Neomantra.org

With relative calm finally approaching after spending the chaos filled month of December finishing last minute work deadlines, attending conferences and trying to find free time to buy presents for friends and family in between, I’ve now found some time to do some things I wanted to get done.  Mostly that means I had time to do home brewed beer things, fix up my blog a bit and work on KDE stuff.   I’ll start with the KDE work since there’s likely some of you who may not care about my brewing adventures.  That’ll be at the bottom if anyone is interested though.

The promo team has been quite busy this month.  We’ve been doing a wide variety of things, most of this can be seen via the updates we’ve made on the Promo section on the Community wiki.  One of the things that we’re trying to get off the ground is a section for art work.  The idea is that this could be a common place where anyone could go and easily find cool designs and logos relating to KDE things.  There is a little bit there right now but if you have any other images we could use please do feel free to add them or email them to the promo team.

Along the same lines we are still looking for anyone who can do some design work for potential use on KDE t-shirts/hats/coffee mugs/etc.  This is a great way to earn instant fame and glory among your KDE peers as we will all think of you when we look at your design in the mirror or as we drink our morning coffee every day  If you are interested please let us know!  Ideally I would like to have some cool things available before Camp KDE so we can raise awareness of the store while we’re there (which we can’t really do if nothing is for sale yet).

Also, in case you’re living under a rock and missed the Dot story, the Camp KDE speaker schedule was released last week and I’ve got to say it looks jam packed full of really interesting talks.  Coming from a bioinformatics day job I’m especially interested in Phillip Bourne’s keynote on open access to data.  And somehow I tricked the rest of the organizers into letting me speak there so hopefully that goes well too  I’ll be discussing how people who don’t know anything at all about programming can still get involved and be contributors in the KDE community.  I hope that developers will find this interesting as well because part of this discussion is meant to teach you how to find opportunities for your friends who normally say “yeah I’d help you with KDE things but I don’t know how to write code” to get involved.

One quick thing I’d like to mention is that I put some of the ideas I’ll be discussing in my Camp KDE talk into practice in my own life recently and managed to convince a friend of mine to give KDE a whirl.  Not only did he install openSUSE with the KDE Plasma workspace he also decided to start learning QT (he’s historically been a Windows user/programmer), and has started a blog to document his learning experiences along the way.  It should turn into a great resource for other new KDE/openSUSE users as time goes on.

Last, but certainly not least I just wanted to give a quick update on my beer making activities.  Here is our kitchen, where I spent most of my day yesterday:

My kitchen on a normal brew day

For those wondering what the heck all this stuff is, on the far left there is the malt/hops/etc, aka the “wort”, boiling in the gigantic pot.  Next to that are some more ingredients that I was weighing out to be added later in the boiling process.  Then there is the cooling coil and some other random tools and a thermometer, etc.

Anyways I’ve done some work on the beer brewing section of my blog and it’s much prettier now thanks to a few pictures like this one.  I also added the Belgian White beer I brewed yesterday in the status section and history, and added a more detailed sub page about the Holiday Ale I made in October.  Eventually I’ll get around to doing that for the other beers on the list too.  But for now, it’s time to go bottle my IPA!