LAW 2007

I went to the London Algorithmic Workshop, held at King's College London a few days ago. The main purpose is to see people, and to have some feeling of being in a city. (I don't expect to understand things like counting runs in a string using automata and such; although there is a talk about my ex-boss and his student's previous work.)

For all sorts of reasons, the cost of going there had increased considerably from the original estimate.

One thing is that I ended up staying at a hotel. Finding a cheap hotel in central London is like 買大細, for you never know how bad it can be. There are always terrible comments on the web for whatever hotel you pick. At the end, I picked one which seem to have not-too-bad comments. When I arrived I was relieved - it was very small as expected, but tidy and clean. From outside, the room is like a storage room or so at a turn of the stairs, but as long as you shut yourself inside it feels alright. There is no toilet/bathroom inside - have to use the shared ones outside. Apparently, this is the default for cheap hotels.

The return trip coincided with the heaviest snow of UK in 10 years (or something like that). You look out of the train window and it is white everywhere. But while the weather was bad enough, the train was very accurately on time.