Wow. It’s midnight, and I’ve been up since 5:00 a.m. (who could sleep with a day at LegoLand on the horizon?). A full trip report to follow, but if you’re playing the home game you can get started with the photographs.

Note that if you’re a Flickr “friend” or “family” you’ll see lots of cute photos of Oliver in there; if you’re not, you’ll see lots of photos of the back of Oliver’s head. Privacy lines get drawn in funny places. If you’re friend or family and not on the secret inside, drop me a line.

Once Oliver found out that LegoLand existed, there was no stopping him. So in an hour we’re hopping on the train for the three hour ride across the bottom of Denmark, staying overnight in the exciting LegoLand Village Hostel, and then spending the day in the park on Tuesday. Laptop is staying back here in Copenhagen, so expect radio silence until Wednesday.

Saturday was spent with Olle and Luisa in their 3rd floor cabin enjoying a “traditional Danish lunch.” Wonderful fun.

It was a beautiful sunny day yesterday, so I did the bellacommute into reboot on my borrowed bicycle. I’m getting a little better at traffic management, and in figuring out how to get on and off the bike without falling (it has a child seat on the back, so the standard “swing leg over” technique doesn’t work).

One thing I didn’t anticipate is that bicycling takes energy. Not huge amounts of energy. But it’s a good idea to at least have breakfast before you head out. I didn’t, and so halfway there I entered a sort of higher level of dizzy consciousness. When I arrived at the Kedelhallen I think I must have looked like I was having a heart attack, as I received several “he looks like he’s having a heart attack” stares from my peers.

The highlights of day two of the conference for me included:

• Maya Lotan’s demo of urbanseeder, an online flirting service: it was nice to see someone thinking about bringing mistakes and happenstance and chance into the digital realm.
• Rasmus Fleischer’s presentation on The Grey Commons; it was refreshing to hear an intelligent, thoughtful take on media piracy.
• Jyri Engeström’s talk, titled Blind Men’s Baseball, where he talked about bringing the kind of presence tools we have on the web into mobile devices to add a sort of “peripheral vision” to the mobile experience.
• Imity. I’m not completely sure what it is or how it works, but it was pretty cool.
• Chris Heathcote’s demo of Apache running on a Series 60 mobile phone (next step: install it on my Nokia N70).
• The aforementioned 20 x 20 presentation — biggest thrill I’ve had in a long time, both to give and to watch. Got a lot of good feedback after too.
• Having dinner with Ali Pasha and Frank Westphal and Olle and getting to participate in a real Conversation of Programmers about Programming, something completely new for me.
• RUST. I’m not sure whether I was technically “clubbing” or not, and it only took about an hour for the smoke and the noise to make me lose my voice and my game, but it was fun. (Note to Europe: you do know that smoking is bad for your health, don’t you?)
• Getting a demo of XShare from Sourabh Sharma in the middle of RUST. Anyone who can sell me on the virtues of their product when I can’t hear what they’re sating is a born salesman.
• Learning how to exchange business cards via Bluetooth from Henriette.
• Riding home on the bicycle at midnight in the drizzle after it was all over.

Reboot 8.0 was about “renaissance” and I think my experience of the conference was more about the verb of that than the noun: I missed most of the scene-setting theoretical talk, and instead enjoyed a lot of demo by doers. In the end, I had lots of fun, renewed some good ties from last year and made some new ones, and know in my heart I’ll be back for 9.0.

Guy Dickinson snarfed me along for a PechaKucha orgy this afternoon. “Hey, we’re doing this 20 slides for 20 seconds each thing later… have you got anything?”

Got on the bicycle, tore back to the apartment (yes, it does take 12 minutes), got on the laptop and whipped up a Keynote presentation about something I choose to call “making public data public[er]” — looking at the various “public service computing” projects I’ve been hacking together this year.

Back on the bike, back to reboot, tracked down Guy, put the presentation on his PowerBook and then suddenly it was time to go. Amazing experience: all the adrenalin I’ll need for the next month or so. Presentations from Guy, Michael Smith, Matt Webb, and Alexander Kjerulf were equally thrilling to watch.

You’re going to have a hard time convincing me that any presentation should take longer than 20 x 20 from now on. Thanks for having me along, Guy.

Here’s the PDF of the presentation if you’re interested. And you’ll find links to most everything I talked about in the Rukapedia.

New term to describe “commuting by bicycle on a sunny day”. You heard it heard first.

First, if you’re the person who left me a voicemail yesterday at 19:35, please phone me back: I can’t for the life of me make sense of the Danish-only voicemail system on my mobile.

To Guy, who I met yesterday again in almost the same place we met a year ago: you will never get your house paid off. You are obviously extremely well-suited to being a teacher, and if you’re ever going to do it, you should do it now: the world will be a better place if you do (and I’ll send my son to be your student).

And a question: are we all going to have to eat fruit in the renaissance, or is there a chance we’ll take chocolate with us?

I didn’t get to commute by bicycle — it was pouring rain when I set out to leave and I lack the proper rain slicks to make a rainy bike trip — so I quickly calculated a backup plan involving walking and bus (it takes about 3x as long this way as by bike, proving why bikes are so useful). I overshot the Nordre Fasanvej stop because I thought Nordre was somebody’s name — “Hey, Nordre, pass the salt!” — whereas it actually means “north” (as “søndre” means south). But only by a block. So I arrived at the Kedelhallen early enough that there was still a health stack of name tags in the “P” pile.

On the way in the alley I ran into Dannie Jost and Henriette and it was like Old Home Week. Quite a change from reboot 7 last year where I was able to slink in under the radar; today Dannie greeted me with “I thought you were going to ride your bike!?” There are no secrets.

To save you from an exhaustive blow-by-blow of the day’s events (and to save myself — I have to get up in 7 hours and do it all over again), here are the highlights of my day:

• Adam Arvidsson condensed a year-long introduction to sociology into 45 minutes. It was brilliant. Now all I need is the same exercise for the other disciplines and I’ll be able to make up for my lack of formal education (always running into problems when people quote James Joyce and I’ve no idea who they’re talking about…). Favourite thought: in the 21st century social bonds are unstable, and we’re continually forced to reproduce them (we can no longer rely on technologies like religion to cement our bonds); in this way we are becoming more like monkeys.
• Ulla-Maaria Mutanen on “Crafter Economics.” I wish Catherine could have been there — this was a perfect demonstration of the overlap of our two disciplines. Ulla-Maaria’s thinklink project is intriguing. Favourite idea: “learning motivates exchange” (mostly because that’s what motivates me).
• An early morning exchange with Martin Roell and others where we talked about how the colours of photos in Flickr change with the seasons, and how we could write an app to extract a sort of Flickr Colour Temperature — the aggregate colour of the photos flowing in on a given day — in the style of the terror alert system in the USA.
• Running into Matthias Müller-Prove again and remembering that he wore red trousers at reboot 7, and intriguing (or confusing?) him with that memory. This year, by the way, he is wearing a sort of “ruddy tan” trouser.
• A chat with Jacob Friis Saxberg, also an acquaintance from reboot 7.
• JP Rangaswami — best speaker of the day, bar none; a sort of “Steve Jobs, but with dissonance.” Favourite ideas: “we never used to have privacy, why do we need it now?” and “the way to prevent bad ratings [in recommendation engines] is to do good things.”
• Steve Coast on OpenStreetMap. A brilliant idea and a tremendous tool for humanity going forward. Steve’s an excellent presenter, too.
• Meeting up with Felix Petersen from Plazes again, and meeting the “Plazes Portugal” guy — Pedro Custódio who is organizing a conference called SHiFT in Portugal in September (a reason to return to Portugal presents itself as if by magic).
• A demo by the guys from The Pirate Bay. Except they had nothing to demo because their servers had been seized. And the few questions they received they had no real answers for.
• Stumbling into a late-night coven of consultants gathered in a circle far from the madding crowd discussing their craft — Ton and Elmine and Martin and others. Fascinating to eavesdrop.
• Learning that both Olle and my new acquaintance Jonas Bengtsson were both familiar with the erstwhile Canadian television drama Danger Bay (we talked about lots of others things too).
• A presentation on technology use in schools by David Smith that renewed by faith in humanity. David is a teacher who in most situations other than the one he finds himself in would be sacked for blaspheming; as it is, he is a smart, literate, and conducting an inspiring stealth of networked culture into his school. Bravo.
• Sitting between Rob Paterson and Rick Segal, two fellow Canadians at the opposite ends of several spectrums.
• Leaving my laptop at home. I bought a small black and red Stephen Regoczei style notebook at Føtex for 9 kroner on my way to the Kedelhallen; it and my four colour pen served me extremely well.
• Google Will Eat Itself.

By the time I looked at my watch for the first time, it was 10:30 p.m. By the time I got home it was midnight. I will leave reboot stickers for Oliver on the dining room table and steal off again into the morning before he gets up. Tomorrow, hell or high water, I will ride a bicycle to reboot.