Who Says Penguins Can't Fly?

It’s been a long time since I wrote anything here – the last post was published in the beginning of May 2010. This time I can’t blame it on lack of time though. In fact I’ve had a lot of free time this summer, which is quite rare, but I chose to spend my days away from the computer for a change.

In this post I will write about some of the things that have happened in the period since I last posted till now, both KDE-related and general nonsense.

Bachelor’s degree

Before summer I finished my Bachelor’s degree in Meteorology. My thesis was about the impact of soot, regionally, on surface temperature in India and Sweden. Although the last days before the deadline were trying, I enjoyed working on it a lot and it make me confident to continue down the academic route. If anyone is interested in reading it, just send me an email.

The SCAM GUI written in Qt3

To model the atmosphere I used the one-column model NCAR SCAM. I knew from before that it had a GUI, but it was unexpected and fun to find out that it used Qt. Not so fun to have to dive into the code to fix a couple of bugs, but it could have been worse – at least my attempts to learn C++ and Qt paid off, even if it was in a way I never imagined. The rest of the model was written in FORTRAN, something I wouldn’t be surprised to see again soon.

Akademy

Next stop was located in Finland, Tampere – Akademy 2010. Yeah I’m a little late writing about it; let’s just say that I’m still recovering from the shock.

It already began on the bus from Helsinki to Tampere. When I had found a nice seat and looked out of the window, I saw someone who resembled Aaron Seigo. Pure coincidence, I thought to myself, there’s no way I’ll run into Akademy attendees this soon. Then this guy who looked like Aaron bought a bus ticket, and damn, his voice was also almost identical. Yes, that’s the voice I’ve heard in a lot of screencasts and other media before. Next he started to talk to some of the other passengers and said something along the lines of “so a bunch of you are on this bus”, and the situation became clear – I was already being surrounded by KDE people.

Surely you can imagine how long this text is gong to be if I were to describe everything in detail (hell, we haven’t even arrived at Tampere yet), so I’ll try to summarize the experience of my first KDE event. In short – it was amazing.

I hadn’t met anyone there before, but everyone was very open and friendly. It was nice to see the faces behind the nicks and talk to people I had exchanged messages with online. Unfortunately there weren’t many from the KDE Forums team that could attend – other than Anne Wilson and me, Luca Beltrame made a quick visit on Tuesday. On a more positive note, some people without direct KDE connections who cooperate with us on the forums and UserBase made it to Tampere to take part of Akademy, which was very cool.

Finally I would like to thank the organizers for doing an awesome job and the KDE e.V. for making it possible for me to attend.

Mountain bike competition

At the end of the summer I went to Gotland, Sweden’s largest island, to participate in a mountain bike competition. It was my first bike competition ever.

The competition was held over two days, with 42 km cycling each day (in total 84 km). It’s a bit much for a newbie like me, but I liked how the competition focused on the experience rather than who the fastest rider was. During those two days the participants got a taste of the best Gotland had to offer. The route passed through muddy trails, rocky paths, a nightclub and past customers in a supermarket, cheerleaders and glassblowers, among other strange and less strange things.

I ended up fourth to last, but needless to say it was very fun. (It’s amazing how the brain tends to forget the last painful kilometers and only focus on the good parts.) Besides, if we were to multiply the times by our number of wheels, my placing would be bumped up towards the top even compared to the elite class riders.

I usually don’t like to post pictures of myself online, but I guess I can make an exception this time, just for your sake. (You still won’t see my face though. Hah.)

Me (left) and my friend

By the way, do we have other uni riders who reads Planet KDE (I know about one more), or maybe even MUni riders?

What’s next?

So what plans do I have for the nearest future? In KDE land I’ll continue to help out in the KDE Forums as usual, and I’ll also try to contribute to UserBase in various ways. I think the wiki has a lot of potential, it just needs to reach a critical mass of contributors.

From now on I’m going to spend more time on my studies and look into different fields of meteorology to find out what I’m really interested in. As a consequence, I expect to have less free time to spend on KDE, but don’t worry, I won’t disappear completely.

My plan is to continue to write here, mainly about the KDE Forums as well as UserBase. If all goes well I’ll also share some KDE tips, more about this later. Finally, if I get in the mood for coding, I might continue my The Road to KDE Devland series. But I wouldn’t bet on it.