Alex Martelli wrote: > Anton Vredegoor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > However I still maintain that I was never able to meet these fine > > people you speak about and which you seem to know because the cost > > involved (a few hundred euro to visit pycon for example) was too high > > compared to my food budget. > > Europython is cheap to attend, and has been held twice in Charleroi, > Belgium, for example -- if you're in the Netherlands, you could have > bycicled there, crashed with somebody (I've seen lots of impecunious > people offered hospitality that way), and not spent more on food than > you would by staying in the Netherlands. You'll have to invent some > better excuse, to explain why you chose not to attend it.
I looked it up: 160 euro (early registration). My food budget is about 16 euro a week now, maybe even less if I want to keep feeding myself a bit longer, maybe in 2003 my reserves were a bit higher than now, but I had not yet learned then to be without a regular income, so I was very scared to become pennyless at that time. I am perfectly used to sleeping at other peoples' places, for example I was at many go (baduk) tournaments and if the prices and atmosphere would be anything comparable to that I guarantee you that I would have been present. IIRC I got an offer from Laura Creighton at the time to borrow me the money, so one could say it was a choice, although by that time the price had gone up to 270 euro. But frankly indeed, I just don't even like to participate to events that claim to be open for all but don't even acknowledge that the barriers are extremely high compared to some participants budgets. Your hype about it being cheap has a very chilling effect on my enthousiasm, it's the same way with pypy congresses, which I also would have liked to attend (and this thing even seems to be sponsored by public EU money). Probably I am still a *rich* person, on a global scale, because I live in a place with free internet (from a public library). You *do* realize that even posting to usenet is impossible (or at least very hard) for a lot of people, including me for at least 6 months. I had to find someone to invite me to gmail and also a way to access my previous internet account, which I lost access to when they cut my phone line, to recieve the mail that finally enabled me to post via google. Nowadays it's probably possible to open a hotmail account and get invited to gmail from there, so one can post to usenet. Theoretically I have now yet another option to post (except via google), but IMO it remains true that one needs at least one link to corruption to be able to post to usenet. Anton 'hey, and my laptop doesn't even have a cdrom, needs almost continous electricity, it's keyboard is broken (but it works fine with external keyboard), and it networks via a pcmcia card with a *cable* ' -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
