From worries to motivations
Lately, I have been feeling dissatisfied. Restless. Anxious. Worried. Worn.
I feel like I am sitting in a pressure cooker. Yet I am unsure where the pressure comes from.
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Driving in Slush
My Slush certificate came in. It states that I did good in my volunteer position. While I agree with them that I was, indeed, excellent and maybe even surpassed my capabilities as a member of the Drivers team, I do feel that I should mention some things in regard to Slush and volunteering there in general.
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Who you gonna call? Night Watchers.
Last night I woke up to a car alarm. It took me a while to realise that the noise I heard through my deep sleep was indeed a car alarm. As a fellow car owner myself, I know that car alarms usually have a reason to go off (unless we are talking about *my* car that starts screaming on its own or when a fly accidentally bumps into it), so I peeked out through the curtains.
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Are Familiar Strangers Becoming an Endangered Species?
According to the paper “The Familiar Stranger: Anxiety, Comfort, and Play in Public Spaces” by Eric Paulos and Elizabeth Goodman [1], Familiar Strangers are people we regularly encounter during our daily activities in public spaces, yet never interact with directly. They are people who wait alongside us at the bus station, do their groceries the same time as us, and eat their lunch at the same café as us. Most Familiar Strangers are tied to certain places (and perhaps times).
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A Metal Bird
A metal bird makes one last turn
as the final rays of a setting star
glance over its wings
disappearing into the soft milkiness
as light as a lovers’ first kiss
leaving behind a glowing belt of pink.
The night has arrived.
And so have I.
EIT Alumni Startup Days x Women@EIT
I had one of the best and most relaxing hackathon experiences yesterday at EIT Alumni Startup Days X Women@EIT.
Together with the amazing Mohit Ahuja and Leire Carreras Orobengoa we tackled the case of online shopping and badly fitting clothes provided by the awesome sustainability-oriented company Afound.
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What is a tactile screen?
An understandable explanation
Screens surround us everywhere. There is the TV screen, the computer monitor, the annoying moving advertisement that takes up the whole wall of the building right next to the bus stop, and the part that we poke daily on our smartphones.
But what is a tactile screen?
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Hogwarts on Earth
When I started my Master’s, I basically saw it as a way to live abroad for a while, experience new cultures, and meet new people. It has been all that and much more!
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Translating a poem from a language I do not speak
I had the opportunity to translate a poem for one of my projects (FireFlies). To be fair, we formulated the project in a way that created this opportunity. I adore writing little rhymes and poems myself and wished to try translating the work of others.
The only obstacle was that the original poem was in Old Dutch and I was very far from being proficient in Dutch. In fact, I only knew a couple of elementary words, such as please and thank you and how to ask for a marshmallow.
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Let small girls play with big boy tools
When Kasper invited me over to help with building stage decor and said that my task would be playing around with a jigsaw, I had pictured sitting on a clean floor, putting together nice puzzle pieces. You can only imagine my surprise when I was handed a humongous wooden board and an actual power tool. Plus, when we ended, the floor was far from clean.
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