Tomorrow afternoon I’m booked on an Icelandair flight to Halifax by way of Iceland. Schedules being what they are, I’ll overnight in Halifax before flying back to Charlottetown on Tuesday morning.

On either side of my lovely dinner with friends last night I’ve been spending a little tourist time in Copenhagen.

When I arrived yesterday morning in the centre of the city it was raining, with signs of raining more. So I diverted to the Grand Teatret movie house to see The Band’s Visit. This was a minor miscalculation: although English-language films are, as a rule, shown in their original version here with Danish subtitles, much of The Band’s Visit is in Hebrew and Arabic. Which the subtitles translated into Danish. It’s a testament to the other qualities of the film that my inability to understand most of the dialogue didn’t stand in the way of enjoying the film.

Just as the film was letting out I got an SMS from Til, my Plazes colleague, who had managed to find a way to inject juice into his powerless mobile phone with a one-time-use power pack after leaving his power supply at home. We met up at Europa, a café in the heart of the very, very crowded main shopping street. Despite the claustrophic journey and cramped quarters inside, I had an absolutely amazing sandwich with smoked salmon, smoked cream cheese and pears.

Til and I then headed down to Christiania, a neighbourhood I’d never visited in my four years of coming to Copenhagen. I was a nice way to spend the afternoon: we wandered around the alleys, grabbed an orange juice, listened to some music (and avoided some other music) and drank all the “partially self-governing” in.

Around supper time I left Til to his own devices and headed off to Peter and Nina’s for dinner.

This morning I cycled down to Riccos for one last coffee, and then continued downtown to the <a href=”http://rentabike.dk/>cycle rental shop to return my bike. Confusingly, they were closed, despite telling me that they would be open on Sundays. More confusingly, when I pressed the door bell outside the rental area I got buzzed in. To an empty, dark space. I decided to just lock up the bike, clip my voucher to the basket, and hope for the best, and went on my way.

I made my annual pilgrimage to the Danish Design Center where I took in the exhibitions on Living Wood and New Nordic Cuisine, did some shopping in the shop, and had a snack.

I had lunch at Chili — a burger place with an 8-item condiment caddy delivered with each burger — and then wandered about the edges of downtown for a while before walking to Gloria Biograf, a tiny one-screen repertory theatre near City Hall where I saw the 2:00 p.m. showing of En fri verden — the Ken Loach film It’s a Free World.

When the film let out I caught the bus home and began the process of closing down the operation here — washing the dishes, packing up my things, and getting ready for tomorrow’s travels.

It’s been a wonderful trip: the many kindnesses shown me by Olle and Luisa and Henriette and Thomas and Peter and Nina and Mark and Claus and Tobias and the rest of the Copenhagen crew have made me feel truly at home; reboot was great, with the added twist of being audience and presenter both this year, and the simple fact of working and living in the middle of everyday Copenhagen has been a welcome change.

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.