Just as I was beginning to feel like one of the family, it is time to leave Wonderful Copenhagen: we jet off, via Malmö, tomorrow afternoon to Dublin, Ireland, spend two nights there and will be in Keene, NH on Monday night ready for an early Tuesday morning workday at [[Yankee]] (if I’m in the office at 9:00 a.m. it will be 3:00 p.m. Copenhagen time; by 5:00 p.m. it will be getting close to midnight).

Last night we played host to a bunch of Copenhagen friends new and old. [[Catherine]] spent the day brewing up a wonderful feast and somehow we found enough plates and bowls and forks (and chairs) for 7 adults and 3 kids. The smoke alarm went off once, and everyone was driven crazy by the kids playing with the “fire engine with realistic siren sound.” And I think everyone had a good time. Here’s what the kitchen looked like at the end of the night:

This is why it’s a good idea to rent an apartment with a dish washer (bottom middle)!

After sleeping in late this morning, this afternoon, while I had coffee with Nikolaj, [[Catherine]] and [[Oliver]] took one last swing around the neighbourhood, had ice cream, bought a very nice knit sweater for Oliver, and started to prepare for our exit.

Around supper time we got on bus #26 and took the 20 minute ride down to Valby where we rendezvoused with [[Olle]] and [[Luisa]] at Luisa’s parents’ house. They had a lovely campfire ready for us in the garden, and dough ready for wrapping onto sticks and cooking over the hot coals (thus allowing Olle and I to live out the first practical exercise under the Open Bread banner).

We also got the chance to compare hearty Italian wine from the house cellar (Nebbiolo Brumale) with a bottle of Stormhoek Shiraz (“wine from the Internet,” generously provided the previous night by Thomas). Unfortunately for Stormhoek, after finishing the Italian bottle it tasted something like “wine flavoured water” by comparison, leaving Olle to provide the following handy visual companion to the experience:

By the end of the night we’d polished off the good wine, the bad wine, some excellent tea, lots of bread and cheese and mustard and a good portion of leftover cake from the night before:

We were lucky to have had the chance to meet Luisa’s brother Andreas, who popped over to pick up car parts and taught be a lot about the Copenhagen - Sweden real estate market and income tax regime to boot, and towards the end of the night the famous Jeppe who rolled on in as the sun was just starting to set:

The deceiving thing about being in Copenhagen in mid-June is that, at 10 degrees north of our home latitude, the days are sneakily long — it’s still twilight at 11:00 p.m. So you’re going along having a good time around the fire and before you notice what’s happened, six pleasant hours have passed. So around 10:30 p.m. we were back on the bus and heading to Oehlenschlaegersgade 5 for the last time.

Our entire Copenhagen Team have been quite kind and generous and have helped make this a memorable two weeks. Peter and Pia Brun, who rented us their apartment with my only “references” being my blog, allowed us to have a real home here in the city. Olle and Luisa took us enthusiastically under their wings, answering our quirky questions about Danish miscellania and entertaining us all the while. And Henriette, Thomas and Nikolaj have each been there at important moments to offer practical advice and friendship.

My old friend and mentor Bill Difrancesco used to preach the value of finishing up “at the top of the game” — ending a game of pick-up basketball, for example, while everyone was still enthusiastic and having a good time. We’re truly leaving Copenhagen at the top of our game, happy with what we’ve experienced, and eager to return. This is a wonderful city that we’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of; suddenly making an annual spring trip here is beginning to look like a pleasant idea indeed.

I took the bike out into Copenhagen this afternoon to rendezvous with Nikolaj Nyholm at Kafferiet on Esplanaden and used the opportunity to take my new [[GPSlim 236 Bluetooth GPS]] for a ride.

I grabbed a demo copy of Phone2GEarth, paired up my [[Nokia N70]] with the GPS, and started capturing my latitude and longitude every 15 seconds.

The result was a couple of KML files (to and from) that look like this when loaded into Google Earth:

The beauty of the [[GPSlim]] is that it’s about the size and weight of a box of matches, and it can talk to GPS satellites from the breast pocket of my shirt, thus removing two of the disincentives to everyday GPS tracking, bulk and awkward positioning.

My next step is to wire up an alternative to Phone2GEarth using Python for Series 60 so that I can do funky things with my position information in real time.

Nikolaj and I had a good chat walking around in the sunshine in the park around Kastellet.

I just learned a new term: press gaggle. Seems to be what we would call a “scrum” in Canada.

You thought snippets of White House press briefings were weird on TV? Try reading gaggle transcripts! Here’s a snip from yesterday’s session:

MR. SNOW: …I think it’s also important to note that as the President gets out and talks about this, people begin to understand his position better. They get to see it. We had — today, he had the opportunity to speak with people who had come here and become citizens, who had started businesses. He had an opportunity to sit in on a classroom, and some of you were in there. And this helps dramatize what’s going on. Today he was dramatizing not only importance, but how it happens that you do assimilation.

Or how about this from May 24:

MR. SNOW: I’m sorry, I’m going to be moving some of these tape recorders so I can put my coffee here. I will apologize in advance.

After reading David’s glowing reference to the GPSlim 236 Bluetooth GPS receiver, I decided that it was as useful an option as any other, and finding one in stock at Computer City here in Copenhagen this afternoon pushed me over the edge. It’s charging as we speak; I’ll strap it to the phone in the morning. Just think — soon you’ll be able to find me anywhere.

Computer City turned out to be a reasonable facsimile of an American electronics store, complete with the faceless suburban feel. When I finally flagged down a clerk — they all seemed on a mission — he was very helpful. Getting there is very easy: take the S-Train from Vesterport north to Nordhavn and you’ll find the store right across the street from the train station exit.

This was my first S-Train experience: it’s not the Metro, it’s not the “train,” it’s the S-Train. Sort of like the “GO Train” in Toronto: runs out into suburbia in all directions, but you can’t take it to Germany. The cars are very snazzy, and have helpful dynamic displays that show the train’s position at any given moment.

From Nordhavn we went south, by S-Train again, to Dybbølsbro where Oliver and I made a brief run through Fisketorvet Shoppingcenter (uninspiring but for an acceptable chicken pasta salad at Mamamia’s on the second floor) before walking back home (closer than we thought).

The CBC reports that residents in Stratford — Charlottetown’s very own Mississauga — are up in arms because their neighbourhood might become infected with something they call “entry level housing.” I think that’s code for “poor people.”

My mind boggles when I read things like this:

“It’s not going to end up with these retirement couples and the single-family dwellings,” said Lori Nelson, who helped organize the meeting.

“That’s not what it’s going to be. It’s going to end up in crime, and everything else. So, I’m very opposed to it. And I’m afraid for my kids.”

In other words, if you’re not old or in a family, well, you get the picture.

Reactionary statements like these cause for some sort of social class education strike force.

Here are some screen shots of more neato walking webserver fun.

First, here’s a directory on my [[Nokia N70]]’s memory card mounted, via WebDAV, as a drive on my iBook:

Next, a screen shot of Safari on the iBook browsing the Apache webserver on the N70 showing the folder where photos I take with the phone’s camera are stored:

Here’s another Safari screen shot showing the SMS inbox on the phone:

And finally two screen shots, one from Safari the other from Opera running on the phone itself, both showing the “home” page from the webserver running on the phone:

Please note that if you want to try this on your own N70, you’ll either need to have a data access plan with your mobile service provider, or you’ll have to hack together a reasonable Bluetooth-based facsimile using gnubox (which lets the phone inherit Internet from a parent Windows, Mac or Linux box).

Here’s an interesting photograph:

I took the photo of my iBook using the iBook. By browsing to the webserver running on my phone. Which was pointing at the iBook. The phone, in turn, was getting its IP address, via Bluetooth, from the iBook. It all seems very symbiotic.

There is so much magic coming together to make this photo happen that it’s a miracle it all works: think “my blender talks my toaster into squeezing oranges for it.”

Thanks to loosely coupled pieces of the pie from Apache and Apple and Nokia and gnubox and Python it does, though. Neato.

Okay, so now I can run a webserver on my mobile phone (I can’t tell you how unbelievably cool this is, and not only for the gadget geek reasons — it’s a Copernican moment when our webservers start to walk around, something that forces us to rethink who’s “producer” and who’s “consumer”).

Anyway, what’s the first thing a walking webserver needs but to know where it is. This handy software let’s my [[Nokia N70]] talk to a wireless GPS receiver; all I need to make it work is, well, a wireless GPS receiver. Nokia has a couple of models available, and I figured being in a Big City like Copenhagen, rife with mobile shops, I could just pop over ‘round the corner to pick one up.

Or not.

You’d think I was looking to install photon torpedos in my [[Chevy Nova ]] from the look on the faces of the mobile, electronics and computer shops I visited along Copenhagen’s “silicon allé” today. Apparently the notion of connecting a GPS receiver to a mobile phone hasn’t entered the public consciousness yet, and so while one or two people I talked to had heard of such a thing, and thought maybe they could order one, nobody had one in stock, and nobody knew else who could sell me one.

I suppose this is what eBay is for.

Remember back in the day when if you moved houses you needed to get a new telephone number, even if you stayed in the same city? Remember all those times you switched Internet service providers and needed get a new email address? In both cases we were victim to a close coupling of identifier (phone number, email address) with identified (us). Fortunately these are well on their way to becoming de-coupled; there’s a reason I’m @rukavina.net and not @myisp.net.

I think it’s time to start worrying about the same sort of thing for our remote media storage: as we pour our photos into Flickr and our video into YouTube, we’re also ceding the address of our media to someone else. My photos are @flickr, not @rukavina.

There’s some recognition in other digital domains that this is a Good Thing: FeedBurner, for example, has an upsell called MyBrand that, for $2.99/month, lets you have your RSS feed like at feeds.yourdomain.com rather than @feedburner.com.

But this photo of mine (mine!) is @flickr, not @me. And as I blog it and email it and gradually insert it into the digital nervous system of the planet it becomes harder and harder to decouple from Brand Flickr.

So I think that we have to start thinking about how to separate the process of storing something from its publicly exposed URL. I can still use Flickr (or anything else) as a photo storage, indexing, tagging system, but I want to be able to assign my media an address that I own, one that I can re-point when and if I move the “physical” storage of the photos.

We already know how to do this — look at the DNS system as an example of a system without “identifier-identified lock in” as an example.

The nice thing about Flickr et al is that they expose the programatic side of their services with a rich API; as such, it should be easy not only to layer my own URLs over my photos (and, indeed, store them in more than one place). Perhaps that’s the next project?

[[Oliver]] has decided that he will make lemonade for the big dinner tomorrow. Not wanting to be left out, I thought I should contribute a beverage of my own, and I found just the place to help me on a cycle through Frederiksberg this afternoon: Tea Shop at Falkoner Allé 65.

Regular readers will recall that I fancy myself something of an iced tea expert. Some might say that I’m iced tea obsessed. So the sudden appearance of a tea shop called Tea Shop seemed like a good sign.

Oh, and what a tea shop Tea Shop is. This ain’t no “here’s your Celestial Seasonings Lemon Zinger,” it’s a “let me take these hearty canisters from the shelf and let you smell the many varieties of Rooibos I have.” The shop is hosted by a woman who appears to be a tea savant; she assures me that the Forestberry Rooibos that I selected will make an excellent iced tea. I’ve promised to report back.