About a month ago Oliver and I had a few hours to kill on a Saturday afternoon. So I fired up the GarageBand, patched the audio gear in, brought in a bed track, and let Oliver have at it. I added some background vocals, did some light remixing, and this is the result. Perhaps only because I’m his father and love him dearly (and am very far away as I write), but listening to this brings a smile to my face every time.

Speaking of Olle: he mentioned to me last week that he has taken on the responsibility for the cooking from Monday to Thursday, a level of family commitment that I aspire to from (very) afar. He decided, to streamline the planning process, he would assign eat night a different theme: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are Swedish, Soup, Ethnic, and Fish respectively.

I decided that, if nothing else, he should be supported in his efforts. Which begat the procrastincation that is now olledinner.info.

So now you too can know what Olle and Luisa are eating for dinner.

Olle made a casual mention of the Linux command tree. New to me. Try it: it’s dreamy.

Apparently if you come to reboot enough times, eventually you organically become a speaker. And so it seems Thomas has moved my Working for Free proposal onto the things that will happen at reboot list. Comments, here or there, are welcome.

Nicole Simon recorded episode of her preboot interviews with me on the topic this evening where I start to explore the issue a little.

I’ve updated the Plazes to Nokia Maps Bookmarklet I created back in April. It now supports both Plazes.com and Plazes.net, and is smart enough to recognize a Plaze IDs in URLs in both common forms:

• 31704_teglbr_ndervej_6
• 31704

As before, just drag this link onto your browser toolbar:

Next, visit the page of a Plaze. Here’s the one for my office, for example, and here’s the same Plaze on Plazes.net. Now click the “Make Landmark” bookmark on your toolbar: after a brief pause you’ll be prompted to save a file.

Save this file and copy it to your Nokia Maps-enabled mobile, and open it. You’ll now be able to save the location and details of the Plaze as a landmark, which you can then use just like any other landmark in Nokia Maps.

It all started yesterday morning: Olle wired the night before that he had the day off, a beneficiary of the Swedish total shutdown for Midsommarafton — midsummer’s eve — and we made arrangements to meet up in Malmö and plot our usual revolutions.

And so I caught the 11:02 a.m. S-train up to Hellerup where I got on the long-distance train over Oresund to Sweden. Only an hour, and no need for a passport, but another country and another currency away.

Nokia Maps guided me from Central Station right to the door of Olle and Luisa’s exotic new pad on Löjtnantsgatan, a pleasant 20 minute walk around the edges of downtown.

Olle, true to form, played excellent host: the Pavoni’s boiler was fired up for coffee, gnocchi was prepared, and a sampling of exotic European alcohols brought out from behind the secret pantry door.

We spent a very pleasant afternoon talking about cultural assimilation, source code repositories and Mad Men and then headed off into shuttered Malmö on a fruitless cheese-gathering expedition that ended up across town at the penthouse crashpad of Olle’s sister and her boyfriend where the serious Midsommarafton action would take place.

This holiday — the Friday that falls nearest the summer solstice every year — is serious business in Sweden. And so from our high perch with views both across the sound to Copenhagen and across town to the Turning Torso, a dozen of us were indulged with grilled sausages, many varieties of herring, new potatoes, smoked cream cheese, a startling array of schnapps varieties, and excellent strawberry cakes for dessert.

It was a good and interesting crowd to celebrate with even if, upon revealing that I was born in 1966, the response was “oh, you don’t seem that old.”

So apparently I am old now. At least to those born in 1980. Oddly, it was the music of my youth, not theirs, on the stereo all night long. It was like the playlist of the old YMCA youth dances teleported ahead from 1982. Sade. Tina Turner. Led Zeppelin. Elton John. Apparently everything old is new again.

What with all the schnapps, discussion of how backwards Canada is for still being part of the Monarchy, and assorted other raucous merrymaking, my best-laid plans of heading out early so as to be in bed before midnight were dashed: we stumbled out the door, happy, healthy and wise at 2:00 a.m.

Olle expertly guided me back to Central Station through the deserted streets of Malmö to catch the train; fortuitously the 2:22 a.m. was ready to leave just as I stepped on board. I was in the heart of Copenhagen at Norreport by 3:00 a.m., and there joined the drunken shawarma-clutching masses trying to navigate the night busses home.

While I was relatively firm on my feet, I was in no shape to parse complex bus schedules, and so ended up on the 94N which, unfortunately, was not going to take me home. Fortunately I realized this before it was too late, and got out at Fredrik Bajers Plads where I waited around for the 3:45 a.m. 96N bus that would take me almost to my door. While I was waiting, the sun came up.

I was in my bed just after 4:00 a.m., with the alarm set for 9:00 a.m., as I had an important party to attend Saturday morning. While I fully expected a sleepless night of simulated ocean travel, I fell quickly to sleep, and while I didn’t exactly sleep soundly, I made out okay, and so when the alarm went off it was more “oh, darn” than “I want to die, now.”

This morning presented a series of complex logistical challenges, just the kind of thing you want to engage in after a rollicking Midsommarafton: I needed to ge me some coffee, find a picnic lunch, and find a birthday present for a four year old.

The four year old in question is Penny, daughter of my friends Henriette and Thomas (you may remember them from our trip to Louisiana last year). Today is Penny’s birthday, and I was invited to Dyrehave, a forested park just north of Copenhagen to join in the celebrations.

So at 9:30 a.m. I hopped on my bicycle and headed to the local BR toy store.

Which was closed until 10:00 a.m.

So I diverted to Riccos for coffee (excellent, excellent coffee), then headed back to BR once it opened.

My challenge: find good birthday gift for a girl, I’ve only met once, who, because she speaks Danish and I speak English, I know almost nothing about. I wandered around BR in a daze of Lego and Playmobil and Barbie Princess Caravans for a good while until I settled on a cool-looking set of maracas, a couple of bouncy balls, some tiny stickers and some foamy dinosaurs. All wrapped on in a cloth marbles bag. I crossed my fingers and continued on.

A brief stop into Fotex to get some picnic supplies, and I was on the bike racing home to back before running to catch the train. Fortunately Klampenborg station, where I was headed, is only 10 minutes north (one of the fringe benefits of being based in the Nordvest). I caught the 11:19 a.m. S-train north, and was headed into the forest just after 11:30 a.m. Half an hour late, but not bad all things considered.

Henriette talked me in to the park via a series of scavenger hunt-like SMS (“walk straight ahead to the white house”) and eventually I ran into Thomas and found the festivities just getting started.

Penny’s birthday was truly delightful: presents were opened (she seemed to like the maracas; she also got two trumpets for her birthday, which must be something of a record), picnic lunches were pulled out of picnic baskets, an exotic boat-shaped cake served, and games of dodgeball and fruit salad (the later of which extended my Danish colour-naming vocabularly significantly). It rained a little in the middle, but then the sun came out brilliantly and shone for the rest of the day. I got to meet Penny’s grandparents, and a bunch of Henriette and Thomas’s friends (vigourous dodgeball play does wonders for removing language barriers).

By 3:00 p.m. my crazy party lifestyle was beginning to catch up with me, and so I bid all farewell and made my way back to the train. Twenty minutes later I was in the middle of a deep nap.

This is my fourth spring trip to Copenhagen. I started coming for reboot and was lucky to make friends along the way. Now I come to spend time with friends, and am lucky to take in reboot while I’m here. Thanks to everyone for your warm hospitality; skaal.

I set up TinyPlazer.com a few months ago as a mobile-device-friendly way to update my Plazes geo-presence. I targetted it for my Nokia N95 and because I use it without a data plan in Canada, its “tinyness” assumed a wifi connection. In other words, I wanted it to be lightweight, but I wasn’t counting the bytes.

Here in Copenhagen I do have a data plan on my mobile: it costs me 0,02 DKK per kilobyte of data transfer (this is 0.004 CAD, which makes Canadian Rogers Wireless pre-paid data 12.5 times more expensive than Danish Telia pre-paid data).

So today I used TinyPlazer.com for the first time over an actual GSM data connection. The process of identifying and confirming my Plaze, entering my status message, and receiving a confirmation cost me 0,30 DKK. Or about 6 cents CAD.

Which is certainly reasonable, and about 1/3 the price of updating my presence by SMS (0,20 DKK).

But, I ask myself, could it be even less?

The Web Developer add-on for Firefox told me the weight of all of the objects on the initial TinyPlazer.com page was 3KB: 1KB for the HTML itself, 1KB for the logo and 810 bytes for the CSS.

I was able to reduce the size of the CSS file from 810 bytes to 321 bytes just by removing styles I wasn’t actually using, consolidating some styles together, and removing whitespace. Similarly, I chopped 200 bytes out of the page itself by shortening class names, removing whitespace, and making better use of CSS, taking it from 1070 bytes to 848 bytes. I changed the logo from one big graphic to a small Plazes logo following by text, reducing the weight to 593 bytes.

The result was a total reduction in page weight to 1762 bytes.

The second “select your Plaze” has a varying weight depending on the number of Plazes returned. Because experience has shown I almost always pick from the top 5 displayed, even though I display 10, I reduced this to 5 selections.

Testing my changes with an actual GSM “plazing.” I found the combined effect of all of these changes lowered the per-Plazing cost by GSM data from 0,30 DKK to 0,22 DKK, or by about 25%.

This charge suggests a total data transfer of 11KB. My N95’s log (Applications \| Tools \| Log) shows 5KB sent and 5KB received:

Presumably Telia is doing some “round up to the nearest KB” to get the 11KB data charge.

Looking at the Apache server logs for this session, I see a record of five transactions, four GETs and one POST. Total data transfered: 3272 bytes. But this doesn’t count the HTTP send and response headers.

Looking at a sample HTTP transaction in more detail, the request for the CSS file, using cURL’s “trace” option, I find that the request for the 321 bytes of the file itself involves 242 bytes of send headers and 283 bytes of response headers, meaning that 321 bytes actually takes 846 bytes to transfer.

I traced the total data transfer for each of the five transactions:

So for what I’m able to count, I get a total sent data of 1365 bytes (vs. my phone’s 5KB counter) and a total received data of 4534 bytes (again, vs. 5KB counted by my phone), for a total of 6899 bytes. Which is not 11KB.

To try and see if there’s some sort of uncountable overhead involved with GSM data, I used Profimail to pick up my IMAP email over a GSM connection, and reset its data counters before I did. Profimail counted a total of 0.3KB sent and 5.69KB received, for a total of 5.99KB. My phone’s own log, however, shows 1KB sent and 8KB received, for a total of 9KB, which is 3KB more than Profimail reports. Telia billed me 0,20 DKK for this session, or 10KB.

This suggests that the data counting is happening at some deeper level, beyond my ability to measure, and perhaps involving the overhead of using TCP/IP over GSM. This “premium” appears to be about 50% of the data transfer that I can calculate, so that:

I’d welcome any insight others might have into this issue, and any suggestions you might have for reducing either the measurable or the “invisible” data transfer payload.

I made a repeat visit to the Telia outlet in Copenhagen Central Station to pick up a SIM card for my time in the Copenhagen. I’ve updated the page with details about how to do this. I’m amazed again how easy this is: no identification required, just pay 99 DKK and you’re out the door, slip in the SIM card and you’ve got a Copenhagen number.

I’m sure there are places other than Telia where you can do this, but it seems all the electronics and mobile shop outlets otherwise have no concept of what a “pre-paid SIM” is, or aren’t in a position to sell one.

Here are the Danish coins that end up in my pocket most often:

There are other coins in circulation, including the “ore,” 100 of which make up one krone, but the four above — 1 krone, and 2, 10 and 20 kroner coins — appear to be the big four.

It can sometimes take me years to see obvious patterns, and, indeed, it’s taken me four years to realize the symmetry among these four.

Here’s a ballparking guide for Canadians, based on June 2008 exchange, for what each is worth:

• 1 DKK - 21 cents - “a quarter”
• 2 DKK - 43 cents - “two quarters”
• 10 DKK - 2.12 - “a toonie”
• 20 DKK - 4.24 - “five bucks”

The 20 DKK coin is the killer for me, and it’s the route by which I ended up leaving a 5 dollar tip on a 7 dollar cup of coffee yesterday.

In this CBC report about downtown Charlottetown parking there was mention that the developer of the proposed new downtown hotel, Homburg (emphasis mine):

…wants a new parking garage, built either next to the Charlottetown Hotel or on land behind the Queen Street Parkade. City council rejected that idea this week.

Here’s the area in question:

Without tearing down at least three buildings, those housing Cedar’s, Royal Tandoor, Monsoon and Back Alley Records, as far as I can see there is no “land behind the Queen Street Parkade” on which a new parking garage could be built, other than the thin strip that’s currently used to dump the existing garage’s snow.

Am I missing something here?