You can download QuinnCo’s presentation from the show as ODT or PDF.

First, thanks to Dr. Pharr, for her wonderful babysitting services. She was, genuinely, the keystone for the day. Without her, I would not have been able to be at the build-day, let alone trying to coordinate.

The build-day is one that I will carry with me for the rest of my years. We may have others, but there will be nothing that will stay with me quite the way this one will. It took my breath away, to look up and see what must have amounted to 75 people, working away together, in rhythm and sync. Half of the attendees were residents of the children’s home, and I must say, I was incredibly proud of the way the adult participants took the kids under wing, and really mentored them through all of the stages of computer repair and installation. I was so proud to see everyone working together, doing their parts and pitching in. And, at the end of the day, our numbers proved how strong we functioned as a team. We processed a total of 47 computers.

There were moments, in all of this, that took my breath away. I watched a 17 year old boy teach an 11 year old girl how to take RAM out of a junk computer. I listened in as a young college man taught a group of teen girls about electrical circuits, and how computers read data as 1s and 0s. I received several squeeze hugs, and thank yous, from kids who were incredibly excited to know they would have a computer they could play with.

All in all, the day was an incredible success, and nothing I write here could adequately describe how thrilled I was, or how proud I am, to call all of the participants friends. Thank you, each and every one of you, for touching my heart, and helping us accomplish this goal. Maybe, hopefully, we managed to change a child’s life for the better. That’s all I can ask for.

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View the full Press Release.

First off, let me introduce Qimo. No, not the software, Qimo the Eskimo, our new Mascot! Qimo is just the tip of the iceberg, thanks to the very generous Brian Hall for donating his time and talents we are getting all new artwork for Qimo.

Even though we haven’t release a final version of Qimo, we haven’t let keep us from getting computers out the door. In fact, we’ve given away more computers in the past week than we have all of last year! If you know of any kids who could benefit from one of our computers, please let us know, and as always if you have any computers, parts of computers, or even computer accessories, please consider donating to our cause. We would especially like to start getting printers that we can donate to households that don’t already have a computer.

As if all of that wasn’t enough to keep us busy, we’ve also been planning our trip to L.A. for the Southern California Linux Expo. Thanks again to Brian, we’re going to be showing off in style. We will have commercially printed Qimo CDs to give away along with lots of other marketing material, all with much better artwork that we could have made ourselves. We’ve also enrolled to host a “Birds of a Feather” discussion about how Linux and Open Source can help charitable organizations save money without sacrificing capabilities.

First, we’ve been in touch with the Walk Now for Autism folks. Very kind people! We’re set to be vendors for the resource fair then. End of March.

We’ve also been in touch with a local university, a local hospital, and several members of the OpenSource communities. We’ve been thrilled to be featured in two blogs from LinuxInsider, and we’ve been mentioned in the blog of Mr. Jono Bacon, of Canonical.

And just tonight, we were contacted by the organizers of the Southern California Linux Expo. We have been invited to come out and show off Qimo!! We are thrilled that we will be joining them in late February. This is tremendous exposure for Qimo, a major forum to show off not only what we do, but WHY.

We’ve also been preparing for our Hillsborough county roll-out. That should take place very soon.

We owe a great deal of gratitude to Jono Bacon, of Canonical, for taking the time out of his busy schedule to help us along, as well as a great thank you to Katherine Noyes from Linux Insider, for featuring us in her blog. And a great deal of thanks go out to the developers of the games we feature, without them, Qimo would not be. And a thank you to the Florida LoCo community, an online community of Ubuntu users, for all of their help, support and patience. And a special thank you to MIANOSM, of Fla. LoCo, for generously donating space for us to host the CD image of the software.

Thank you ALL for your patience and support. Without our local community, this would not be possible, and without support from friends scattered far and wide, we would not be blessed like we are.

Please, go check out the website, download the CD image, and let us know what you think. We’re open to suggestions, testing, critique, etc.

Take care, everyone!