Current mood:	satisfied
Current music:	Doris Day, singing Que Sera Sera

APCAUCE - 3

Well, got back last week from organizing APCAUCE 3 at Pusan, South Korea.

I first landed at Seoul, after a whole day spent in transit at Singapore - and promptly headed for a meeting of the APRICOT advisory and management committees at the Lotte World hotel in the Jamsil area downtown. After the meeting, and a little shopping, I caught a Saemaul high speed train around midnight to Pusan, arriving at the ungodly hour of 3:50 AM. Promptly flagged a cab to get to my hotel, did not notice that it was a "luxury" cab ... that made the meter run to 20K won (USD 20) rather than the 9K won (yeah, well, USD 9) it'd have actually cost, had I picked an ordinary cab. Damn.

Our hotel, and the conference venue - the Busan Marriott - were right next to a glorious looking beach. Too bad I was dog tired after several hours flying cattle class, I rather preferred sleep to sightseeing. The hotel I'd booked, the Glory Condominium, was about five minutes walk from the Marriott, and was a traditional korean hotel - in other words, a small apartment with a tiny kitchen, bath and mattresses in the bedroom, no beds. Bring your own toothbrush and towels, we were told. Problem is, no one told us to bring along some spray for all the bedbugs I and my roommate (and friend, Kapil Chawla) had the pleasure (!) of meeting in the hotel bedroom.

Oh well. After unearthing a hotel staffer who could speak English, and complaining about the bugs, we did manage to get some sleep.

The APCAUCE event I organized was fun - and quite productive. Some really good speakers, including government delegates from the US Federal Trade Commission Australian National Office For the Information Economy and Korean Fair Trade Commission governments talk about antispam laws being planned in their countries

More excellent speeches from Dave Crocker, Brian Tompsett, Anne Mitchell and others.

Pictures of the event, on current APCAUCE chair Jim Lick's digital camera, can be seen at http://www.drivel.com/apcauce3/. I got to be coordinator this time, taking some off the load off our regular secretariat, Jeonghye Choi, who will be off on maternity leave soon, and will miss our next event at APRICOT 2004, during February 2004 at Kuala Lumpur.

APCAUCE was being hosted at the APAN (Asia Pacific Advanced Network Forum) meet at the Busan Marriott. Lots of people there with Windows laptops, so it was no surprise that Blaster and Sobig made themselves very conspicuous by their presence. Lots of big notices asking people to clean up and patch their systems, APAN network staff frantically scanning the network and identifying infected hosts ... the works. All this did provide a lot of interesting stuff to discuss during the Security workshop organized by Dr. Sureswaran Ramadass of the Universiti Sains Malaysia.

It also gave me a chance to appear a second time on businessweek, thanks to a half an hour long phone call / interview I had with their HK based correspondent, Bruce Einhorn, about Sobig. Bruce's article can be found here, on the Businessweek website.

Going back, I took another Saemaul back from Busan to Seoul, and then a limousine bus to Incheon airport, where I had another seven hour wait before I could catch my flight to Singapore. Actually managed to find a wireless connection that let me put my Compaq laptop and Cisco Aironet wireless card to good use and surf for free here ... Singapore's Changi airport has horrendously expensive wireless unless you are in an airline lounge. Thank god I have a couple of friends, who have nice fast cable modems.</a>

Finally, an early morning flight back to Madras, again on Indian Airlines. Ugh. Their service and punctuality grows worse day by day. Pretty soon, we'll have a situation where they just can't get any worse no matter how hard they try. Well, at least they aren't too expensive, and they do cover several major transit airports in Asia.

Enough rambling, back to work :)