Frank Meeuwsen helpfully shot video of the Pecha Kucha presentations by [[Guy Dickinson]] and I at [[reboot]]. You can watch them on Frank’s website. Man I was talking fast!

That’s Guy’s head you see there in silhouette — he was my timer.

My [[Nokia N70]] has a built-in voice recorder that lets me tape 60 seconds of audio (the one minute limit is an annoying but sometimes useful feature). Over the past month I’ve pulled out the phone at various soundful times and recorded a minute here, a minute there. I’ve pasted all of the clips together, and you can listen to the entire 11 minutes, 11 seconds in one go. Audio is relatively low quality, there are only a couple of bona fide podcast-like bits and otherwise you should just treat it as a sort of raw audio montage of euro-audio.

Among other things, you’ll here lots of buskers, a ride on an antique trolley, roller coasters at LegoLand, an ambulance siren, the bells outside our window in Copenhagen that rang every morning at 8:00 a.m., a minute inside a Porto coffee shop, and a little tour of a water wheel.

A Ryanair re-scheduling about a month ago left us with two nights in Dublin, and the coincidence of concerts by The Eagles, Metallica, Mark Knopfler & Emmylou Harris, and Robbie Williams all on the same weekend left the city centre without a hotel room available for less than 500 EUR a night, so we’re out here on the outskirts in the Tulip Inn by the airport.

It’s actually a rather pleasant hotel in the “late modern business hotel with restaurant” class, and the staff are extremely helpful. For 11 EUR they serve a “full Irish Breakfast buffet” and once we removed the macabre parts thereof it was a pretty decent feed.

Having already done the whole “6 hour tour of central Dublin” on the swing through here on the way over, we opted to head out into the countryside rather than downtown for today’s free day. Turns out that Swords Village, a pleasant little place, is only 15 minutes walk up the road, and so that’s where we started our day.

We’d a vague idea that we wanted to head out to the coast to Skerries to see Skerries Mills, billed as an “industrial heritage museum showcasing wind and water energy.” When bus connections from Swords proved too difficult to manage, we found a helpful cabbie who ferried us out to Skerries for 23 EUR — a little dear, but a good investment for the time and frustration it saved us (we learned a lot from the cabbie too).

The trip to Skerries took us through rolling green hills; but for the thatched roofed cottages, we might just as well have been driving out through the hills of New Glasgow, PEI.

Skerries Mills proved to be a thoroughly wonderful place. An early arrival meant we had the place — and the tour guide — to ourselves. And so over the course of an hour we received an excellent introduction to the world of flour milling, an education that picked up exactly where our visit to the Iron Age left off two weeks ago.

We got to see the waterwheel and the millstones and follow the path of grain through the system into flour. Then a walk up the hill to see the “backup power system” — two centuries-old windmills:

Our visit to the Mills finished with a lunch in the tea room where both [[Catherine]] and I had the “salad sampler” — three salads and hearty brown bread. Lunch was accompanied by the vocal stylings of a lounge singer rendering the hits of the last century — from Frankie Valli onwards. [[Oliver]], true to form, stood up and danced and was the hit of the room.

After lunch we walked into Skerries proper and found it to be a town very much in the “place that the people from Ballykissangel go to when they go to town” model.

We walked the main street, stopped for a few rides at a beach-side amusement park, had an excellent snack at a coffee shop called Olive (where, among other things, we had a plate of olives), and eventually got the double-decker bus #33 (1,80 EUR each) back to Swords Village.

Catherine’s only demand for the Irish leg of the trip was to drink a real Guinness in a real pub, and so we stopped for supper at The Old Boro Public House, and she got a couple and we had a nice supper.

Sitting in the pub I suddently realized that the contribution of my Irish DNA to my makeup is my “widow’s peak” — all the other men in the place were losing their hair in exactly the same way I am. Thanks, Ireland.

As I write we’re relaxing in our room, gathering our energy for the long travel day tomorrow. See you in North America.

I’ve written about this before, but it’s hit me again: after a month in non-English speaking countries (2 weeks in Portugal, 2 weeks in Copenhagen) we’ve re-entered the world of our native language here in Dublin, and the effect is occasionally overwhelming. Who knew that it took so much effort to process the background chit-chat in public spaces — coffee? no, that’s too big! Billy, come here right now, and take that frog out of your mouth.

The characters in the 3D movie at LegoLand, being citizens of the world, speak a sort of Sims-like rumble that’s not in any language that anyone speaks; for two weeks our background noise has been just like that: a pleasant foreign singsong that means nothing to us. Now, all of a sudden, we understand everything. It’s weird.

Meanwhile, I’m sneezing up a storm. [[Catherine]] maintains that I’m simply allergic to bad airplane air, but I think I’m allergic to the European spring, as my symptoms started a couple of days ago in Copenhagen. Usually I can get a respite from the ick by drinking a strong cup of tea, but Irish tea, at least in my limited experience, is dreadful. I’m not sure whether it’s the water or the bags (universally Tetley) or the milk or the sugar, but they form a toxic brew together.

We’re here in Dublin for the day, then flying to Boston, by way of Philadelphia, tomorrow morning at 11:00 a.m. With any luck the pollens of North America will be different enough to let me slide back into my regular healthy state; in the meantime the endless din will continue.

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).