Dancing
Engineer
Fierce
Creature
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What Scares You?
Tonight at Toastmasters Groningen I talked about how a fear of heights led me to jump out of a perfectly good airplane. Twice. And one of the points of my kickass speech evaluator was that I needed to incorporate more facts. Which is true. I am *really* good at telling a story. At leveraging emotions. At entertaining. And…
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Tackling Talker’s Block With a Sledge Hammer
(V will be so happy that I’m starting this post this way…) I was listening to a podcast the other day. Specifically, the Tim Ferris podcast featuring Seth Godin who talked about so many amazing things like how he makes honey vodka and his obsession with chocolate and that if you’d like to tackle writer’s block, write every day. And…
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All Your Repos Are Belong To Us
Today (and tomorrow) are the RDO Mitaka Test Days in Brno, Czech Republic and I spent a few hours this morning catching up on the tripleo quickstart live demonstration video and the rest of the day bashing my head against the packstack sanity checks for RHEL 7.2, CentOS 7.1, and Fedora 22. And I took awesome notes. To share with you.…
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Change is Terrifying. Do it Anyway.
On Saturday, 05 March, I am one of the keynote speakers for Django Girls den Haag. Hi. My name is Rain Leander. Welcome to Django Girls den Haag. Today I’m going to talk about programming – what it is, why you should do it, what you can do with it. I’m going to tell you my…
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I Would Buy It
I have thought about some books I’d ACTUALLY like to write, as opposed to, say, NOT. In no particular order: – project do: goal achievement because SCIENCE social psychology research for goal achievement; applying it to a goal achievement method. invent or better define a method.
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Thinking About Writing A Collaborative Book
hrm… or maybe i should just write a book on my own. but something that i’m willing to write a whole hell of a lot about. and also speak a whole hell of a lot about. being a woman in tech. just another unicorn. a call to arms. a call to horns. the book i’m…
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Not Exactly a New Year’s Resolution
I’m back in training, yes, since the first, but I would say it was a new year’s thing as much as a refocus on health. This is something I used to do more often (constantly) when I was dancing professionally and then a bit less often after I retired. Now that the child unit has…
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Hello, My Name Is
I am in the midst of a new position within Red Hat and part of the new responsibilities include applying to public speaking opportunities all over the world. And since you have to include a short biography with these applications, I decided it was time for a bit of an overhaul. For perspective, here is the old…
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The Beginning of Something Beautiful
Over the past few months, I’ve spoken with a few people about my idea, The Project, and started posting about it here and there. I spoke with friends and family about it and got some response via social media. Then I did this thing. This past weekend. I ran over to the big building to attend StartupWeekend Groningen 2015. Based on The…
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The Project Pitch Debriefing
A friend video taped what I actually said which was not nearly as eloquent as what I recently wrote and as I listen to people vote for their favorite pitches and discuss mine, I realize that I didn’t get the point across. People are discussing it in terms of education, which is true, it’s partially…
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The Project Pitch
Hello my name is Rain. Yes, like the weather. I am building The Project. It will be an online community backed by social psychology research helping people build, make, accomplish, and change the world. Imagine, if you will, that you want to accomplish a task or learn a new skill or make something incredible –…
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The Most Amazing Chocolate Icing In The Universe
NO I DON’T HAVE PICTURES BECAUSE I ATE IT ALREADY One standard cube of salted butter Two normal tubes of phadelphia cream cheese Four tubes of powdered sugar One jar of cocoa powder YES, I KNOW THESE ARE NOT PRECISE MEASUREMENTS Use a mixer. Whip that butter until it changes shades. Whip it good. Mix…