madd0.com

There was one thing I loved about Seoul and it's that, wherever you were, if there was a little green near you, there was music to be heard. Gyongbokgung was not an exception. Indeed, I actually got to see the artists behind the music and one of them was glad to perform before the camera:

Here we are in Korea!

The Imagine Cup finals are taking place in Seoul's Sheraton Grande Walkerhill, where we arrived a few hours ago. If you are reading this on the website, you can see that plazer can already locate me on this side of the globe.

I started publishing pictures to my Flickr account. I'll see what I can do to better integrate them with the blog as soon as possible. I'll probably put a Flash badge on the site like I had before and I think FeedBurner can do something for the RSS feed.

Since the competitions do not start until tomorrow, we have some free time in our hands today, so I'll go with most of the French delegation downtown in about an hour to check out a huge tech market. Apparently haggling is the rule here, like in China, where I actually got pretty good at it. Unfortunately, I don't know how to say the numbers in Korean yet and, even though "calculator-haggling" is possible, it's not as effective as trying to speak the local language.

Pour ceux qui veulent suivre, en français, la délégation française à Séoul, voici quelques blogs :

• Les Français à la finale mondiale d'Imagine Cup en Corée - Août 2007
• Benjamin Gauthey
• Srooba's blog for Imagine Cup 2007
• Team Arenium

Et j'éditerai le post au fur et à mesure que j'en trouve d'autres...

I'm in a plane heading to Seoul right now to participate in the finals of Imagine Cup 2007 and this will be the first of, hopefully, many posts covering the event. A couple of remarks: since I am a contestant and not a journalist, I will not have a lot of time for writing, so for a while all posts will be only in English (the text will be available on all three feeds, though); and since Internet access will apparently be difficult to come by with, I will probably be posting by batches when I get the chance to go online.

That said, let's get started!

So, why am I quoting Flemming?

It's the best description I could find for the flight.

Shaken, because we probably passed through every single turbulence pouch from Paris to Seoul. Every single one! I know this particular route is bumpy—I get the same treatment when flying to Beijing—but today it was particularly rough. I felt like I was traveling on a Costa Rican road, and for those who have been there (and I encourage you to go in spite of this particular comment) that is no compliment.

The "stirred" part, however, has nothing to do with the flight, what I wanted to allude to was the elegance of the drink concerned. I maybe shouldn't even mention this if I still want people to talk to me when I get back home, but still...

You see, we were asked by Microsoft to get to the airport extremely early. We were actually the first people to check-in (never done that before, by the way. I've already been among the last, but never the first.) and already some of us (including me) were on a waiting list because our flight was extremely overbooked, even though we already had confirmed seats (or at least I did). Anyway, I kindly told the lady that, if there was any problem, I was ready to make the sacrifice of accepting an upgrade to Business class. And, guess what. I got it!

Here's my place in our plane's seating plan when I checked-in:

And here's the place where I actually sat:

That's right, I got to travel the only way people should travel during the longest flight I've done this year (according to FlightMemory at least).

Well, there's not much more to say for now. The pilot's announcing that we are about to start our descent towards cloudy and hot Seoul, so I'll get back to you with more later today.

Une idée originale de la part de l'équipe Imagine Cup : placer sur une carte les équipes en route vers Séoul ce week-end pour la finale Imagine Cup.

Ca aurait été encore mieux s'ils nous avaient demandé de nous placer nous-mêmes sur la carte, parce je ne suis pas du tout près du sud de la France en ce moment.

Alors, pour la prochaine fois : un mash-up qui utilise plazes et Virtual Earth, ça, ça aurait été cool...