From Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino comes a pointer to a typophile’s dream toy: Wordle. Give Wordle some text, and it creates a “word cloud,” sizing the words based on their frequency. I fed it the entire text of Anne of Green Gables, and here’s what it came up with:

You can see a larger JPEG, or visit the Wordle itself (and make your own).

I get a local newspaper or real estate flyer through my door almost every day here in Copenhagen, so I decided it was time to be able to parse the Danish listings:

Here’s what I’ve learned:

• Udb is short for Udbetaling — “payment.”
• Knt is short for Kontantpris — “cash price.”
• Brt is short for Brutto — “gross.”
• Nt is short for Netto — “net.”

Of course I have no idea what these terms actually mean in the Danish context. Is the Udbetaling the “down payment” or the “monthly maintenance fee.” Any light my Danish friends can shed would be welcome.

The 1,925,000 DKK “cash price” is about $400,000 Canadian. The 100,000 DKK “payment” is about $20,000 Canadian.

Two little pages constructed partly to help me visualize reboot, but mostly to help me procrastinate: reboot people in pictures and reboot people on a map:

It seems that Thomas wasn’t kidding: I actually am talking at reboot — being the on the schedule makes it so:

Being a speaker gives me access to the secret Speakers Guide, in which I find a lovely innovation:

Questions and answers are abandoned this year. Instead they’ve been replaced by “thoughts”. Ie. ending your session asking “So what’s your thoughts?” instead of asking “Questions?”. Not commenting on each thought being shared, just passing on the torch to the next one in the crowd that has a thought. You’ve just inspired several hundred highly thoughtful people, let them share…

You may recall Oliver’s puffy eye from two years ago, a thrilling episode that is forever associated with London in Oliver’s mind. This morning I woke up with my own, albeit less severe, version thereof:

The eye has gradually been returning to normal over the morning. Perhaps some bizarre Valby tree pollen was the cause?

Sankt Hans — St. John’s Eve — in the suburb of Valby was lots of fun. All the action took place at the house next door to [[Luisa]]’s parents: I arrived to find a sea of children and their parents dining on a buffet of tasty delights. [[Olle]] grabbed me a plate, Luisa brought me some wine, and we men hunkered down in the corner for some serious talk with Luisa’s father about Italian wine, urban agriculture, and the similarities of grappa, slivovitz and other distilled beverages.

Halfway through the night one of the big tablers said “who’s the guy from Canada?” and when I raised my hand, and explained I was from Prince Edward Island, I had an instant conversational entrée to the Anne of Green Gables reader across the table. We had a nice chat about U.S. politics, about the difficulties of learning Danish for an English speaker (a topic considerably enhanced by her imminent graduation as a speech-language pathologist) and about whether PEI is as beautiful as L.M. Montgomery wrote it to be (I had to admit that, at least for now, it still is).

Somewhere in there we actually did sing Vi elsker vort land (“We love our country”) — there were song sheets and everything — and also Happy Birthday, or at least the Danish version thereof, as it was one of the wee folk’s day (the big line in this song is “med dejlig chokolade og kager til” — “all with tasty chocolate and cakes.”)

The kids went to bed, the crowd thinned out, some mind-cracklingly good espresso was served to accompany the fruit salad for dessert, and before I knew it it was 10:30 p.m. (although you’d never know it from the light still in the sky at that hour).

I retrieved my plates from the dishwasher — I attempted a reasonable facsimile the [[Catherine]]’s standard tapas offerings as my contribution — loaded up the bike, and walked with Olle and Luisa to the train, honoured to again have a backstage pass into regular everyday Danish life.

I decided to move ahead to the next level of the S-train experience for my trip down to Valby this evening: taking my bicycle on the train. It turned out to be very simple: I bought one ticket for me (20 DKK), and another ticket for my bicycle (12 DKK):

When the train arrived on the platform, the first carriage had a huge image of a bicycle painted on its side, so it wasn’t hard to figure out which carriage was meant for me.

There is a cycleway that leads from just the other side of the Bispebjerg S-train station down to Nørrebrogade and then across to the end of Jægersborggade. I cycled the route with GPS running this afternoon on my way back from shopping (I bought bread a Katz Kitchen) and you can see my route here.

Along the way I encountered a piece of public art seeming custom-tailored for me: it’s a large paved mound about 25 feet across with its latitude and longitude painted on it in big block letters:

It must be a relatively new installation, as it doesn’t show up in Google or Yahoo Maps nor in Google Earth.