thanksgiving

Yesterday was Thanksgiving in Canada. (The Americans celebrate it on totally the wrong day. ;) Family and friends descended upon the house here and we commenced to cook up a storm in the kitchen. We used every pot, plate and bowl (and nearly all the cutlery) in the house at one point or another in the day. The result was a very delicious bunch of food: an organic free range turkey (most everyone in attendance was omnivorous), baked mashed yams and sweet potatoes, roasted beats, steamed brussel sprouts and leafy greens, a potato and carrot roast, gravies, stuffings and pumpkin pie. Yum!

Thanksgiving is about more than food, of course. It's about, well, giving thanks. (That and board games, conversation and sharing some drinks with friends. :) I'm thankful for so many things in my life, with my family and home at the front of that list. This is my KDE blog, though, so what am I thankful for right now when it comes to KDE? Here's my non-exhaustive list:

• Qt Development Frameworks for picking up Marco Martin to work on Plasma related technologies. Pure awesome! I really enjoy working with Marco, and I'm happy he now can devote his full attentions to this stuff. I do hope to find more such opportunities for Plasma folk in the future. As the project matures and generates more useful products for others to invest in, I'm hopeful this will happen fairly naturally.


• The KDE PIM folk are communicating more. I took some of them to task recently about the detriments of non-communication and where the responsibility for communicating might lay in a project that has commercial backing. Such dialogs are never the most fun thing one could imagine spending their time on, but several of them did just that, particularly Till. There's been a rolling parade of blog entries and stories that have made it onto community news sites in recent times. For that I'm very thankful to the KDE PIM team. Communication is awesome (and how else would I know how far along Akonadi for Qt, KDE and Gtk+ had come?), improving our processes around it is even more so. PIMsters, keep up the communication, because you rock and we should be able to keep up with that. :)


• User communication improvements are to be seen everywhere in KDE land. From KDE Brainstorm to Userbase to the new crash dialog that has noticeably improved the quality of bug reports since it debuted, these efforts have improved my life. Hopefully they have helped others even more so.


• Our community of contributors continues to do amazing things, and for that I'm very thankful as a user of our software and a member of that community. While the three previous points are more transitory in nature, this one is ongoing. Ever since I started contributing to KDE, the community has been here and been strong. It's the air we breath, and just as easy to take for granted. Thanksgiving is a great reminder for me to stop and take it un-for-granted.