[kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: Novice Night!

[Paul Nijjar]

Hang in there. Spring is almost here. We've almost survived the winter. Naturally, that means it is time to think about our other fundamental drive: reproduction. Doggies reproduce by having puppies.  University professors reproduce by having grad students. How do Linux users propagate the species? 

Simple. In order for us to make new Linux users, we have to get regular people using Linux. We demonstrate our nurturing love and support via advocacy, installfests, repairfests, mentorship... and education, which is where this month's KWLUG presentation comes in.  Raul Suarez (who, incidentally, is one of KWLUG's most captivating speakers) will demonstrate "A Day in the Life of a Home Desktop Linux User", a gentle introduction to the programs and tools a new user might expect to encounter most frequently. 

This presentation is intended to be completely beginner-friendly, so in order for it to be effective lots of Linux beginners need to attend. If you know of folks (possibly including you!) who might be interested in getting their feet wet in Linux please invite them to join us on Monday. This presentation will begin at 7:00pm. 


In other news, the FLOSS Fund nominee for this month is GNU PDF, which is an attempt to implement libraries that can use all of the features (forms, embeddings and so on) that the current batch of otherwise-excellent open source PDF readers cannot yet handle. If you would like to be part of the KWLUG donation to this project, you can drop some money in the FLOSS Fund can at the meeting, or you can contact cabal member Andrew at acant at alumni.uwaterloo.ca .  

We are also looking for more FLOSS Fund nominees. If you know of a good project to nominate, please leave a suggestion on our website. It's hard to believe, but we are actually out of nominees after this month!

A number of interesting new user groups have sprung up. The Waterloo Region Drupal Users Group (Waterloo DRUG?)  meets to celebrate and discuss the Drupal CMS package. They meet on the first Friday of each month at The Working Centre. Visit http://groups.drupal.org/waterloo-region for more information, or fire off an e-mail to richard at weait.com . 

Stalwart KWLUG member Chris Bruner has started a Linux Users Group in the town of St. Mary's, Ontario. They meet on the first Wednesday of each month at Fullerworks. I don't think they have a web page yet, bt for more information you can contact Chris at cbruner at quadro.net . 

Finally, we have a request from Google recruiter Yancy Rivera to advertise some (non-local) jobs with the company. Yancy writes:

We're looking for engineers with hybrid Unix/Linux System Administration and programming skills who possess strong coding (C, C++, Java) and scripting skills (Perl, Python, or Shell).  If you feel that you match this description well or know someone that might please contact me.  Below are two links to more detailed job descriptions.

http://www.google.com/support/jobs/bin/answer.py?answer=23591

http://www.google.com/support/jobs/bin/answer.py?answer=23594

Yancy's contact is yancyr at google.com . 

(And if you have Linux-related (and preferably local) postings you want KWLUG to know about, please drop me a line. 

Anything else? Oh, right. Our meeting location: 

The Working Centre 
43 Queen Street S
Kitchener
(between King and Charles Streets)

There is free bicycle parking in the back lot always, and free internal combustion engine parking in the back lot after 6pm. The Working Centre is a mere block away from the Kitchener Transportation Terminal, so you don't have to worry about tiring out your nascent Linux users after inviting them to the meeting.  

- Paul



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