SAC 2007: Day One
Mar 12th, 2007 by admin
Day zero didn’t end so great. The plane trip here to Seoul was not bad; I used it as an opportunity to catch up on the adventures of Harry Potter. But when I got to the Incheon airport I was exhausted (I have great difficulty sleeping on planes). I wasn’t able to find the bus that went to the downtown area, so not knowing any better I decided to take a cab. What I didn’t know then was that the airport is over 100km away from downtown Seoul and my cab ride cost nearly $150 American. It turns out the going rate for Taxis to the downtown area is in fact around $100 and I paid the dumb-tourist tax on top of that. I hate taxis. It doesn’t matter the country, I hate taxis.
My hotel, the IBIS, is not bad and for Seoul pretty reasonably priced. They have a nice hotel restraunt that cooks both eastern and western style food. My east meets west breakfast this morning included: miso soup, noodles, eggs, bacon, something that looked like pot stickers, sticky rice and fruit.
The COEX conference center is less than 10 minutes away by foot. Once I got to the COEX convention center I had a little trouble figuring out where the ACM event was. All the ACM signs are in Korean despite the fact that the entire conference is in English. The signs have little arrows pointing where to go but the signs seem to be contradicting each other — pointing to some extra-dimensional passage way that I wasn’t able to find. Finally I figured out one of the numbers on the sign (though Koreans have their own numeric symbols, arabic numerals are at least as common if not more so) referred to a room on the third floor.
I just got a copy of the proceedings which are about as thick as two phone books. At many conferences you get a “bag” to carry around the proceedings. At this one I received a rather nice black Targus laptop bag. The ACM logo is ironed on in the inside which I think is kind of odd. It would be way geekier if there was an ACM logo on the outside. Along with the proceedings the bag was filled with maps and tourist guide books. Time to plan what I will do..
Testing comments on the new journal system. Are we gonna be able to prevent the blog spam that we were getting a while back?
Well there are a lot of features to help stop it including (optional) post approval, a mark as spam button (similar to google’s I think – I don’t know if they do any kind of filtering), (optional) registration requirements and some plugins to help stop it too.. So my hope is yes..
And once you get one comment approved by a moderator, subsequent comments don’t need approval..