I gave my seventh speech at Windsor Speakers Toastmasters in March 2015. It was for Project 7 "Research Your Topic" from the Competent Communication Manual.

Listen to my speech on YouTube or read it below.

I gave this talk at the InspireWIT Women in Technology conference for students at Nottingham University on 15 Nov 2014.

The theme: women inspiring women

The brief: talk personally and frankly about yourself, about your education and experiences of being in the technology industry.

This is an edited version of a comment I made on John Pavlovitz's blog post: Young Men, Sex, and Urge Ownership (And Why It’s Not The Girl’s Problem).

This post was prompted by the comments.

I think I might have invented a new genre of erotica. I ran a successful crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter to print my book, fingers & tongues.

I thought long and hard about how to make the design work for the book's intent. Using my experience as a UX consultant, I made user-centred decisions on the typography, editing, book design and the use of imagery.

Do you read erotica? Or would you like to know why a feminist would write porn?

If you read erotica, do you find yourself flipping forward to the sex bits? If so, my new book "fingers & tongues" is for you.

I gave my first talk at my local Toastmasters in July this year.

It was the first time I'd actually chosen to stand up and speak in front of people. Up until then I had tried to avoid it. But when I couldn't avoid it, I always got very nervous and did very badly.

Listen to my speech or read it here.

I love MOO. I use them to make my Minicards, for my company, my jewellery and my personal cards.

In 2013, I started to look for a new permanent role. MOO was my ideal company.

After trying different ways to make contact, I finally went for awesome.

Stephen Fry, talking to Mark Lawson on TV in September 2007 said:

Certainly the most destructive vice, if you like, that a person can have - more than pride, which is supposedly the number one of the cardinal sins - is self-pity.

I think self-pity is the worst possible emotion anyone can have. And the most destructive.

It is, to slightly paraphrase what Wilde said about hatred (and I think that hatred is a subset of self-pity, not the other way around) it destroys everything around it except itself.

In 2003 I wrote a list of eleven factors I think influence people when they're buying art.

In order of decreasing importance, the list begins with Artist. The work Medium is half-way through.

It ends with the least-important factor: "Is it a good picture?"

It's a very cynical list but I still think it's pretty accurate. I wrote it after my experiences of trying to get work into major and minor exhibitions.