[[Olle]] took us to Forskningsavdelningen today — Research Department in Swedish. It’s a hackerspace here in Malmö that he’s a member of. To get there meant walking out of the bourgeois heart of the city into its near-industrial fringe and into a collection of low-rise red brick buildings that house, among other things, a Greek school and artists lofts.

Forskningsavdelningen itself is part of a broader “creative and political freehaven” called Utkanten that includes a performance space, workshops and lounge. The aesthetic is spray-paint and concrete slash old couches slash power tools. Emma Goldman meets This Old House means CGBG.

And it did all feel vaguely familiar: back in the mid-1980s I was involved with a group, Projects for Change, that you could call a sort of “analog Forskningsavdelningen.”

The tools of our trade were Letraset and Gestetner duplicators the great issues of the day were capital punishment, the war in El Salvador and the arms race. We had a tiny store-front at 139½ Hunter Street that contained some desks, a library, a slide projector, a turntable with a collection of Tom Waits records. And a lot of piss and vinegar. It was a rag-tag group of young and old, with political bents ranging from socialist to anarchist. I made a lot of good friends there, learned a lot about issues I knew nothing of, and developed the shape of my own political philosophy, such as it is.

Forskningsavdelningen is decidedly more digital in nature and is more Mechanics’ Institute than political salon. There are computers and telephones and an electric organ, soldering irons and old switchboards and piles of old hard disks. And a few copies of The Whole Earth Catalog.

Utkanten describes itself as a space “free from the capitalistic and static society that has invaded and corrupted our lives and tries to smash all our dreams and hopes that anything ever could be different than the present” and it’s interesting, heartening, to see digital work happening in such an environment when so much of the digital landscape is littered with the petty concerns of monetizing friendship, selling the dream of the finally-perfected mobile device and helping cloistered academics navigate their siloed specialties more effectively.

You don’t need a freehaven to set your sights on pointing digital work in more interesting, enlightening and valuable directions, but it certainly doesn’t hurt: working in an environment that’s infused with a spirit of boundarylessness does wonders for removing the walls of the prisons we choose to live inside.

My visit to Forskningsavdelningen has set my mind racing, and has ignited some long-dormant passions. And put me in a good frame of mind to take on reboot’s “action” theme with a newly-refreshed set of eyes.

As a longtime admirer and user of Mint, and someone never-quite-satisfied with the state of my RSS toolset, I was excited to find that Mint author Shaun Inman has a new project, a web-based feedreader called Fever.

Fever is an interesting kind of software: it’s not a desktop application, and it’s not a web-based service. Instead it’s a PHP application you install on your own server and thus to use it you need something capable of running PHP and MySQL. And while that “something” can be as simple as your own Mac or PC, and while the installation into that something has been made about as dead simple as such a process can be, it’s still not a process for those who find “drag the program’s icon into you Applications folder” about all the technical knowledge they want to possess. It was easy for me; I wouldn’t necessarily suggest my father take on the task.

Here’s the Fever elevator pitch:

Your current feed reader is full of unread items. You’re hesitant to subscribe to any more feeds because you can’t keep up with your existing subs. Maybe you’ve even abandoned feeds altogether. Fever takes the temperature of your slice of the web and shows you what’s hot.

That’s a pretty good description of where I was at: 128 feeds in NetNewsWire, a mixture of locals and must-reads and generic cruft, and a general lack of enthusiasm for the whole task combined with a vague feeling that if I dropped out of the flow entirely I might miss Something Important.

Fever aims to cure that malaise by sectioning your feed landscape into two big piles: the Kindling, must-read feeds like your son’s blog or news from Ward 3, and Sparks, the “inessential” feeds that serve only to pop interesting links into Fever’s automated automagical “Hot” list of items in your feed-pool that have received attention from multiple sources.

It took me about 30 minutes to get up and running with Fever: setting up a MySQL database, installing and running a pre-flight check script that makes sure your setup is Fever-capable (a pre-customer-service masterstroke), purchasing a license ($US30), exporting my feeds from NetNewsWire and importing into Fever. I then spent some time paring down my feed list, getting rid of old feeds that never get updated, and feeds that concerns interests I no longer have.

And here is the punchline: Fever actually did for me what it said it was going to. At first I couldn’t believe it: this morning there were only 5 unread items in my “Kindling” to read when I would usually be faced with 40 or 50 unread items in NetNewsWire. I thought something was broken, and fired up NetNewsWire to see what Fever was missing. It turns out that it wasn’t missing: there really were only 5 must-read items waiting for me to read; everything else was just a lot of “cool iPhone 3GS hacks”-like posts that I was simply in the habit of scanning right over. Now, if enough authors of my “Sparks” feeds think I really oughta know about the cool iPhone 3GS hacks, then that news will show up in “Hot.” Otherwise, I never have to be bothered with it.

Suffice to say that, at least so far, I am happy with my new Fever, and it’s become my newsreader of choice.

Steven Garrity, who blogs far too little for his own good, writes with insight about chronic belonging.

Our choice of Finnair as the airline to get us to Copenhagen was based entirely on price. Well, that and that it wasn’t Air Canada.

Things started out well enough: quick check-in, on-time departure, seats together. Our seats were a little cramped, mind you — more Japan Airlines-like than I would prefer — and the presence of Gigantor and his partner in the seats in front of us, constantly moving their seats back and forth, switching positions, flailing their arm rests back at us and complaining about the indignity of it all, didn’t help (recall that every social nuance, good and bad, is amplified 10 times in the low-oxygen environment 10km in the air). But we were making out okay.

And then the toilets filled up.

It seems that older planes such as ours are not, according to the flight attendant, equipped with advanced technologies that allow things like the filled-upness of the sewage tanks to be detected by anything other than faith. And so when the ground crew in Toronto forgot to empty them, the only way to detect this was when they filled up to the top over Greenland, 4 hours into the flight.

I’m not sure what the specific regulations governing this are, but apparently you’re not allowed to fly 200 Clamato and Diet Coke-filled passengers for 3 more hours without a way to pee. So arrangements were made to divert us to Reykjavik for de-sewage and re-fuel. And this is how we came to be on the ground in Iceland at 3:30 a.m.

The turnaround was quick — not surprising given the paucity of 3:30 a.m. air traffic at Keflavik Airport — but with the delay itself and the additional flying miles required for the diversion we were 90 minutes late getting into Helsinki and our flight to Copenhagen had already left.

Fortunately Helsinki-Vantaa Airport sports free, fast public wifi and I was able to tweet our delay, and this was quickly received and passed along. And Finnair quickly threw together a new routing for us via Stockholm that would see us arriving in Copehnagen only four hours later than planned.

The rest of the journey, save, ironically, any free time to pee, went without problems; we even had special “premium economy” seats on the SAS flight from Stockholm to Copenhagen that entitled us to slightly more leg room and a tasty snack of smoked salmon on hearty dark bread. Much to our surprise our luggage made it with us, and we were on the train to Malmö at 15h16.

[[Olle]], bless his heart, was wandering around the outside of Central Station in Malmö canvassing for our arrival, and he picked us up in his hands and dropped us at our lovely downtown apartment, kindly rented to us by his coworker Isak, and before we knew it we were, despite significant jet lag, showered, dressed, and eating Indian food accompanied by Chinese beer and discussing the geopolitical.

It’s good to be back.

When I was a kid I used to go and visit my grandmother in Brantford and she would take me to the public library and we would borrow books in a series that included The City of Gold and Lead.

I don’t remember much about the books but I do remember a character named Beanpole who, what with the books being post-apocalyptic and all, was forced to fashion his own crude eyeglasses.

I recalled Beanpole today as I drove around Burlington, Ontario trying to find someone to repair the arm of my own eyeglasses, an arm that inexplicably went wonky over the weekend. The sad truth I discovered is that eyeglasses, like so much else these days, are now considered a consumable that you simply throw away when they break; my image of finding a master optician who would rummage around in the cellar until he found the materials needed to weld my glasses back to form has been dashed. Like television repair, there is no more eyeglasses repair; it is a dead craft.

Which is how I find myself sitting in the food court of the Mapleview Mall beside a gaggle of Bluetooth-headset-wearing seniors drinking Grandma Lee’s coffee and waiting for the personable staff at Lens Crafters to whip up a brand new pair of eyeglasses for me.

The staff at Lens Crafters were nice enough and all, but they are factory workers, not craftspeople, and they could no more construct a Beanpole-like pair of eyeglasses from scratch than today’s auto mechanics could build their own car.

The DIY silver lining in this story is that when I was stymied by a one-day closure of my eye doctor yesterday and unable to retrieve my prescription, I remembered that last year I’d blogged my prescription, and I simply grabbed it from there. Let those who cast aspersions on my habit of obsessive self-documenting take this as a lesson that, at least once in a Blue Moon, there’s a practical pay-off.

My first big event with Catherine’s family after we started dating was to accompany her to her brother William’s and sister-in-law Debbie’s wedding in 1992. Coming from a tiny family as I do — both my parents are only children — it was an immersive short-course in large-family logistics. I survived, though, and have felt a welcome part of the clan ever since, even if, technically speaking, we’re still “dating.”

Seventeen years later and we’re back in Napanee for another family wedding. Both of Catherine’s grandmothers have since died, along with her Grandpa Joe, her Uncle Hilton, and her Aunt Lois. Niece Patricia and Nephew James have been born and grown up into mature teenagers, cousins Pam and Wendy have both had children, and wee nephew Allan, who was four years old at that first wedding, is now engaged himself. And he drives a pick-up truck and is very, very tall.

Saturday it was niece Valerie’s turn to get married, and this was the first time in a long time that everyone in the immediate family was able to sit down in one place and share a meal together. And what was once foreign and daunting now feels familiar and even, dare I say, comfortable.

Spending time with your partner’s family is like turning up the volume. Take everything you love about your partner, and everything you can’t stand, all their endearing qualities, and all the things you’d edit out if you had the chance. And then amplify them across a swath of relations.

It can be a shock to the system.

For the longest time I thought there was something unique and particularly demanding about all of this, but this weekend I realized that this is just how it is: what’s bred in the bone comes out in the flesh. So much of what I love about Catherine comes from this place and these people, and while swimming around in the undiluted extra-strength version of this ethos can be challenging, it’s also an immutable aspect of being part of this coalition.

And then, as I write this, comes the final piece of the puzzle: after 17 years, I am now part of this place, part of this life, part of the cacophony, as much responsible for what it is and what it means as any other. That’s both comforting and completely daunting.

Off to a final dinner (I’d say lunch, but that’s not what they call it here) with the family before heading off to the Rukavina version of same where Catherine can reach her own conclusions about its virtues.

Oliver has posted a brief video of the wedding we were at last night to his blog. Yes, Oliver has a blog.

The lads were talking on Thursday about how Ford is going to emerge from this automotive debacle as a winner, and suggested that Ford cars today are not, um, your father’s Ford. I was suspicious, but the lads seemed so sincere that I was willing to keep an open mind and when I was offered a Ford Focus as a rental car option this weekend I said yes instead of my usual “do you have a Corolla” response.

Well, if our experience over the last 24 hours is any gauge, the lads were right. Our brand new Ford Focus — 240 km on the odometer when we left Pearson Airport — is a comfortable, peppy, feature-rich automobile that seems light years from Found On Road Dead.

Confusingly, my favourite feature is a Microsoft one: the car has the much-touted Microsoft Sync. I never thought that having a car that could make Bluetooth love to my phone was a big deal, but then I synced (Synced?) my [[Nokia N95]] with the car and 30 seconds later we had podcasts streaming from the phone over the car’s stereo system and I was ready to place calls to my mother by holding down a button on the steering wheel and saying “call Frances.” It all worked well enough to seem like magic.

Sync-aside, the car has nice fit-and-finish, seems more spacious than our VW Jetta, gets great gas mileage, and is fun to drive.

While I continue to think cars are fundamentally evil, and hope to be car-free soon, it’s hard not to be impressed with whatever Ford did to go from Fairlane to Focus (and whatever GM didn’t do at the same time).