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 ;-)

In anticipation of my trip tomorrow I’ve made my usual round of calls to my credit card companies to let them know I’ll be away in Europe for 10 days. I’m not sure what the “note on my file” they promise to put in place actually does — I’d like to hope that it somehow integrates with the anti-fraud triggers in a positive way — but they all seem so happy that I’m calling that I almost look forward to calling.

A new “feature” I was exposed to from both my VISA and MasterCard issuer today was an attempt to up-sell me services at the end of the travel business. On the VISA side they tried to sell me travel medical insurance, on the MasterCard side it was “a low balance transfer rate of 1%”.

I know that credit cards are a business, and this upsell is no different than the seemingly endless inserts I get in my bill each month. But somehow calling about a “note on my file” seems like it should be removed from the commercial fray — more “editorial” than “advertising.”

Of course it’s always smart business, which is why we can only expect more of it. “Thank you for calling about your medical emergency Mr. Rukavina; while I’ve got you on the line I’d like to take a moment to let you know about our new line of convalescent homes …”

Somehow I’ve come up short on the “late spring holidays” front: I was at Yankee last week and thus working on our Canadian Victoria Day and today, Memorial Day in the USA, I’m back here in Canada. I’ll have to be more careful in July when the next bifurcated holiday set is due.

Today is Ordinary Polling Day (regular people call it “Election Day”) here in Prince Edward Island. For the past couple of days I’ve been busy fine-tuning the election results website for Elections PEI, and tonight just after 7:00 p.m. it will spring to life with live results.

Given that the last time we did this we’d all just slept through a hurricane, we’re starting the day with a concrete logistical advantage: it’s so much easier to run a website when you have electricity, and when you don’t have to step over fallen trees to get to the office.

Because much of the Island was without both electricity and Internet in 2003, the use of the election results website for that election was, well, “much lower than anticipated.” So tonight is really the first opportunity since 2000 to discover how many Islanders will get their results online. Which, in turn, should teach us something about the change in Internet penetration into Island homes in the past 7 years.

How do we know how much capacity to build? The honest answer is “as much as we can build with the gear we have.” How will we know whether it’s enough? When it grinds to a halt. Which, of course, we hope it doesn’t.

Which is not to say that we haven’t Taken Steps. All of the pages you see on the election results website are straight-ahead HTML; they’re not build “on the fly,” but rather generated automatically every two minutes by a PHP-driven process behind the scenes. This means that there’s no database bottleneck, and that the limiting factors, in the end, are Apache and available bandwidth.

To handle the increased bandwidth we’ve had a temporary additional Internet connection installed to supplement the bandwidth already in place through the Government WAN: there’s a fiber running to the Confederation Centre of the Arts and we’re tapping into the same big pipe there that’s used to stream live video of the Legislative Assembly. In theory we can burst to 10 Mbps if we need to. On the Apache side, we’re running Apache 2.2.4, with everything that’s not required stripped out.

As a failsafe we’ve got an off-Island mirror site set up, using Amazon’s S3 for hosting, and we can switchover to that site by changing our DNS if required.

From the ballot box to the Internet, your vote takes the following path: the ballots are counted separately for each of the 319 polls, the ballot count is reported by telephone to Elections PEI’s offices at 180 Richmond Street (there’s a phone bank with 10 stations set up there) where the ballot count for each candidate is recorded onto a pre-printed sheet of paper (technical tangent: the sheets themselves were printed from spreadsheets created directly from the MySQL database of polls and candidates by the excellent OpenOffice::OODoc).

The sheets of paper get carried over to Johnny and I where they’ll get entered into a web-based results tabulation system that’s running on a sister server to the webserver (trivia: the name of the webserver is Wallis, the name of the back-end server is Edward). Entering the results updates a MySQL database, and the MySQL database is used to update the results pages every 2 minutes. After they leave our hands, the results sheets get handed to the next desk over where they get entered into a spreadsheet on a standalone PC; having this redundancy in place lets us compare numbers through the evening, and also provides a backup in case the network goes down and we need to generate printed results.

At least that’s how it’s all supposed to work. Stay tuned tonight to see whether it actually does.

While there’s obviously some pressure involved in working to ensure that all the contingencies have been planned for, one of the beauteous things about Prince Edward Island’s electoral process is that it’s still firmly based on pencil and paper. If the Internet goes down, or the servers catch on fire, or I lose my ability to type, the election will happen, the results will get tabulated, and democracy will march on.

In any case, at 5:50 a.m. tomorrow morning I’m on a plane to Copenhagen by way of Montreal and Zurich. If tonight is problem-free then it will be a “well-deserved vacation.” If it isn’t, well, then I’ll be “fleeing the country.”

If you’ve ever scored a Priceline deal on a hotel room, you know that your stay in “Room 212” can be costing you a much different price than the person in the identical “Room 213” is paying. Like airlines, hotels manage their inventory to maximize the revenue per room, selling as many rooms as they can at the highest rates possible while simultaneously appearing to charge everyone a reasonable rate and, at the end of the night, end up as full as possible.

Exactly how hotels do this is something of a mystery to we consumers. Purposefully so, of course: if we knew the drill, we could play the game back at them. And indeed frequent travelers know at least parts of the drill, and plan accordingly.

Today when I checked out of my Boston hotel the night auditor mistakenly printed my receipt over top of some pre-printed “yield management worksheet” forms that he’d left in the printer. He noticed the error of his ways, and offered to print me another receipt, but I said it was okay and left with it in hand. At the bottom was a “Notes/Strategy” section that offers a small peek into how hotels manage their inventory:

The truth of the “different prices for the same room” system was proved by a report that was left on the front counter of the hotel: it showed that prices charged for the room I paid $169 for last night varied by as much as $40 up and down.

Ten years ago my brother Steve was in South Korea teaching English. Reasoning that I should seize the opportunity to visit, I managed to figure out a way of getting from Boston to Seoul for next to no money. I got myself to Boston for free by cleverly combining a trip to Yankee into the mix, and because I flew out from Boston early in the morning, I ended spending the night before in the Harborside Inn on State Street.

Back in 1997 the “Big Dig” — the multi-billion dollar, multi-year plan to rid Boston of it’s elevated downtown Expressway by burying the highway — was in full swing. And the Harborside, which opened just two weeks before my visit, was right in the middle of it. Literally: directly in front of the hotel there was a deep bit being hollowed out with giant battering rams (the pit was the beginnings of what is now the new Aquarium subway stop).

I was warned when I checked in that I might notice “some construction noise.” That was an understatement: around 6:00 a.m. it felt like the world was going to end, with every smash into the bedrock of the giant machines out my window shaking the foundations of the hotel. This effect seemed only amplified by the atrium that forms the core of the hotel; it acted as a giant amplifier:

What a difference a decade makes: the Expressway is gone now, and the work to convert the ground it covered into greenspace is well underway. You can actually see North Boston from Quincy Market, and almost all of the chaos brought on by the Big Dig is gone. Indeed my journey down from Yankee to Logan Airport was only 2 hours, and I glided in on I-93 south and down into the Callaghan Tunnel without stepping on the brakes after I turned at the lights up in Manchester.

So now the Harborside, which once looked like a crazy enterprise in an inane location, is in the middle of a revitalized waterfront. Where once there were battering rams is now a nightclub patio. The T stop is right at their door, and the walk to gnocchi is only 5 minutes.

The hotel itself is showing its age a little — the cold water tap in my room came off in my hand, the carpets are a little frayed, and the free breakfast served in the atrium is no more. And there are several new “boutique” hotels in the city that have taken some of the shine off the high thread-count sheets and hardwood floors that seemed so revolutionary back then.

By you can’t beat the location — among other things you can be at the airport in 10 minutes, which is why I’m here tonight — and at $169/night in the high season, it is, for Boston, one of the best deals going for a spacious downtown room.