Usability?

I've recently tried to submit my paper to VL/HCC 2006. The good news is that I got a paper accepted, the bad news is that it's only a short paper, the conference is quite expensive and seems to last all week. So this is larger dent out of my money/holiday budget than I wanted. Still I've worked on Visula for a while (as a background task) so it makes sense to write it up. On the brighter side, I don't need to talk for so long :-/

So today is the deadline. I've been very quiet recently since I've been trying to condense 8 pages into 4, and now it's ready.

The instructions to submit the paper are long and infathomable. The login process is protracted. The links in the page have broken icons. A link to submit the paper is missing. An instruction to fix the link is also infathomable and refers to boxes that don't exist. The upload process is slow and error-prone. The PDF verification process has a really shitty UI. After a few attempts, I get my PDF verified. The submission link just takes me back to the start. Then this morning, the entire site has crashed due to lack of disk space on the server. I still have no fricking clue how to submit the paper, I'll randomly click some more when the server comes up. I emailed the tech support yesterday with no response.

My next usability hurdle comes when I need to register for the conference. This website seems nice and clean. I enter a few details, hit a button and get a blank screen. Bam. Nothing. Try again, same result. Apparently I should fax a non-existent registration form to a non-existent fax number.

Now, the irony of the situation is that this conference is concerned with usability and human-centric computing! Still it's not too late to withdraw...