I live in France, and just found out that Hugh MacLeod’s free wine to bloggers promo has been extended to French residents. The man has balls, sending bottles of South African Stormhoek wine to people who have the very best that Bordeaux, Bourgogne, Alsace and the Côte du Rhône have to offer on their doorstep.
It’ll be interesting to see how the wine fares in a taste test with the Givry I got earlier at Leclerc.
Updated to correct boo-boo
OK, against my better judgement…
The new job has not turned out to be the opportunity I was hoping for. A number of factors have led to some conflict, and a total lack of passion or momentum.
I am currently considering my options – start a free software company (the problem is so many ideas on the one hand, and figuring out where the revenue stream is going to be on the other), re-entering the job market and just admitting that taking this job was a mistake, or try to make a silk purse out of the sow’s ear, buckle down, build character, and try to do the best I can in the circumstances.
I’m interested in hearing ideas people might have, by e-mail or in blog comments.
Due to the increasingly varied nature of the projects which will be represented in Lyon March next year, the conference will undergo a name-change. The GIMP developers conference will still take place, but it will be as part of the Libre Graphics Meeting – LGM for short, if you’re into acronyms, pronounced glam. Don’t ask. Just pronounce it glam. Or say LGM. Whichever you feel like. Or just use the long name, so people know what you’re talking about.
The Libre Graphics Meeting will be a meeting of minds and bodies involved in libre graphics. That is, people who program, work with, or want to find out more about free software graphics applications. It’ll be a blast.
The web-page for now is in the GIMP wiki. Please feel free to aliment it with ideas, feedback, comments and abuse.
Was it inspiration or coincidence that Luis’s take on the conflict between trademark protection and the free software ethos should come out the day after Branden Robinson’s description of Debian’s trademark problems?
It’s been a busy 24 hours.
I need to write all this up in a schedule, as soon as these are confirmed properly. But for the first 48 hours after the confirmation of the dates, it’s not bad at all. This’ll be a real Free Graphics dream team.
I have a huge backlog of news – I guess I’ll not get rid of it any other way that one item at a time.
So, let’s get started – a new conference will hit people’s calendars next year. For the time being, we’re calling it GimpCon, but that may change, because it’s increasingly inaccurate.
The 17/18/19 March, in Lyon, France, there will be a gathering. There will be lots of GIMP people, obviously, but also people from the Scribus project, hopefully also from Blender, Inkscape, littlecms, Krita and other free software graphics projects. I am putting together the basics of a schedule now (consider this a call for proposals, if you’re interested, although I will be doing the rounds of graphics projects mailing lists).
There will be 2 days of presentations, tutorials, technical talks – these are aimed for people interested in image processing in general, and probably about 2/3rd aimed towards application use (professionals and home users, roughly 50/50) and around 1/3 aimed towards people who want to learn about the principles involved (potential developers, students). A third day is unplanned – since the main point of the weekend is to get together, meet people, maybe do some brainstorming and hacking, this day is completely freeform. The public are welcome on all 3 days.
There is a real buzz about this conference – people on different projects are telling me “finally, I’ve been dying to meet people on these projects for years”, or “I have so much to learn, and I’d love to meet all these people”. I have no idea what to expect, but I think it’s going to be great, and the attendance levels are probably going to blow us away.
David and Oscar, I hope ye know what we’ve let ourselves in for…
I got this mail (verbatim) from Air France “cyberservice” this morning. Interesting read, even if it doesn’t really explain the variations in price I saw on different flights yesterday.
Cher internaute,
Merci d’avoir pris contact avec airfrance.fr
Vos remarques, que nous avons lues avec grand interet, appellent quelques
precisions sur la politique tarifaire d Air France.Chaque Compagnie definit sa strategie commerciale en fonction de ses propres
criteres, mais globalement celle-ci repose sur deuxaxes principaux : la satisfaction de la demande et l equilibre des couts.
Pour un meme parcours, differents tarifs sont proposes avec des dates de vente
specifiques pour des periodes bien determinees, ainsiqu un quota de sieges limites pour certains d entre eux. Les tarifs les plus
interessants sont souvent les premiers vendus et les offres desieges fluctuent tres rapidement selon les demandes. De plus, en echange d un
prix attractif, ces tarifs comportent certaines contraintestels les changements de reservation non autorises ou un sejour limite.
A la date de votre devis, nous vous avons propose le tarif le plus interessant.
cependant, dans un contexte concurrentiel evident,Air France doit adapter en permanence son offre commerciale et en particulier
ses propositions tarifaires.Il est alors effectivement possible que notre offre soit evolutive dans le
temps, pour devenir plus attractive.Ceci rejoint d autres types d activites pour lesquelles les pratiques
commerciales sont similaires a celles du transport aerien.Nous esperons que ces informations vous donneront une meilleure connaissance de
la politique tarifaire de la Compagnie.En souhaitant qu Air France sache garder votre confiance, nous restons a votre
disposition au 0820 320 820 (0.12 euro/mn) tous les jours
de 08h30 a 20h00 .Cordialement.
L Equipe du Commerce Electronique
In other words, “we have cheap tickets for different dates. Sometimes, the price can come down dramatically if you wait a while, but usually the cheapest tickets get sold first.” Like I said, it doesn’t explain the way every flight on the Friday went from 42 euros to 71 euros in the space of 25 minutes (maybe they only had 1 42 euro flight left for that day?) but it’s incredibly frustrating to be “segmented” like this.
Joel Spolsky wrote about segmenting and said:
The airline industry got really, really good at segmenting and ended up charging literally a different price to every single person on the plane. As a result most people felt they weren’t getting the best deal, and they didn’t like the airlines. When a new alternative arose in the form of low cost carriers (Southwest, jetBlue, etc.) customers had no loyalty whatsover to the legacy airlines that had been trying to pick their pockets for all those years.
He also said that segmentation resulted in “a long-term erosion of customer goodwill caused by blatant price discrimination”.
I agree whole-heartedly.
(Two rants in a row, people will start taking me for Hub 😉
J’ai essayé de réserver un vol aller/retour de Lyon à Amsterdam avec Air France, départ le matin du 21 Octobre, retoure le soir le 22.
J’ai eu pour 700 euros, avec un prix pour l’aller de 320 euros HT.
J’ai changé mes préférences de vol pour choisir un retour le dimanche matin, le 23, à 6h30. D’un coup, les tarifs sont tombés à 161 euros TTC, avec le même place dans le vol de l’aller à 42 euros HT. En plus, toutes les vols des deux jours avais ce même prix affiché, 42 euros par place l’aller, et le retour.
Un demi heure plus tard, j’ai essayer de réserver définitivement ce dernier formule, sans succès. La même combinaison de vols était affiché à 700 euros, et même des vols partant et arrivant plus tard avais maintenant le prix de 71 euros par place, pour un nouveau total de 212 euros.
Comment Air France peuvent expliquer ce politique de détermination de tariffs, et est-ce qu’ils croient vraiment que leurs clients vont accepter ce genre de traitement sans rien dire?
For a long time, Carol Spears was a positive contributor to the GIMP. She wrote tutorials, helped people out on IRC and on mailing lists, she mentored people who were a little shy or new to the community. And she re-wrote the GIMP website, to a stage where it was almost ready to replace the old one we’d had some the 0.99 days.
That’s when things started coming unstuck. Carol had several personal hardships around that time, which I understand and sympathise with. She had built up a lot of capital around the GIMP, and people gave her a lot of lattitude, and help. But she became discouraged with GIMP development when replacing the GIMP website took years, rather than weeks. She ended up blaming one or two people for that (including me, I think) more or less harrying them away from the GIMP for extended holidays.
And since then, we have still tried to get the old Carol back. She moved to California, where she stayed with a GIMP developer. She came to GUADEC in Kristiansand with a ticket paid for by GIMP sponsors. For a time, things looked like they might be getting better.
And yet, Carol persists in being incredibly anti-social. She gets incredibly aggressive any time anyone mentions photoshop, Windows, her lack of politeness, or any other of half a dozen loosely connected topics.
And she scares away potential contributors, the lifeblood of the project. The GIMP hasn’t had many new people for a while, but reading the mail she sent to Diana Fong after Diana was trying to contribute positively to the project stepped over a new boundary.
I don’t know how many times she has sent this sort of mail to well-wishing people who then silently went away. But this is the first time that I have seen this kind of thing from her.
I am no longer prepared to be associated with Carol. I’ve asked yosh to remove her gimp.org e-mail address. He may well refuse. If he does, he can remove mine instead.
Thanks to everyone who replied. Especially Calum, who sent links to Google, which gave his photos for Copenhagen in the first 4 answers.
I have not found any group photos for Dublin or Seville, and I know that there weren’t any for Kristiansand or Stuttgart. But here’s a trip down memory lane for people who were in Paris and Copenhagen (count how many people were in the photo for bonus points).
