Welcome, wanderer of the world wide web, let me tell you about myself. In my CV, I describe myself thus:
- Polymath
- Autodidact
- Constant curiosity
- Fun loving
- Creative
- Tenacious
- Cool, calm and collected
I am happy you’ve arrived at my site. I have been using rachel-rose.net for years now, and it’s gone through various iterations. Spurred on by the Google/Coursera Foundations of UX Design Certificate course, I am developing my personal brand here.
Wellness, music, technology and UX are my passions. My true calling is making the technical appear simple and explaining it thus. I am a highly versatile communicator and I never talk down to people.
Through the COVID lockdown(s), many yoga teachers migrated to online teaching platforms. I myself gave a free daily class via Facebook, to help people cope. You can see me in action on my Youtube channel, Alteayoga.
After lockdown ended, though, I resisted the industry move to online delivery of Wellness services because I believe that it degrades the User Experience. Peering into a screen, putting up with below par sound or soldiering on through connection issues, not to mention receiving little or no feedback from the teacher who probably cannot see you anyway…this is far removed from in-person classes. My aim in studying UX, therefore, is to apply UX to online Wellness services.
During and after the COVID lockdown(s), I also observed with great dismay the troubles of older people forced to bank online. This is what led me down the path of UX. I had been refreshing my tech skills with the freeCodeCamp curriculum, but didn’t feel a tingle about being a developer.
Upon discovering the world of UX, it immediately struck a chord, almost as if it had been there waiting for me all these years. I am wildly excited about UX! When I studied Chemistry and then later worked in high tech, I found myself constantly concerned about the humans on the other end of the router. Looking back, I perceive a pattern. I love tech, but care deeply about how it is used or applied. For example, I love Biochemistry, but prefer to practice Nutrition because I loved reality more than theory. Immersed in the jargon of the high tech world, I adhered to a strict rule of “no TLA’s” (three-letter acronyms). Why? Because I saw how TLAs were used to obfuscate and confuse, and that the person using them all too often did not even know what they stood for! I took the customers’ frustrations and turned it into fuel to help them. My motto since then is
“Go for the quality and the money will follow. Go for the money and the quality will never follow”.
-rachel rose
They say “choose a job that you love and you’ll never work a day in your life”. My work is highly vocational and I love it. I am successful because I work very hard. I have been self-employed for twenty years and proudly manage almost all aspects of my business. Given that I live in Spain, I do it all in two languages (or more…I speak four)! My professional employment is in yoga and bodywork. Learn more about them at Rose Tint Your Life and Alteayoga.
Writing
I have published numerous articles about wellness, mindfulness and yoga. Please refer to the list here: https://alteayoga.es/rachels-writing/
A longer and more eclectic selection of my writing may be found in my yoga and wellness blog, stretching back to 2011. Truth be told, I was blogging before then, using the domain ravenhead.org (see a snapshot on the Way Back Machine – the archived links section is especially historical and interesting).
Music
Go have a listen to my songs and Guided meditations up on my Soundcloud page!
I have done a lot of collaborations, and Love and Faith is one of my favourite songs and productions. It is my composition (melody and lyrics, voice and guitar). The recording was done with Jake Knights, who also did the production and keyboards. Miguel Alsem did the mastering, basses and percussion.
Magma Lows and I collaborated on the project that we called “Inner Three”. I do a rap that I am very proud of on the track There is Always a Reason.
Jake and I collaborated on the dub heavy chillout track “Deep Happiness“. The track began with the voice sample, which is a Whatsapp voice message I sent to a friend who was having a troubled time. Listening back, I realised that the message and the cadence had artistic value. I sent it to Jake who then built a track around it. The original recording had some plosives and other noise, and we tried to re-record some parts. But, we could not get an exact match in tempo, pitch and cadence. Eventually, Jake took it to Miguel Alsem who tidied it up. Jake sent it to the label, NuTek Records, and it got published!
RAYEROSE is my music blog where I post tracks that catch my ear. It has been going for quite some time now and I really love some of the music up there. Check it out!
I use Ableton Live as my DAW. I have an Arturia AudioFUSE sound card and an Arturia Analog Lab MIDI controller. My main mic is a SHURE SM7B. I play a Taylor 414CE acoustic guitar with a beautiful red finish.
**update 4/5/21 – I bagged a deal on a pair of ADAM Audio F5 Studio Monitors. Incredible sound and clarity. I shelled out for a pair of ISO Acoustics stands, in order to get the best position possible in my little studio.
++update 23/05/21 – I grabbed an outboard synth! I found a second-hand (but nearly brand new) AKAI MINIAK Virtual Analog Synthesizer but I am still getting used to navigating the buttons. It’s a lot of fun so far!
First photo is the cover of my Firewater EP on the groovy as fuck Bandcamp: Rachel Rose – Firewater EP The second photos is from my bank Plank and dates from about 1992. The photo on the right is of me when I was collaborating with Anja Klove in the “Rose and Clover Project”. Below, you have a short “musician’s bio” that I wrote but never use as I really just make music for fun!
Rachel awakens the passion for human (r)evolution. Her simple, sensual and silvery songs slide between folk and spiritual pop – a fun and sexy dance towards consciousness.
Coding
I worked in Internet Networking from 1997-2002. It was a short, intense period. Of the generation who plotted linear regressions on graph paper, I nearly “missed” computing. In 1997, I completed my University studies (B.Tech Applied Chemical and Biological Sciences, Ryerson U, Canada), only to realise that I had yet to surf the amazing revolution called network computing. My curious Gemini mind set out to rectify that. Well, truthfully, I did own a Mac Classic in my last year at University. Here I am looking pale in a Canadian Winter.
Tech Baby Steps
I moved to London, England, and scored a job in the computer centre in Wimbledon Library. Quickly realising that my clients knew nothing, I RTFM and became somewhat of an expert on Windows 3.1 and 95 and MS Office. We had a dial-up connection (modem!) when I started working at Input/Output Centres), although we soon installed ISDN and then – gasp! – a LAN.
Adventures in the WAN
INSNet/EDEX, our ISP soon recruited me. First off, I installed email accounts, soon moving onto DNS records and then, finally, leased lines. I learned UNIX and the shell, CISCO and TCP/IP routing and all sorts of fun stuff like HTML, CSS, some Perl and PHP and etc. It amazes me to remember the first time someone talked about “Google”, or blogs, or Youtube!
Moving up the ladder with jobs at Pilot Network Services (R.I.P.) and then DIGEX/Worldcom, I took on Sun Certification and became a CCNA. The Dot-com bust burned me out, and also my mum died, and it wasn’t a happy time for me. I became a therapist, studying massage, nutrition and yoga. I am super chill, happy inside, with a clear mind and healthy body. This was my long sabbatical and healing. We all know, now, that humans need to be whole within in order to function well in work, society and at home.
But tech never went away. I love to delve into the backend, hack HTML, CSS and PHP, maintain my own web sites and LAN and got very good at Open Source tools like WordPress, Softaculous, Inkscape, GIMP and LibreOffice.
Back on the Code Again
So, now I am working through the freeCodeCamp curriculum, and looking carefully at the world of UX. I am blogging about my adventures in code, if you’re interested.
** Update: I signed up for the Google/Coursera Foundations of User Experience (UX) Design. So far, I love it!