Not Well but Grateful

While I feel slightly guilty for not saying anything here for quite a few weeks now, it’s not the first time this has happened and well, I’ve spent all of my time working on preparations for LRL USA for probably the last 3 months, so, y’know, not much time to spare.

Well I guess I ought to be telling everyone how great the event was, how all the hard work was worth it and so on, but sadly I started to come down with a nasty cold during the flight home and it really hit on the evening I got home, so I’ve barely done anything since getting back except sleep and lie in bed reading a book. Seriously, I slept for 19 hours when I first got home.

So, yeah, LRL USA 2008 was great fun, very exhausting with the jet lag and so on, I’ve never been the best at handling sleep related issues so I began crashing by 3pm and was humourless by 6pm most days, however it was great fun either side. I met some truly fascinating, inspiring and welcoming people. I met some nut cases too, but I genuinely didn’t meet a single person I didn’t like and that’s pretty rare anywhere, so thank you to all the people who made it, particularly the exhibitors as I had most dealings with them, I wish I could have met you when I was a little more together 🙂

Anyway, back to my pit of sickness and despair 🙁

Support the Libre Graphics Meeting

Every year, the Libre Graphics Meeting get together to discuss cool new stuff in the Free/Open Source graphics and image editing world and make plans to make them even better. One example of the outcome of this is that you can drag and drop between applications like The Gimp and Inkscape. I didn’t know this kind of thing was going on and that’s great.

This year the Libre Graphics Meeting have a shortfall in sponsorship due to the withdrawal of a major sponsor who wasn’t able to secure the funding approval. Apart from paying for the facilities, much of the sponsorship money is used to pay for the flights and accommodation of important developers from the Gimp, Inkscape, Scribus, Blender, Krita and Open Clip Art projects amongst a number of others to ensure that the right people are at the event for it to be able to meets it’s goals. Most of these developers are unpaid and work on these projects in their spare time and so can’t afford to meet the travel costs themselves or take the time off work to attend.

Sadly, due to the withdrawal of one of the main sponsors, it now doesn’t look likely to be the case that many of these developers will be able to attend as a result and so the LGM have setup an appeal for donations in a bid to secure the funding required to get the right people to the event.

As a backdrop against this, I’ve been thinking recently that for the first time I can probably afford to put a bit of money where my mouth is regarding the software I use and so I decided to donate.

Click here to lend your support to: Support the Libre Graphics Meeting and make a donation at www.pledgie.com !

I think ideally, they need another big sponsor to reach the target by the end date of April 18th 2008 but if you’re a Free Software graphics software user then there is something you can do to help too.

We talk about this in LugRadio Season 5, Episode 15 which is released on Monday April 7th 2008 so don’t expect the link to the episode to work until after then.

You can also Digg the story to bring more attention to it.