I spent three nights at Hotel Transit-Loft in Berlin last week. The hotel was relatively cheap (60 EUR for a private room with bath), very clean, had nice friendly English-speaking staff, and put on a good breakfast (that runs until Noon, which is nice).

The hotel is convenient to Alexanderplatz, from which you can get almost anywhere in Berlin by U- or S-Bahn (with the M4 tram under construction, I found the best way to get to the hotel was to take the M2 tram from Alexanderplatz, get off at the Knaackstraße, and walk down Immanuelkirchstraße to the hotel — it’s about 2 blocks and the hotel is well-signed).

Perhaps because the hotel caters to families and youth, it’s very, very low key. I didn’t need to leave a credit card number to reserve, or even to check in: I just walked in and they handed me a key. There’s a large breakfast room/lounge, and you can get drinks 24/7 from the desk. The only thing that it would take to make a perfect picture is free wifi (there’s a T-Mobile hotspot that’s accessible from the entire hotel, with access starting at 2 EUR for 15 minutes). There’s a coin-operated Internet terminal available otherwise.

Rooms are huge, with giant windows and substantial washrooms with shower and toilet. It’s a no-frills setup, so you won’t find telephone, television, hair dryer, etc. in your room.

Plenty of nice places to eat in the neighbourhood, both along Immanuelkirchstraße and up Greifswalder Straße. The State O Maine bar just across the street offers an hour’s work of free wifi if you buy a drink; sit outside on the patio there and you won’t wish you were anywhere else.

Apparently there’s a major international cycle race happening on my street on Thursday:

I’ve got no problem with the notion of holding a cycle race on city streets — cycling’s great, and we should all do more of it.

It would be nice, however, for race organizers, or the city officials who allow for the street closures, to let residents know how we’ll be affected. There’s nothing on the race website other than the map above; I had to call the race office (which sent me to someone’s cell phone) to find out that my street will be closed from Noon to 7:00 p.m. on Thursday and that I won’t be able to take my car in or out during that time (I phoned the city for confirmation of this, and they told me “full closure” would extend from 1:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.).

Again, I support the race, and I don’t even mind the inconvenience. But if you’re going to rent out my street, the least you can do is tell me in advance.

Well, I set [[Oliver]] loose on Scratch last night (“a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art”). Oliver’s younger than the target age of 8, but he’s also very good at iterative learning (i.e. click on everything, see what it does, proceed accordingly; it’s a method not unlike the way I work everyday).

Watching him use the system, which requires almost no typing (really just numbers — changing “move 10 steps” to “move 20 steps”), is instructive. I think he groks the metaphor — dragging programmatic jigsaw puzzles pieces together to make combinations like “move 10 steps, make a pop sound, repeat” — and with a little practice he’ll be able to do some interesting things.

Indeed, much to my delight, he has already managed to figure out how to change the background of the “stage” and he was able to record the sound of himself making a “meow” sound and attach it to a cat sprite. This is way, way more fun than Logo ever was (it’s hard to get excited about moving a turtle around a surface in the age of Spiderman).

On a higher level, it’s interesting to see that Oliver’s big interest is in mixing the characters of his favourite TV shows together in new ways: one of our first experiments together was to take the code sample “Pacman” game and replace Pacman with Dora the Explorer.

Although Oliver knows that Dora and Lunar Jim and Arthur and Caillou all inhabit separate TV worlds, he sees no problem with mixing them all together inside Scratch. Which raises some interesting questions about remix culture and intellectual property. When Oliver creates some sort of combo Dora-Barney-Backyardigans pong game with ghost sounds and tractors and wants to release it for others to use, is that okay?

While there may be copyright arguments to suggest not, in a just world I have to think that it’s only fair that kids be allowed to remix the commercial icons that are so ingrained a part of kid life these days. Surely we deserve some recompense for agreeing to include Pooh toothbrushes and Dora toilet paper in our lives?

[[Oliver]] and I are going to take Scratch out for a ride this afternoon. Oliver seems convinced that we’ll be able to code up a new Dora the Explorer game. We’ll see.

I grabbed a Moleskine from the shelf on my way out the door to [[reboot]] a couple of weeks ago; as chance would have it I grabbed the same one that I’d used to take notes for reboot 7.0 two years ago. So on one page I have written “Caught the 21:42 train just as sun was starting to set” from 2005 and on the next “Humanism 101” from 2007. Here’s a random assemblage of notes and links from the 2007 pages:

• Sapere aude — from Adam Arvidsson’s Humanism 101. Also “humanity is a project; note something we have but rather something we do.”
• From While We Wait for the Babel Fish by Stephanie Booth: some people are “language bridges:” they knit together communities of different languages with their ability to speak/read/write multiple languages.
• Tom Raferty spoke very practically about creating a carbon-neutral data centre in Cork. The session was dense with useful technical morsels: 1U servers use 220W of power; a 40U rack uses 20kW of power; Dublin bandwidth costs 15 EUR/meg/month (Cork is much more expensive); a Second Life avatar uses 1.75 kWh/year (as much as a person in Brazil); servers are commonly rated in “Watts per $1000 spend”; in Ireland the peak demand for electricity is 3:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.; wind power in Ireland meets 0% to 30% of demand; 21 degrees C and 45% humidity is the ideal server environment; average exhaust from servers is 30-40 degrees C. And for some reason Ireland has had the right to grow sugar beets taken away from it.
• I noted vizi.nl but I cannot remember why.
• Someone raised the notion of “T9-friendly URLs” which is something I’ve thought a lot about (T9 is a system for typing words predictively on a mobile phone numeric keypad — see t9.com for more).
• The Availabot is, ironically, still not available. But it’s still a neat idea.
• I’ve a sense that Fred, from Webreakstuff, is a very interesting guy. Which prompts me to take a look at Goplan. Nicole did an interview with Fred.
• Symbol Sourcebook: An Authoritative Guide to International Graphic Symbols was recommended.
• I really enjoyed the micropresentation by Jeremy Keith on “hypertext.” It was perhaps the session that made best use of the “15 slides, 20 seconds each” format. Here are the slides themselves (PDF).
• Somebody (who?) said “it’s not where you are, it’s what you do about it.” I like that.
• Somebody else (must get better at attribution in the notebook!) recommended The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger.
• The presentation by Matt Jones on Dopplr was interesting. I’m not convinced of Dopplr’s utility, but I might not be in the heart of the “travels all the time” market. No, hold on a minute, I am.
• Jyri’s talk on Microblogging demonstrated yet again his skills at divining interesting order from chaos. He is so at home on the stage.
• Ordinarily I would find talks like Flow: A New Consciousness For A Web Of Traffic by Stowe Boyd a little too ethereal for my tastes. But somehow I took a lot out of it, mostly that industrial systems, like present-day schools, will do everything in their collective power to prohibit peer to peer communication — Stowe called this the “war on flow.” I brought up the example of the banning of electronic devices in PEI’s Eastern School District and Stowe’s response was, in essence, “yah, that’s it.”
• Lee Bryant’s session on A Town called Kozarac.ba was refreshingly grounded in a real situation with real people using the web to do practical stuff (like raising money for fire engines in their community).
• I would like to hire Ewan McIntosh to come and be a teacher at [[Oliver]]’s school: this guy knows where it’s at, and reminds me why I originally wanted to be a teacher.
• Guy Dickinson, the hardest working man at reboot, did a demo of ThinkFold, a web-based collaborative outliner. I only caught the tail end of the demo; Guy has promised to demo it online (what better way?) sometime soon.
• Someone (yes, I know, attribution) pointed to Night Driving, a VW campaign. It’s enough to make me want to become a serious driver again. Almost.

I said to [[Olle]] after reboot was all over that it seemed to me that the evolution of a reboot participant over several years involves the realization that it’s okay to skip stuff and, indeed, that by skipping stuff you increase dramatically your chance of random conversations with interesting people on the lawn (or in the hall, or around the urinal). I’m not quite there yet, but this year I made a better job of it than last, and I relaxed into the warm embrace of reboot rather than trying to wring every morsel from it. I had fun, and I’ll be back.

Nokia Media Transfer is a very nice application that links phones like my [[Nokia N70]] with the Mac: it syncs iPhoto with the phone’s camera, iTunes with the phone’s music library, and the “Nokia Device Browser” component allows for exploration of and file transfer to/from the Nokia’s memory. Very nicely done.

Night Cap is a new dessert/coffee/bar in Charlottetown located above Hunter’s Ale House at the corner of Kent and Prince. Last night [[Oliver]] and [[Catherine]] and I, always eager to try what’s new, went there after dinner.

What’s Good

• Super-friendly and attentive staff.
• Bright, airy space with interesting views out into the city from the second floor.
• Dizzying array of beverage choices, alcoholic and non.
• Child-friendly.
• Close proximity to our house.

What’s not Good

• The black tablecloths were dirty. Very obviously. And they were wrinkled. The effect was not unlike “used bedsheets thrown on the table.”
• Dessert is expensive: expect to pay $6 or $7 for almost anything.
• No pie. They ad in The Buzz clearly says they have pie. But this came as a complete surprise to the manager. I wanted pie.
• My wine glass and Catherine’s glass coffee mug were streaked and spotted; all the glassware could use a good polish.
• Huge portion sizes — way, way too much dessert for any normal human (the manager did say they’re working on adjustments here).

The general aesthetic and layout were more “Smitty’s with dessert” than “42nd Street Lounge.” While the graphic design and brand positioning seemed to suggest an “upscale” joint, there seemed to be an odd array of characters coming in and out and milling about, perhaps due to the association with Hunter’s Ale House. It seemed perhaps that a trivia game might break out at any moment. Catherine and I looked at each other on the way out and agreed, through a simple glance, that we won’t be in a hurry to go back.

Welcome to Berlin is a guide produced by the city to welcome to residents. It’s available in Arabic, French, Polish, Turkish, Russian, Serbo-Croat and German. Here’s part of the introduction from Mayor Klaus Wowerit:

My congratulations: You have just moved to an exciting city. The capital of Germany has many cultural opportunities: Museums and galleries, theaters and operas, cinemas and concerts, scene-clubs and restaurants. Many of those who just arrived in Berlin are enthusiastic about the cosmopolitan and international character of the city and its population, with people from more than 180 nations. Many new citizens are intrigued by the leftovers from an affected and moving past which can be seen all over the city. In Berlin dense urbanity and a wide variety of recreational offerings can be found side by side.

The guide covers housing, working, family assistance, education, transit, legal information and emergency contacts. Every city should have one of these.

This time around during my trip to Copenhagen for [[reboot]] I opted for a pre-paid SIM card from Telia to use in my [[Nokia N70]] to get me a local number. I’ve written up a brief on how I did this so that others might do the same; in summary: Telia beats Sonofon because they have a handy outlet in Central Station and because they make it really easy and cheap to use GPRS/3G data.

If you want to fly from Toronto to Manchester, New Hampshire on June 24th, Air Canada’s booking engine offers you two options:

You can fly direct, which takes just under two hours and involves a tiny Beechcraft airplane, or you can fly via Winnipeg and Chicago, which takes 10 hours and involves traveling an additional 3,340 km. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to have some sort of “filter out insane flights” tool on AirCanada.com?