In full lederhosen, no less! That’s dedication.

The next afternoon we headed back to the airport to welcome my mom, step-dad, and brother. Eventually we managed to collect them and get them back onto the train home.

The Garbericks were pretty jet-lagged, but we herded them out of the house and down to the nearby Wirtshaus am Bavariapark for dinner. That’s where Joe discovered a new affinity for Schnitzel.

Me and my gorgeous Mom.

We dedicated the next day to sightseeing. Our first stop was the Olympia-Schimmhalle so Joey (who swims competitively for Ball State) could get in his workout. Interestingly, they had up a sign that due to the war in Ukraine (and the need for Germany to conserve energy) the temperature in the pool would be cooler than normal. Joey didn’t mind.

We walked them all around the Olympiapark, including stopping by the 1972 Olympic Massacre Memorial. The 50th anniversary had recently been commemorated, so there were wreaths for each of the murdered athletes. It was very moving.

We then went into the city to show them the highlights of the Altstadt. We finally went into the Frauenkirche, the symbol of Munich.

Of course I had to take Mom to a local quilting shop! She bought a fabric panel covered in scenes from Munich.

We walked all over, trying to take advantage of the sunshine to help them get over the jetlag. In the afternoon we stopped for a little rest in the Residenz Hofgarten.

The next day was Tuesday, and it was finally time to head to Oktoberfest! Rodd and I got dressed up in our Tracht, and Mom braided my hair for me. It was cold and rainy so I wore boots and a cardigan with my dirndl.

We headed down early to the nearest entrance at the Bavaria statue. A kind person offered to take a group photo of the five of us!

It was Joey’s 21st birthday, so we’d all chipped in the day before to gift him an outfit from Trachten Rausch. He got a belted lederhosen with a beautiful collarless shirt and knitted socks.

Mom’s wearing my other dirndl. Don’t we look cute?

Pretty quickly, Joe and Joey decided that they needed appropriately Bavarian hats. We stopped at a stall where a very nice guy helped sort them out.

The day was really cool and damp, and it was constantly threatening to rain. Little did we know it would be like this almost every day for the next two weeks.

We walked up and down the aisles checking out the tents. The Schottenhamel Festzelt is the one where – right as that gun salute had happened on Saturday – the first Oktoberfest keg was tapped by the lord mayor of Munich.

Right after this it started to rain, so we decided to make the Armbrustschützenzelt (“Crossbowman’s tent”) our first stop of the day. It was very pretty with its green and white striped ceiling, and it wasn’t very full yet so we easily got a table. It apparently hosts the German crossbow championship (in a side tent) every year.

It had just gone noon, so it was definitely time to get on the beers. Here you can see Joe and Joey modeling their new hats.

The Garbericks were definitely feeling the Gemütlichkeit.

Never underestimate the ability of a 21-year-old to suck down beer. Joey finished his first liter in under 20 minutes!

We also introduced them to “Ein Prosit,” the short little drinking song you hear every 10-20 minutes at Oktoberfest. Here is me singing it very, very off-key.

I was very proud to have remembered to bring my Deckel, a lid for a beer stein. It’s much more useful in the summertime to keep wasps and bees out of your beer in the biergarten. We got a pair of them engraved a few months earlier.

We were finally at Oktoberfest! It was really happening!!

The rain stopped so we headed back out for more exploration. We saw the Paulaner bierwagen and stopped for photos. The wagon is just for show though; pretty much all the beer at Oktoberfest is served from modern kegs. (The only brewery that still does the wooden ones is Augustiner.)

We were getting a bit peckish so stopped off at Cafe Kaiserschmarrn for cake. This tent is run by Rischart, a famous bakery chain in Munich. It looked like a giant gingerbread house!

The nearby Münchner Knödelei (“Munich Dumping House”) had a very cute photo stand-in that Rodd and I couldn’t resist…

We were getting a bit tired and the Americans all needed a nap, so we headed back to the house to recharge. Along the way we spotted the Löwenbrau bierwagen as well.

After a nap, we headed back in the evening to explore the Oide Wiesn. This is a fenced off area that is meant to be more like the historical Oktoberfest, and you have to pay a couple euros to get in. We went first to the Museum tent, where a traditional band was playing.

I really loved the exhibit of all the old Oktoberfest posters. Those ones from the 60s and 70s were so cool! The 2022 design is also available on a commemorative beer mug, which I bought later that evening.

We also checked out the Historische Kegelbahn (“Historic bowling alley”) with wooden balls and pulley-system for restoring the pins.

Time for another beer tent! We went to the Festzelt Tradition, a 5000-seater in the Oide Wiesn that features traditional brass music and dancing. We got a table and ordered some food for Brotzeit. (You’ll notice that we changed into warmer clothes, because the weather was so chilly and damp.)

In the Oide Wiesn tents, the beers are served out of ceramic beer steins rather than glass, and I believe it all comes from barrels as well.

We were absolutely delighted when a group of folk dancers took over the central stage! This was the highlight of the day, seeing them do the Schuhplattler dancing, stomping and slapping their knees and thighs.

The men were later joined by women, who twirled twirled twirled in their beautiful dirndls.

We left the Oide Wiesn in the evening and headed back out to the midway, doing a final lap to buy souvenirs and check out the modern tents. The Löwenbräu tent looked to be pretty popular! My favourite part is the big animatronic lion over the entrance, who throws back a beer and periodically roars.

There are plenty of smaller tents too. We stopped to get some Käsespätzle at Feisingers Kas und Weinstubn (“Cheese and wine parlour”), which was packed with happy Bavarians singing pop music.

Mom really liked her Käsespätzle!

We couldn’t resist the opportunity to finally see inside the Pschorr Bräurosl, after seeing it being built over so many months.

It was PACKED! Definitely not getting a table in here. So many young people, standing room only, up on their seats dancing to rock music. We did a lap and then got the hell out.

And that was it for our first day at Oktoberfest! Time to go home and sleep it all off….

The next day was the last day of the Garbericks’ visit, and we decided to take them to Nürnberg as Joe’s father had been stationed there after WW2. We caught a train the next morning.

Rodd and I had visited Nürnberg back in May so we knew our way around. First stop was the castle…

Everybody was enjoying the sunshine for a change!

Here are the Garbericks taking in that fabulous view.

We also showed them some of the highlights of this beautiful medieval city.

In the afternoon, we decided to check out the Germanisches Museum, which is Germany’s largest museum of cultural history. It was full of very cool artifacts. I particularly liked the really giant axe that had been turned into a painting, and the small wooden allegory of the 7 Deadly Sins (with Anger as a particularly pissed off lady with a knife).

That evening we met up with our dear friend Frank again for dinner, this time at one of Nuremberg’s oldest restaurants.

The next day we said goodbye to the Garbericks, and less than 24 hours later, Kel and O’Malley turned up!

The next morning we introduced them to the wonders of Weisswurst Frühstück.

And then it was straight back to the Wies’n! Still cold and rainy though.

The Steckerlfisch man was in action.

We decided to make our first stop the Wildstuben. It’s like a two-story Alpine hut, and you’d never know it was constructed from shipping containers. We managed to get a large shared booth upstairs.

Unbeknowst to us, it was “Italian weekend” at Oktoberfest and the Wildstuben had a really large crowd of them. They began chanting and singing songs and dancing on the chairs.

Here’s me, Rodd, and O’Malley. As you can see, I wore my other dirndl on this day.

We needed some food after that, so we ended up back at Cafe Kaiserschmarrn again. This time we headed inside properly and managed to snag a booth with a prime view of the live band. They were playing up on a raised tower with a sort of ramp that the singers would periodically come down.

The place was pretty popular with families and kids. (Yes, I kept the crown.)

No beer in this tent, though they do serve cocktails. Instead we had coffees and pastries.

The singers kept telling us to hang around for the big 2pm surprise. Adorably, it turned out to be a giant wedding cake for Ludwig von Bayern and Princess Therese von Sachsen-Hildburghausen, whose 1810 wedding celebration was the first Oktoberfest. Apparently they do this every day of the Festival? (I’m unclear how much of that cake is actually cake.)

We headed back out into the cold and rain…

Our next stop was Oide Wiesn. We checked out the Museum tent again, which had some bits of the old rides on display. (“Die Geisterbahn” is basically a Ghost Train.)

It was time for more beers, so we headed for the Herzkasperl-Festzelt. Again, we managed to get seats at a table without too much difficulty. (The trick is just to find one of the waitstaff and ask them to help.)

They had a traditional band playing and various folk dancing troupes performing.

Lebkuchen (gingerbread) hearts are of course one of the most popular Oktoberfest souvenirs. There are stalls selling them all over the festival, ranging from tiny hearts to giant ones. They all come with ribbon so you can wear them around your neck. (I don’t think you’re really meant to eat them!) Mine says “Prinzessin” (Princess).

Kel and O’Malley were definitely feeling the Gemütlichkeit!

They even had a go at bowling at the Historische Kegelbahn! Here you can see the mechanism of pulleys that pulls the pins back up and lifts the ball to the ramp.

Meanwhile Rodd and I decided to go on “Eine Fahrt ins Paradies” (A Trip to Paradise), one of the original old rides.

It went up and down and around and round…

Our final beer stop with Kel and O’Malley was the Festzelt Tradition, which was a lot more full than it had been at the start of the week!

We managed to get into a shared table wayyyyy in the back corner.

To our immense delight, there was a WHIP-CRACKING demonstration to music! A bunch of guys stood up on some sort of stools and cracked the whip right over people’s heads!

They also had a band setting up at one end of the tent as well.

It was a fun way to end our Oktoberfest day with Kel and O’Malley! They had another day of playing tourist in Munich before heading out on the next leg of their European adventure.

A day later, our final visitor of Oktoberfest turned up… Scott!

Once more into the Tracht, my friends! It was still rainy and cold.

We decided to have Weisswurst Frühstück at the Augustiner-Festhalle.

Later we headed back to Cafe Kaiserschmarrn for caffeine and sugar.

I decided I had to have the Kaiserschmarrn – a chopped up fluffy pancake served with apple sauce. As we were leaving later I saw them cooking it in a giant cast iron pan!

There was one more tent in the Oide Wiesn that we had been saving especially for Scott’s visit – the Volkssängerzelt (“Folk singer tent”).

Various groups of folk singers performed on stage, and they were all excellent. At one point this older dude came down into the audience and was, like, making up rhyming verses based on people in the tent. It was wild. Here’s a clip of a very cute group…

At one point, I noticed that other people had little lyric books and were singing along. I asked the waitress for one, and the next thing you know we had a copy! The words were all in Bavarian, of course. (I still don’t quite get this one. “The way to my dirndl is… stony?” Any Bayerische want to clarify?)

Here’s Rodd and Scott giving another one a go…

And that was pretty much it for me at Oktoberfest 2022! I had to take off the next day for a work event in Zürich, but the boys went out a few more times and visited a few more tents.

Overall the experience was amazing, and I’m so glad we did it. I can see where if you lived there, it would get annoying every year. But as a once-in-a-lifetime thing, it lived up to all our expectations. PROST!

The Amaterasu Railway Now Runs on Leftover Tonkotsu Ramen Broth | Spoon & Tamago – Um, I want to go to there. New life goal is to ride on the train powered by ramen broth biodiesel!

I’ve seen these ceramic graters being sold at every market and festival in Germany for the past year, and yesterday I finally got one.

It mushified a clove of garlic nicely, though getting it out again took some finessing. Rodd worked it out – you have to hold the grater on an angle and use the bristles of the brush to push down the plane of it.

I used it in my homemade ranch salad dressing alongside the Snook’s spicy baked chicken strips. (He used toban djan instead of the curry.) It was delicious!

I never ate Brussels Sprouts growing up; they were just never a thing that my Mom cooked. It may well be that the first time I ever had them was ten years ago at Porteño in Sydney. (They were were charred and tossed with bacon and they were the most delicious thing I’d ever had.) But apparently Brussels sprouts really were a lot more bitter 20+ years ago, before scientists figured out how to get high yields from less bitter heritage varieties. Huh. So if you think you don’t like them, you should give them another try.

A couple recipes I particularly like:

Easy Roasted Brussels Sprouts
One-Pan Chicken, Sausage, and Brussels Sprouts
Brussels Sprouts Hash With Fried Sage and Soft Cooked Eggs
Brussels Sprout and Bacon Frittata

How did I not know that there are annual Bootie Christmas mashup albums?? They also have a playlist of all the Mariah mashups they can find, updated every year.

My buddy Phil Nash wrote a useful tutorial on how to alias your Mastodon username to your own domain with Jekyll. Bookmarking in case I want to go down a similar route when I revamp this blog next year.

Also a reminder that you can follow me on Mastodon at @web_goddess@aus.social. And if you’re not on Mastodon yet but still want to keep up with my posts there, you can subscribe to an RSS feed at this URL: https://aus.social/@web_goddess.rss.

Very, very slowly, it turns out.

I’ve never been a big fan of lace myself on garments – mostly because I have sensitive skin and I find it itchy – but I loved this historical overview on types of lace from Broiderie Stitch. Maybe I need to give lacemaking a go? Looks like the Australian Lace Guild have workshops in Sydney…

Note to self: get your glasses/contacts prescription updated first!

(Link courtesy of this great Metafilter post, which has some other lace-related links as well.)

“Everything you wanted to know about pronouns but were afraid to ask” – nice Guardian article explaining why more and more companies, organisations, events, and social networks support the ability for people to nominate their pronouns. I actually covered this very briefly on an internal work meeting recently. It was prompted by someone on our […]

Super fun cover I’ve had on repeat for a week. Bonus: it taught me what the phrase “down bad” means, which is apparently a thing the kids are saying.

Back in September, I headed off to Bangkok, Thailand to attend the first ever AWS APJ Community Summit. This event brought together 130 AWS Heroes, Community Builders, and User Group leaders for two days of learning, sharing, and networking. It was about a 10 hour flight for me from Munich straight to Suvarnabhumi Airport in […]

The Best ALDI Wines for $10 or Less – As a connoisseur of supermarket wine, this is very relevant to my interests.

The many lives of Angels on Horseback https://www.snackstack.net/p/the-many-lives-of-angels-on-horseback I enjoyed this little bit of investigation into the origins of the classic American campfire snack S’mores. Halfway through it turns into the much more interesting discussion of Angels on Horseback, a fancy hors d’oeuvre of bacon-wrapped oysters. I’ve never had those before, but I have eaten […]

No reason. It’s just ridiculously cool. Link courtesy of Boing Boing.

It was still quite warm at the beginning of September, so we squeezed in a day trip to the Ammersee. This lake to the southwest of Munich is the sixth biggest in Germany, and it’s just a short 45min train ride to the end of the S-bahn line to Herrsching. As soon as we disembarked […]

We booked our plane tickets back to Sydney for next month. Now every time I do something in Munich, I think about the fact that it might be the last time. (I made the mistake of saying that to Rodd the other day. He pointed out that, you know, that’s true for everything all the […]

“How to Join Mastodon, the Ad-Free Social Network Billionaires Can’t Buy” I read that article earlier this week and it helped me finally understand how Mastodon’s decentralisation works. I’ve set up an account on @aus.social and I’m playing around with my profile and following folks. If you’re over there, please connect! I’m @web_goddess@aus.social. 🐘

I felt like doing some knitting today so I decided to finally watch Austenland on Netflix. And you know what? It was charming! As a big fan of Jane Austen (and someone who can pretty much recite the entire script to the 1995 P&P miniseries), I really enjoyed all the nods and references to the […]

As with last year, we decided to celebrate the Snook’s birthday at the end of July by heading off on a big summer vacation. The only problem was that I had just arrived back from a work trip to the US, and while I made my short connection in DC, unfortunately my suitcase did not. […]

Why did images of early pregnancy cause such a social media firestorm? https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/3/23435111/early-pregnancy-abortion-tiktok-social-media-images Like many folks, I saw these images shared on social media in past few weeks. I never doubted their veracity though. I have a vivid memory as a kid of visiting the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago and seeing their […]

We Baked Loads of Pies to Find the Best Pie Pans https://www.seriouseats.com/best-pie-pans-6752341 This is relevant to my interests. 🥧

Public Service Announcement: If Google has been screaming at you that you’re running out of storage – I somehow got up to 87% full on mine – there is a useful tool that lets you review and delete things like large email attachments, Drive files you no longer need, etc. I used it to blast […]

Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration – OH MAN. Just watching the trailer was like an instant dopamine hit. Straight back to my childhood… 👾

I like to pretend I’m above crappy American fast food, but let’s be honest – I would 100% try (and likely enjoy) this new Papa John’s monstrosity. 🍕

When shocked Europeans hear that I am sad about moving back to Australia, the lack of cycling infrastructure is one of the main reasons that I cite. And it’s not just that – some people are actively hostile to cyclists and in far too many cases have deliberately injured them. I have loved riding my […]

I was delighted to see on my friend and neighbour Michael Mobbs’s blog that his Sustainable House in Chippendale will be featured on Season 2 of Zac Efron’s Netflix documentary series. If you watch the trailer, you can totally hear Michael’s voice in the shot where they’re drinking the water! I can’t wait to see it. […]

The Twitter takeover is complete. As soon as this whole rigamarole started a few months back I decided to start cutting down on my usage of the platform. In the end I’ve decided I don’t want to be counted as a Daily Active User on any platform run by that man, so today I downloaded […]

The Snook found this listing for a pristine mid-century home in LA. Wow. I don’t like any of the furnishings (or the rugs and wallpapers), but I love the bones of the house. Only $7M. 😂

I recently stumbled across this strategy to help you fall asleep. I’ve struggled with insomnia for a long time, mainly in that my brain will really fixate on a particular topic – even just a fragment of a song – and keep racing. I’m going to try this out the next time it happens and […]

In June I made my first ever trip to Dubai! It was for a work function, so I headed off on my own with the Snook to join me a week later. I landed in Dubai close to midnight… I caught a taxi to my hotel. Interestingly, I was directed straight to a cab with […]

Obviously, visiting Berlin has been on our To Do list since we got to Deutschland in 2020, and we finally got our opportunity this past May when I was invited to speak at the AWS Summit. We hopped on a train on the Friday before… It’s only about a 5 hour ride on the Intercity-Express […]

In the middle of April, I was riding my bike across the Theresienwiese when I noticed yet another fair being set up at the far end. I pootled over to get a closer look. I didn’t have to wonder long before I figured out what event was coming up… Frühlingsfest! Aka Munich’s Spring Festival. How […]

With the four-day Easter weekend looming, we were trying to decide on a city to visit. “There’s a sleeper train to Amsterdam!” the Snook offered. That settled it. Amsterdam had long been on our list of cities to visit (I have a bucket list goal of hitting every one mentioned in Paul Kelly’s ode to […]

Last year I attended the AWS Nürnberg Meetup Group (via Zoom) and learned a couple things: 1) Nürnberg = Nuremberg, which I had previously naively thought was an entirely separate city 😂; 2) despite being technically located in Bavaria, Nürnbergers do NOT think of themselves as Bavarian but rather Franconian; and 3) the folks there […]

As soon as we got back from Madrid back in March, we dumped the suitcases, did a couple quick loads of laundry, and repacked everything again. 24 hours later we were on the train to Vienna. Time to continue our Habsburg week! We caught the RJX 261 from Munich to Vienna, which takes about 4 […]

Our first trip together in 2022! In early March, my boss asked me to come to Madrid for a meeting so it seemed like a good excuse for a weekend in Spain. We headed off a few days early to play tourist… The morning flight from Madrid featured gorgeous scenery. We were staying at the […]

Solo trip! In February I had a work event in Seattle, so I made my first long-haul trip without the Snook in several years. My hotel room had a nice view of the city. It wasn’t water, but it was still pretty. The event was an internal work conference so there’s really nothing to share […]

We are four months into 2022 and I still haven’t documented our last trip of 2021! At the end of November we headed to the US for AWS re:Invent as well as a long-awaited Christmas visit with my family. We had a fairly early flight out of Munich, and the first snowfall of the year […]

Not long after we got to Munich, I saw an ad on Facebook for the West End theatrical production of Neil Gaiman’s book The Ocean at the End of the Lane. I bought the book back in 2014 and we both read it and loved it. I knew that the play had received rave reviews […]

The fourteenth (semi-)annual Web-Goddess Oscar Contest has officially launched! 🎉 And this year you can win your very own set of Spider-Monkeys so you can act out scenes from No Way Home (or the meme!) Each is crafted from a pair of Spider-Man socks, with felt eyes appliquéd. See? They’re very similar, but all slightly […]