Just before [[Oliver]] and I left for our trip to LegoLand on Monday morning, [[Catherine]] and I hatched a last-minute plan to have our Copenhagen friends for dinner on Thursday evening. Invitations went out by email as we were headed out the door; RSVPs came in as we were away, and preparations are now underway for a lavish spread (in the invites I said “light supper” — Catherine doesn’t do “light supper” — she’s got a separate menu for cocktails).

I feel that I must shout publicly here that I have a most cool and flexible consort: not only does she go in for my cockeyed plans to string a New Hampshire - Portugal - Copenhagen - New Hampshire - Boston - Halifax trip together, but she happily takes up the challenges of feeding a ragtag bunch of Danish hooligans she’s barely even met. Let the Hoisin Sauce gathering games begin.

[[Henriette]] says “people from different corners and backgrounds can actually do something together” and to prove it launches Desti:nation. Interesting ideas sprout like flowers in the wake of [[reboot]]. What’s yours?

And we’ll all go together
To pluck wild mountain thyme
All around the blooming heather

Complete lyrics.

GnuBox on SonyEricsson P80x/P90x/P910 and Nokia Series60 phones. Projects like this deserve some sort of award for brilliance and utility (albeit from the small “want to run Apache on our mobile phones” crowd).

Wow. It’s midnight, and I’ve been up since 5:00 a.m. (who could sleep with a day at LegoLand on the horizon?). A full trip report to follow, but if you’re playing the home game you can get started with the photographs.

Note that if you’re a Flickr “friend” or “family” you’ll see lots of cute photos of Oliver in there; if you’re not, you’ll see lots of photos of the back of Oliver’s head. Privacy lines get drawn in funny places. If you’re friend or family and not on the secret inside, drop me a line.

Once [[Oliver]] found out that LegoLand existed, there was no stopping him. So in an hour we’re hopping on the train for the three hour ride across the bottom of Denmark, staying overnight in the exciting LegoLand Village Hostel, and then spending the day in the park on Tuesday. Laptop is staying back here in Copenhagen, so expect radio silence until Wednesday.

Saturday was spent with [[Olle]] and [[Luisa]] in their 3rd floor cabin enjoying a “traditional Danish lunch.” Wonderful fun.

It was a beautiful sunny day yesterday, so I did the bellacommute into [[reboot]] on my borrowed bicycle. I’m getting a little better at traffic management, and in figuring out how to get on and off the bike without falling (it has a child seat on the back, so the standard “swing leg over” technique doesn’t work).

One thing I didn’t anticipate is that bicycling takes energy. Not huge amounts of energy. But it’s a good idea to at least have breakfast before you head out. I didn’t, and so halfway there I entered a sort of higher level of dizzy consciousness. When I arrived at the Kedelhallen I think I must have looked like I was having a heart attack, as I received several “he looks like he’s having a heart attack” stares from my peers.

The highlights of day two of the conference for me included:

• Maya Lotan’s demo of urbanseeder, an online flirting service: it was nice to see someone thinking about bringing mistakes and happenstance and chance into the digital realm.
• Rasmus Fleischer’s presentation on The Grey Commons; it was refreshing to hear an intelligent, thoughtful take on media piracy.
• Jyri Engeström’s talk, titled Blind Men’s Baseball, where he talked about bringing the kind of presence tools we have on the web into mobile devices to add a sort of “peripheral vision” to the mobile experience.
• Imity. I’m not completely sure what it is or how it works, but it was pretty cool.
• Chris Heathcote’s demo of Apache running on a Series 60 mobile phone (next step: install it on my [[Nokia N70]]).
• The aforementioned 20 x 20 presentation — biggest thrill I’ve had in a long time, both to give and to watch. Got a lot of good feedback after too.
• Having dinner with Ali Pasha and Frank Westphal and [[Olle]] and getting to participate in a real Conversation of Programmers about Programming, something completely new for me.
• RUST. I’m not sure whether I was technically “clubbing” or not, and it only took about an hour for the smoke and the noise to make me lose my voice and my game, but it was fun. (Note to Europe: you do know that smoking is bad for your health, don’t you?)
• Getting a demo of XShare from Sourabh Sharma in the middle of RUST. Anyone who can sell me on the virtues of their product when I can’t hear what they’re sating is a born salesman.
• Learning how to exchange business cards via Bluetooth from Henriette.
• Riding home on the bicycle at midnight in the drizzle after it was all over.

Reboot 8.0 was about “renaissance” and I think my experience of the conference was more about the verb of that than the noun: I missed most of the scene-setting theoretical talk, and instead enjoyed a lot of demo by doers. In the end, I had lots of fun, renewed some good ties from last year and made some new ones, and know in my heart I’ll be back for 9.0.

Guy Dickinson snarfed me along for a PechaKucha orgy this afternoon. “Hey, we’re doing this 20 slides for 20 seconds each thing later… have you got anything?”

Got on the bicycle, tore back to the apartment (yes, it does take 12 minutes), got on the laptop and whipped up a Keynote presentation about something I choose to call “making public data public[er]” — looking at the various “public service computing” projects I’ve been hacking together this year.

Back on the bike, back to reboot, tracked down Guy, put the presentation on his PowerBook and then suddenly it was time to go. Amazing experience: all the adrenalin I’ll need for the next month or so. Presentations from Guy, Michael Smith, Matt Webb, and Alexander Kjerulf were equally thrilling to watch.

You’re going to have a hard time convincing me that any presentation should take longer than 20 x 20 from now on. Thanks for having me along, Guy.

Here’s the PDF of the presentation if you’re interested. And you’ll find links to most everything I talked about in the Rukapedia.

New term to describe “commuting by bicycle on a sunny day”. You heard it heard first.

First, if you’re the person who left me a voicemail yesterday at 19:35, please phone me back: I can’t for the life of me make sense of the Danish-only voicemail system on my mobile.

To Guy, who I met yesterday again in almost the same place we met a year ago: you will never get your house paid off. You are obviously extremely well-suited to being a teacher, and if you’re ever going to do it, you should do it now: the world will be a better place if you do (and I’ll send my son to be your student).

And a question: are we all going to have to eat fruit in the renaissance, or is there a chance we’ll take chocolate with us?