On my last trip to Copenhagen, in the spring of 2007, Olle and Luisa took me along to see a performance of Herr Schreber by Livingstones Kabinet. I was extremely, extremely tired — the combined effects of jetlag and reboot having caught up with me.

By despite my fatigue — and the fact that the show was almost entirely in Danish — it poked me in the eye in a very pleasant way. To the point where, once I returned home to Canada, I emailed Peter and Nina — the Kabinet — to order a copy of their CD Those of us who Sleep in Other Peoples Houses. Peter emailed back, in part:

I’ll mail you a copy of “Those of us who sleep” and let’s say you can buy me a beer if we meet again in Copenhagen or elsewhere.

I was touched by his generosity and resolved that, indeed, I would buy beer when next in Copenhagen. Which is now. And so last night, with the matchmaking of Luisa to thank, Olle, Luisa and I were treated to a wonderful evening at Peter and Nina’s house. I did bring beer — bottles of Czech beer from České Budějovice secured from the corner kiosk — and enjoyed a meal and conversation well into the night. Peter and Nina have two daughters, both delightful and entertaining in their own way. There was Scotch, and fantastic ice cream, and unicycle riding, and the gentle singing of hymns in Danish by daughter and friend at the grand piano.

It was a wonderful finish to my two weeks in Denmark.

Here’s the result of a “speed test” of the Internet connection at my apartment in Copenhagen:

My “down” speed is 18 times faster than my “up” speed. Which means that my ability to consume Internet content is more than satisfactory, every time I try to produce content — upload Flickr photos, add large attachments to blog posts and so on — my connection (and indeed my computer) grinds to a halt.

I was quite happy with the way my Working for Free talk went this morning: there was a good 15 minutes of discussion afterwards, and several good conversations after the fact. You can see my slides as a PDF.

I opened the talk with Raise the Dead of Wintertime by Allan Rankin. I dare say it was probably the first use of an Allan Rankin song in a conference of European technologists.

The default behaviour in the (otherwise excellent) Salling Clicker application for the Mac, when used with Keynote, is to jump to the last slide if you click and hold the down or right arrow key.

This caused no end of problems for me because I found that, about 10% of the time, my standard “click” to advance to the next slide was being interpreted as a “go to last slide” click. And going to the last slide, in the middle of your presentation is, well, somewhat disruptive. So here’s what I did to cure Clicker of this problem:

• Open the Salling Clicker Preferences.
• In the right-hand ‘Scripts’ menu under the ‘Clicker Items’ tab, open Keynote, and select the ‘Keynote Remote’ item.
• Click on the ‘gear’ icon at the bottom of the Scripts menu, and select ‘Edit in Script Editor’ and when Script Editor opens find the following three lines:

else if keyCode is in forwardKeys then
    tell application "Keynote" to activate
    tell application "SEC Helper" to simulate keyboard virtual keycode 119

• comment out the lines by adding two dashes to the beginning of each:

else if keyCode is in forwardKeys then
--    tell application "Keynote" to activate
--    tell application "SEC Helper" to simulate keyboard virtual keycode 119

• Save the script (File \| Save).
• Test in Salling Clicker.

I also liked the work of Finnish artist Ilkka Halso at Arken — there were several images from the Luontomuseo (“Museum of Nature”) series, including this one, which I found very compelling.

Some of the art I saw at Arken this afternoon was by Tim Noble and Sue Webster. On the card describing one of their pieces it refered to them as an “the artist couple,” but then later it was written, parenthetically, that they are “also a couple privately.” I’d never heard that turn of phrase before, and I quite like it — a few words that succinctly fill in the relationship blanks.