Today was my last day in Copenhagen, and I succeeded it jamming in packed full of whacky exploits.

Nikolaj, Doc and Ben were gracious enough to extend an invitation to join them on a trip out into the Danish countryside for the morning. So at 9:00 a.m. we all piled into Nikolaj’s 1982 Mercedes, and headed out into the rainy streets of Copenhagen. Our first stop was one of the fantastic Danish coffee shops, places that raise the art of sitting down, taking a break and having a hot drink to a tantric art. The Danes make hot chocolate by placing a hunk of solid dark chocolate molded to the end of a stick into a cup full of steaming hot milk; the effect is completely unlike the powdered stuff I’m used to at home: thick, hot, not too sweet, slightly tart. Kind of like drinking a labrador retriever, but without all the hair.

Next, as Doc details here, we drove over to Dyrehaven for “walk in the woods.” Although it was raining, it was never enough to soak us through, and it was nice to be out and around in the fresh air after four or five days of conference rooms and hotels. The giant deer were an added bonus.

Back into the Mercedes, we drove up to Louisiana, a modern art gallery north of Copenhagen. We were rushing by this point, so we didn’t get a thorough tour of the site, but I got enough of a taste to know I’ll go back: classic Danish design, interesting art, and a very, very good chicken salad for lunch beside a roaring fire in a beautiful fireplace.

Ben had to be at the airport for a late afternoon flight, so Nikolaj dropped me downtown (with Doc’s umbrella in hand, a generous and completely necessary lend, as the rain was tumbling down by this point).

I wandered around downtown, found some secret well-design Danish goods for Catherine’s upcoming birthday (don’t tell Catherine), and then decided to take the Metro south to Field’s, a new shopping mall in the new planned community of Ørestad. I went both because I had a little more shopping to do, and because I wanted to see if, in addition to everything else, the Danes have found a way of making shopping malls beautiful. They have.

Ørestad is very close to the ØresundBridge, a bridge and tunnel construction, now five years old, that runs from Denmark to Sweden. It can be considered the sort of Nordic version of our own Confederation Bridge. Except that the speed limit is 110 km/h on ØresundBridge (instead of our pokey 80 km/h), there are high speed trains running over the ØresundBridge, and when you get to the other side the delights of Sweden await rather than, well, Greater Moncton.

How could I be so close and not pop over to Sweden for dinner?

This was easier said than done. Much of Copenhagen’s rail ticket buying infrastructure is automated, and the machines require either coins or a credit card with a PIN number. I had neither. After lots of futzing around with an ATM machine and a kindly change-offering merchant, I was in business. Thirty-five minutes later I was sitting down to a tasty meal at Indianside in downtown Malmö.

After dinner I tried to take photos of the Turning Torso, the intriguing new skyscraper rising up over the city (there’s a great Discovery Channel special on its construction; see it if you’re interested in tall buildings). Alas it was both too far away, and too blocked by the buildings downtown. I’ll have to go back.

Forty-five minutes later, I walked into my hotel here in Copenhagen.

Good day.

Back to Canada tomorrow via Frankfurt and Montreal; leaving here early, back on the last flight from Montreal tomorrow night.

I am at heart a very shy person. My shyness is selective though: while some people are terrified at the thought of speaking in public, I revel at the opportunity, and am comfortable in front of any sized audience. It’s being in the audience that terrifies me.

I don’t mean the “sitting on the hard chair, listening to the speakers” part of being in the audience. I mean the “hanging out in the coffee room after the speakers” part. I’m just no darned good at “working a room,” and I get so flummoxed by the prospect that I often fade into the silent background.

Partly this is because I’ve not got a good backstory. I can’t say “I manage the user interface design for Microsoft Word” or “I invented spray-on underwear lubricant.”

I am an easily distracted generalist, good enough at a wide range of things, expert at none; I’ve never been able to focus for long enough, or to tolerate the overlords implicit in a “position” to acquire a good title.

So my self-description is left to something like “well, I make websites and I’m a programmer and I’ve got these clients, and I blog and podcast, and sometimes I go on the radio, and I used to be a typesetter.” Not compelling stuff, I imagine.

Catherine has the same problem: she’s a weaver, a jeweler, a metal-smith, a spinner, a painter. Sometimes she says she’s an “artist,” sometimes a “craftsperson,” and sometimes she just says “I make things.” But she’s not shy.

Another cause: I don’t have an innate “small talk” ability. I love small talk — I could talk about the weather and the Blue Jays forever given the right conditions — but I’ve had to learn it from scratch, so it’s more an awkward second language than a fluent dialect.

And of course I’m just plain afraid. Terrified of the unknown, suddenly left frozen at the thought of freeform social contact.

Given that the interesting part of conferences happens during the “hanging out in the coffee room after the speakers” part, this fear / awkwardness / terror leaves me at something of a disadvantage.

Halfway through reboot, I decided that, fuck it, I had to just jump off. Pretend I wasn’t terrified, and see what played out.

I went down to the “sign up for dinner out with the people you’ve met” list by the door, choose a group at random, and put down my name (previous plan: cower back to my hotel). Then I figured out a way to get a ride to dinner, and even hung out with some rebootkins before dinner by pulling up a chair and chiming in. I even sat down for a brief chat with Scoble.

Much to my complete surprise, it worked.

I ended up at Cofoco with a great group of people: Nikolaj, Mark, Dragos, Bernhard, Thomas, Felix, Stefan, Henriette and a whole other bunch of people down the other end of the table.

And I didn’t explode or die or (I think) make a fool of myself. It was fun. I learned a lot (and had a great meal).

And the fun just kept on coming. Today I got invited out to dinner with Doc, Nikolaj and his wife and kids, Laurent and Ben. No explosions or deaths there either.

I think I will stop being shy now; it’s obviously worn out its usefulness.

Here’s another neat Plazes feature: a plug-in for web pages that grabs your current Plazes location, sticks it on a map, and returns a chunk.

(Since the demise of Plazes, this obviously no longer works; I’m leaving this post here for posterity).

Steven found this photo taken at the reboot meetup on Thursday. La-dee-dah — don’t I look all exotic and European with my glass of wine and my smirky look!

Yesterday I wrote about Plazes, a neato “geosocial” service. Tonight I saw it work in the real world.

At about 1:00 a.m. I was just finishing up on the late-nite blogging and email checking when a new email came in:

So I did was I was told, and clicked on the link, which took me to:

Ton found me originally because (a) Rob Paterson (big in Europe) told him to watch out for me and (b) because his Plazes told him I was here:

So I replied:

…and got dressed, went out to the lobby, and found Ton and Martin having a drink. I grabbed a hot chocolate, sat down, and we talked for over an hour about everything from Robert Scoble to making open source bread and open source cars, to just what all those people with laptops open during presentations at reboot were doing.

So Plazes was a social prosthetic device that (relatively) effortlessly enabled a conversation to happen that otherwise never would have.

By lucky coincidence I ended up crammed into the back of a Mercedes with Stefan Kellner and Felix Petersen — the “Plazes guys” — tonight on the way to dinner. They’re thoughtful, intelligent guys, but they’re otherwise completely normal. I think one of the most useful roles of conferences like reboot is to expose easily star-struck and meek people like me to thoughtful, intelligent people with brilliant projects like Plazes who happen to be otherwise completely normal: it makes it seem possible that, with some work, we too could become thoughtful and intelligent.

You would think that a small place like Prince Edward Island, 130,000 small as we are, would escape any recognition at a conference like reboot, with people from 20 countries, but only two Canadians (me and him).

But you would be wrong.

Guy Dickinson from Manchester found and watched the entire set of Zap Your PRAM videos over a series of long train trips.

Dina Mehta is a blogging colleague of Rob Paterson. Although they’ve never met, Rob’s daughter Hope stayed with Dina in India and they became good friends.

Johnnie Moore from London is a blogging colleague of Rob’s too (“oh, Prince Edward Island… you must know Rob Paterson!”). Johnnie’s game to come to the Island.

Danish organic farmer Thomas Harttung has had meetings with the Island’s Foodtrust organization.

Tonight on the way to the after-party, I had a great conversation with Mark Wubben a reboot attendee and high school student (name, alas, unknown)Germany The Netherlands. When he heard I was from PEI, he said “oh, you must know Steven Garrity.” Turns out he is a regular listener of Steven’s Acts of Volition Radio show, and has bought many CDs based on hearing new artists there.

Here I was thinking that I’d have to fall into the usual “small Island province off the east coast of Canada” routine at reboot; little did I know that our reputation precedes us.

Happily, I also got the chance to spread a little Island love outwards: I told Dragos Novac, from Krogos Software in Bucharest, Romania to thank his countrymen at Interakt for their excellent PDFreports product which we used to generate the lists of electors in the 2003 Provincial General Election.

Similarly, I told MySQL co-founder David Axmark the story of how we used MySQL installed on an Apple iBook to help us process the election returns after the unfortunate coincidence of a hurricane with election day, and the attendant loss of power.

Yesterday the insanity of having a fully equipped laptop but no spring jacket hit me squarely, as I found myself shivering down the frigid streets of Copenhagen at 11:30 p.m. with exhausted wrists and a weakened mind. I have decided that today I will divert from the well-trodden lemming path, and leave the laptop at home. I’ve got the REI jacket loaded up with pen and a Moleskin and I’m ready to rock. As such, today’s blog will be delivered to you on bits of paper with tiny scrawled notes that you will find in the oddest of places.

Evidently all computing innovations that we thought were invented by young technoturks in the 1980s actually sprang to being, formed almost as fully as we use them today, back in the late 1960s. So we learned by watching Doug Engelbart’s 1968 Demo tonight at reboot. Mice, hypertext, outliners, keyword searching, regular expressions, it’s all there. If you ever have a chance to see it do: you will be amazed. I’ve attached a brief audio excerpt from tonight’s showing, captured on my iBook in the hall.

Plazes crossed my radar several months ago, likely because of a mention on Joi Ito’s blog. I visited, registered, but never really got what it was for or about, and never returned.

Today I was cured of this through a presentation by its founders Stefan Kellner and Felix Petersen, two super-smart guys from Germany.

Here’s the thing you need to get: location based services — stuff on the web that is tailored, automagically, to wherever you happen to be at a given moment — are hard because, at least right now, the folks with the best geolocating abilities are the mobile phone companies, and they’re not giving the information up, at least not in any sort of open, hackable way.

Stefan and Felix’s brilliant innovation was realizing that they could built geolocation on top of the unique MAC addresses that most every Ethernet router, wired and wireless, have. They have a little app, called the launcher that figures out the MAC address of wherever you happen to be and sends it up to their server.

For example, here’s the Plazes page for the reboot hall. Because I ran the launcher when I opened up my laptop, the Plazes server has the MAC address I’m using, and knows, from other users at the same location who’ve been ahead and “blazed the trail” with information about the location, where I am.

This is such an elegant solution to an otherwise cumbersome problem, that I was smiling throughout their talk. Neato.

The unspoken secret of my attendance at reboot was that, until this morning, I hadn’t looked at the program for the conference. I knew some of the names of the speakers, read somewhere that the conference was, vaguely, about “the future.” But as to the “themes” and “topics,” well, I was too busy figuring out how to get here to pay attention to that sort of thing.

My conference planning, thus, was sort of: conference, Copenhagen, wiki, cool, Air Canada, hotel, register.

As such it came as a pleasant surprise that one of the speakers was organic farmer Thomas Harttung, speaking on The Biological Way – Mind the Gap. Thomas is a compelling speaker, a bona fide farmer, and someone who has thought deeply about food, biology, farming and spirituality. The transcript of an earlier talk will give you a taste of his thinking.

His organic farm here in Denmark serves 35,000 clients with organic fruit and vegetables delivered to the door.

And here I thought it was going to be all packets and wikis and gazombozasa.