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Monday, 21 April 2008

A brief brain-dump on getting to Beijing

It's a long way! Almost 30 hours, door to door, from sunny East Yorkshire to rainy Beijing. Emirates impressed as an airline, although with (much) better entertainment system Manchester-Dubai and (much) better food (and metal cutlery!), Dubai-Beijing. Let's try for good food and good entertainment on the way back, eh?

Nadeem was a life-saver at Dubai, waving his magic card to get all five members of the Talis contingent into an executive lounge for breakfast, showers, and a comfy seat for our three and a half hours in Dubai. Palm trees in the terminal, but not a camel to be seen.

In Beijing, the new-ish airport is truly immense... and all built in the time it took the committee to decide what colour the floor tiles should be at Heathrow T5.

Finally reached our hotel at about 2am this morning... to be told our rooms weren't available. Much debate ensued, which eventually saw us shipped to a different hotel for the night. Now back where we should be, and grappling with the foibles of Chinese internet policy; some sites (like this hosted blogging service) work when you wouldn't expect them to, and other entirely non-controversial locations appear blocked. The corporate VPN is proving unwilling to cooperate at the moment, which makes getting at mail a challenge.

Right, off to finish a presentation for tomorrow...

Friday, 18 April 2008

Hi Ho, Hi Ho... it's off to China we go...

Another month, another trip.

Tomorrow, Tom, Nad, Rob, Chris and I are off to China for WWW2008. We're on two separate planes from the UK to Dubai, but meet up there for the onward journey to Beijing on Sunday morning.

We've got quite a presence in the Linked Data on the Web workshop on Tuesday, which Tom is co-chairing, and then Chris has a paper on Friday. It looks as if I'm moderating a panel straight after his slot on Friday too, which should be fun.

Chinese firewall rules etc permitting, I hope to be blogging proceedings on Nodalities and at my latest blogging venue; the Semantic Web blog over on ZDNet. There might even be some contributions on other media channels; more on that later!