Sunday, January 7, 2018

Beginning 2018

2017 began with the once-in-a-lifetime trip to India to speak at KDE.Conf.in. That was amazing enough, but the trip to a local village, and visiting the Kaziranga National Park were too amazing for words.

Literal highlight of last year were the eclipse and trip to see it with my son Thomas, and Christian and Hailey's wedding, and the trip to participate with my daughter Anne, while also spending some time with son Paul, his wife Tara and my grandson Oscar. This summer I was able to spend a few days in Brooklyn with Colin and Rory as well on my way to Akademy. So 2017 was definitely worth living through!

This is reality, and we can only see it during a total eclipse

2018 began wonderfully at the cabin. I'm looking forward to 2018 for a lot of reasons.

First, I'm so happy that soon Kubuntu will again be distributing 17.10 images next week. Right now we're in testing in preparation for that; pop into IRC if you'd like to help with the testing (#kubuntu-devel). https://kubuntu.org/getkubuntu/ next week!

Lubuntu has a nice write-up of the issues and testing procedures: http://lubuntu.me/lubuntu-17-04-eol-and-lubuntu-17-10-respins/

The other serious problems with meltdown and spectre are being handled by the Ubuntu kernel team and those updates will be rolled out as soon as testing is complete. Scary times when dealing with such a fundamental flaw in the design of our computers!

Second, in KDE we're beginning to ramp up for Google Summer of Code. Mentors are preparing the ideas page on the wiki, and Bhushan has started the organization application process. If you want to mentor or help us administer the program this year, now is the time to get in gear!

At Renton PFLAG we had our first support meeting of the year, and it was small but awesome! Our little group has had some tough times in the past, but I see us growing and thriving in this next year.

Finally, my local genealogy society is doing some great things, and I'm so happy to be involved and helping out again. My own searching is going well too. As I find more supporting evidence to the lives of my ancestors and their families, I feel my own place in the cosmos more deeply and my connection to history more strongly. I wish I could link to our website, but Rootsweb is down and until we get our new website up......

Finally, today I saw a news article about a school in India far outside the traditional education model. Called the Tamarind Tree School, it uses an open education model to offer collaborative, innovative learning solutions to rural students. They use free and open source software, and even hardware so that people can build their own devices. Read more about this: https://opensource.com/article/18/1/tamarind-tree-school-india.

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