Yotel Gatwick is opening in July and is taking bookings now. I like the idea of tiny perfect hotels.

My mates at silverorange are looking for a system administrator. You’ll have to be able to deal with a fraternal atmosphere (in both the good and challenging uses of that word), considerable sarcasm, and living in our small Island province. In return you’ll find uncommon freedom, wicked-smart coworkers, and an opportunity to join us for Gong Bao every Thursday at [[Interlude]]. It’s not the job for everyone, but for the right person it might just change your life.

Every year as [[reboot]] draws to a close the final evening is spent out on the town in a restaurant of your choosing with a group of your new and old reboot confreres. The journey from reboot’s venue to the restaurant usually involves a little bit of a hike, and this often affords an opportunity to get to know some new people.

On this walk-to-dinner in 2005 I spent some time talking to Mark Wubben and at some point, once he learned that I was from [[Prince Edward Island]], he proclaimed “oh, you must know Steven Garrity.”

This year, same walk (indeed much of the same crowd). Was talking to a developer from Copenhagen. Got to talking about Canada. Then Prince Edward Island. “Oh, you must know Steven Garrity.” Again. Turns out he too is a longtime listener to Steven’s Acts of Volition Radio show.

Last week I mentioned here that I’d set up a backup of the Elections PEI results website using the Amazon S3 storage service. The idea was that if all hell broke loose bandwidth-wise on our local server, we could redirect traffic there.

As it turns out, the server hummed along just fine so we didn’t need to flip any switches. Today I got the bill for the Amazon S3 setup:

Total cost: 4 cents. That’s not a misprint. There are no up-front “registration” or “setup” costs for S3 — you pay for storage, and you pay for bandwidth. In this case the bill broke down to 1 cent for the storage used — 956K for 3 days — and 3 cents for the bandwidth used, 0.110 GB, which represents simply the traffic from the minute-by-minute updates up the HTML pages on the S3 server.

Needless to say, this is a significant example of (a) how S3 rocks and (b) how the barriers to entry for almost anything on the web now are perception, imagination, creativity and sweat. In other words, if you’ve got something to say, you’ve no excuse, at least not a financial one, not to say it now.

Rebooting the Web 2.0 age on the BBC News website, uses the “Commentator Attack” poster for Jaiku as a graphic, with my “looking scared” photo front and centre. A few weeks ago I got an IM from Henriette: “quick, I need a picture of you looking really scared.” I complied (I was at [[Yankee]] at the time, and shut the door to my erstwhile office and shot some photos up against the filing cabinet); I sent the resulting photos across the wire, and this is where they ended up:

For reasons I’m not entirely clear on (yes, there is irony in this), although it is 10:35 p.m. here in Copenhagen, the sun is only just now setting completely. I’m sure that this has something to do with latitude.

I was wondering, just now, why I’m so exhausted at this point. Sober second thought: I’ve been conferencing for 12 hours straight, bracketed by longish (for me) bicycle rides. Of course I’m exhausted. As such this is one of those years that I don’t stay at [[reboot]] late into the night to participate in live video chats with the inventor of the computer mouse, etc.

I started the day with back to back to back commercial victories: by 9:00 a.m. I had secured a Danish SIM card for my mobile phone (from the friendly and helpful man at the Telia outlet in Central Station), used the station’s Sidewalk Express Internet station to update my [[Jaiku]] and [[Plazes]] profiles to reflect my newfound mobile number, and rented a 3-speed bicycle for two days.

I immediately headed west and, as last year, I managed to overshoot the reboot site by about 2km — I get confused by all those smokestacks and the one I head to never turns out to be the right one. But I got there, got registered, and was in my seat for the 10:00 a.m. start.

While aforementioned exhaustion prohibits a thorough review of the day’s proceedings, here is a quick run through the highlights:

• The 40 minute short course in Humanism was, like last year’s 40 minute short source in Sociology, brilliant. Adam, the performer/professor has what I characterized on the back-channel as “one of the fastest minds I’ve ever experienced.”
• I enjoyed Stephanie Booth’s talk on Waiting for The Babel Fish, which was a rumination on language, localization and the web. Apparently, for example, the rest of the French-speaking world just says “email” instead of Quebec’s invented courriel.
• I not only ran into many friends from reboots-past, but also many people I know only from their social network avatar icons — “hey, you’re the guy with the beard on Jaiku.”
• Jyri’s this here is where Jaiku got started-grounded talk about microblogging was brilliant: he’s one of those guys that, despite all outward appearances of meekness, owns the stage when he’s on it.
• I updated my [[Plazes]] verb and location with “Eating too many cupcakes @ Reboot 9.0”. Five minutes later, after I’d moved on to additional trivialities and forgotten all about this, I got an SMS back from Plazes that read “You’re eating too many cupcakes at Reboot 9.0”. It was like receiving the voice of God by mobile phone.

• Irish guy Tom, from CIX presented an excellent technical overview of how he’s setting up a “carbon neutral data centre” in Cork. Heartening.
• The Cofoco food for supper was simply amazing; bring them back next year!
• The micro-presentations — 15 slides for 20 seconds each — were as entertaining to watch this year as to present last year. Guy did a great job piecing together a smooth technical setup, and it all went off with only a hitch or two.
• Tobias from Easyflow sequestered some red wine.

• Henriette and Jonas and I dreamed up a new “define your relationship with this person” social network layer that replaces the usual “friend / family / acquintance” model with things like “If I was drunk and it was 3:00 a.m. would it be okay to call this person?” and “If you were being interogated and got the opportunity to be set free if you ratted out this person, would you take this option.” Stay tuned.

• I got the “your domain name will expire in 2 weeks” message for OpenBread.org in my email today, an idea, still in the “planning stages” (i.e. yet to result in an actual loaf) since reboot 7.0 in 2005.

• The Danish peach-flavoured iced tea is addictive; there’s just something about it. Also discovered that “regular” coffee in Denmark has enough potency that I don’t need to go all high-brow and order fresh-pressed.

• I participated in the Jaiku back-channel by SMS, and left the laptop at home. Then I discovered that my Telia SIM comes out-of-the-box enabled for GPRS data, so I suddenly had real live email too, which was, alas, dangerous for its distractions.
• Matt Jones’ made Dopplr look very interesting in ways I’d never considered. Although suggesting that it will actually be an environmental boon by reducing the need for travel seems naive.
• I managed to ruin both Rob Paterson’s knees and my own knees by engaging in a wacky hopping exercise sponsored by Johnnie Moore. Rob may never forgive me.
• It is a universal truth that any session that has “Enterprise” in the title or subject matter will be confusing and buzzword-filled.

The big and important event in my life today, however, is that by virtue of a technical glitch, I’ve been reassigned to Sweden: witness my reboot badge’s country affiliation:

Fortunately my Swedish acquaintances in the rebootosphere have welcomed me in, promised to teach me the national anthem, etc. I’m going to have to prepare an acceptable set of reasons for [[Catherine]] and [[Oliver]] as to why we’re relocating to Stockholm (casting a misprint as a Revelation will probably not cut it).

Must sleep now in preparation for doing it all over again tomorrow.

Well, after the early-morning catatonia of Zurich, things only got better.

I fell asleep as soon as I sat down on the SAS flight to Copenhagen, and didn’t wake up until we landed just over an hour later around noon. So I wasn’t completely zonked upon arrival. Not completely.

To my delight [[Olle]] surprised me with an airport pick-up, spirited me off to my hotel, and then took me back to his place for a long and very pleasant afternoon that involved tag-team folk music Googling (“I see your Clancy Brothers traditional Irish lament and raise you a rousing Stan Rogers sea shanty”) and the sampling of an unusually broad collection of European grain, potato and wormwood-based alcohols.

By the time I rolled out towards the Preboot event around supper time the Absinthe and the jet lag had somehow cancelled each other out, and I was in fine form. I made my way across town by bus — Olle gave me the logistical push and Copenhagen transit refresher course I needed — and then located a City Bike to get me the final step of the way. And thus I came across a gaggle of nerdy types huddled together under a large tree in a city park. It was, as others have said, like coming home.

After an hour or so of catching up with various and sundry the Absinthe and the jet lag, now supplemented by beer, entered a new conspiratorial phase of their relationship, and I decided it was time to head home. With my City Bike gone off somewhere in other hands, I wandered around until I located the train station, took the short hop down to Central Station, and walked the few blocks towards the Cab Inn City.

I was almost there when I realized that, despite my new late-evening-style catatonia, it was still only 2:00 p.m. on my body clock, and that I hadn’t really had a meal in some time. Fortunately at this exact moment I walked by wagamama, a new age juice bar slash noodle boutique. Where I then enjoyed an amazing meal of vegetable dumplings, “chicken chilli men” and a glass of fresh apple-mint-lime juice.

Thus sated, I returned to my hotel, caught up on my email, had a Plazes- and Jaiku-fired meet-up with Igor from Cologne (he was sitting at the next table over, but it took technology to bring us together — “I’m the guy with the Dell laptop sitting across the room”). By 11:00 a.m. I was completely zonked, and I fell immediately to sleep.

I awoke this morning at 5:30 a.m. feeling like a truck had run over me — a light truck, mind you. Say an old-school Datsun pick-up. A shower and a hearty Danish breakfast have returned me to an even keel, and I’m about to head off in search of transport to reboot, which starts in 2 hours.

As I type I am in a semi-catatonic state perched on a bar stool in some sort of “not really in Switzerland” limbo that exists inside passport control but outside security. I’m not sure, thus, where I really am technically — i.e. if catatonia results in senseless murders, whose prison will I go to?

The flight over the sea on Swiss was quite pleasant. I had a very cheery flight attendant serving me beverages all night long, and every time he did so he seemed so enormously pleased to have brought a small pleasure into my life. I watched Blood Diamond on the way over; it’s more brutal than [[Johnny]] suggested, but also as good as he said it would be.

The woman beside me in the window seat was utterly over-equipped for the flight, loaded up with face masks and booties and special blankets and pillows and sandwiches. But she managed to maintain her personal space inside her assigned zone so, save a few uncomfortable “legs touching” incidents in the middle of the night, we were compatible.

I began my 3 hours here in international limbo with a shower in the Zurich airport “day room” area, which is cleverly hidden and essentially unadvertised. For 10 CHF I managed to create an impression of normalcy even though my body continues to scream “it’s 2:00 a.m. — go to bed!” Alas the worldwide carry-on toothpaste ban means that my hair brush is checked through to Copenhagen, so in addition to the catatonia, I also look scraggly and deranged. A perfect look, in fact, for a senseless murdering spree.

What with the $5 coffee and the $9 wifi, this may rank as the most expensive blog post yet. More later.

I got up earlier than is humane this morning — early enough to have a full beta-test experience of the new “when does the sun rise in Charlottetown” information on Almanac.com in living orange and gold.

Kibitzed with Shawn Murphy about last night’s election in the waiting room at Charlottetown Airport. Flight over PEI en route to Montreal was stunning — truly is “the fairest isle ‘tis possible to see.” Picked up a BMW 323i at Trudeau Airport — it was, honestly, the cheapest option; Steve thinks it was a website error, but the BMW was $63 for the day vs. a Hyundai Accent for $68! — and drove in utter German luxury to Steve’s house for an early morning rendezvous.

We had coffee at a vrai cappuccino house, then hooked up with Monique and headed up to Boulangerie Andalos for their spirit-lifting sandwiches. Sat outside for long enough to brush up against a forehead sunburn, and then headed back to Steve’s for a round of good-byes. I was guided back to the airport by Monique’s world-class traffic management skills, and breezed through Swiss check-in and security.

I shall wake up in Zurich, then make a short hop via SAS to Denmark, and be in Copenhagen for lunch.

Well, that seemed to work. The first poll reported a 7:01 p.m. and the last result went online at 9:28 p.m., so it was all over in about two and a half hours. By comparison, back in 2003 the first poll came in at 7:09 p.m. and the last one came in at 9:23 p.m.

The webserver performed well: at the peak load it was responding to just over 13 requests a second. The load average on the server never tipped over 1.3 all night long, and we had more than enough bandwidth to go around. Just goes to show that stripped down Apache, serving out HTML files, can do an awful lot without breaking a sweat.

Google Analytics is churning through traffic data as I write, so I should have some actual traffic numbers sometime tomorrow; the raw Apache logfile is 114MB.

As in previous elections, after the initial trickle of advance polls, data entry became a sea of numbers and I lost my ability to attach any meaning to what I was typing. Fortunately this time I had brother [[Johnny]] sharing the workload, so it was never as frantic as it was in the heat of 2000 and 2003.

It was a pleasure to work again with Elections PEI: Lowell and Norma and all their staff know elections cold, and they managed the entire event with aplomb.

Off to bed so I can get up at 4:30 a.m. and fly to Switzerland ;-)