Did you know that there is a Kummeli joke about swedish people where this one guy says “Olle, Olle, Olle”

And, I wish I knew how to include this video right here, but I can’t be arsed to find out, so follow this link, it’s safe for work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leRsWGF3mSc.

Back? Yes, for the last 14 days, me and my wife have been in transit: Sweden, Finland, and Estonia have been well visited.

I should type up a real report on this, but Everyday Life (that lovely thing) makes me focus on getting back on track again.

This is a sign of life, and I have read your emails, I have read your weblogs. I still like you.

[Nitro](http://www.nitroproject.org) is an MVC web framework written in Ruby. “For Web2.0″, you know.

Interested Nitro neophytes can head over to [Oxyliquit](http://www.oxyliquit.de/), the Nitro Q&A website, which has tutorials, FAQs, articles, and all the other resources you may need. And a link to #nitro at irc.freenode.net.

After reading about Postgres, and hearing about it, from Peter Marklund, I was encouraged enough: I compiled it and installed it on laptop, using [this fine Apple tutorial](http://developer.apple.com/internet/opensource/postgres.html). A thorough, helpful walk-through.

Reading [the Postgres 8.1.4 documentation](http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/interactive/) was a little like paging through a blasphemous tome of ancient knowledge: all of my “Keep Your Logic Out Of The Data Storage” ideas were challenged, and I was often wow’ed with the raw power. On every page, with all the new features. I have some digesting to do. Let the new gospel sink in. Take a stand.

What are your feelings about Postgres’ power?

*Update:* Trouble hit me with the tagging part. Perhaps the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin and the Bundle are as yet incompatible. Perhaps I bet on the wrong tagging library horse for WordPress? Perhaps I should contact the Blogging Bundle author, and ask for the feature?

In Swedish: fotangel (foot-anglers?). Luisa told me the Danish word: partisansøm (partisan nail). Danes get cooler words.

Oh, my home country gets a shoutout in the Wikipedia article above:

> Caltrops have been used by criminals in some countries to hinder pursuing police cars, especially in Sweden where they have become “standard procedure” at robberies of valuable transports.

And, my role-playing subculture, too:

> In role-playing games, some players refer to tetrahedral 4-sided dice as “caltrops” because the corners are arranged in a similar manner to a caltrop’s spikes. When stepped on with bare feet, plenty of pain will result.

The exactness! Yes, this truly is the wisdom of crowds.

We also get to know about the discourse of American students’ practical jokes: “seat tacks” are called “ass scorpions” over there.

Also: I marvel at the category name “Area denial weapons”. The word has an interesting mixture of active and passive.

[Structured Blogging](http://structuredblogging.org/) has the tools to help those aggregators. By enhancing your “Write Post” page to also include “Write Event”, “Write Review”, this plugin enables you to invisibly present events and reviews as such to robots.

[Microformats](http://www.microformats.org/) are about having **structured data** (such as a review “3/10 for lousy Ice Age 2″, or an event “Battle of the Hackers, all weekend at Peach Pit”) **inside the regular HTML**. Data inside this pattern can be picked up by robotic visitors to your site, to be aggregated, and re-presented elsewhere.

Why do it now? If you have some kind of review site. If you have a list of important business cards that should face the world. Or, if you just want some added meta-data to your lists. But what if you don’t have those things?

[Jeremy Keith](http://adactio.com/) and I talked about the cite attribute on blockquote elements in HTML. Not often used. Javascript People are more keen to use these things, because understand just how valuable that extra information can be, when some additional scripting has been added to a webpage. A page with microformats added looks just like ordinary text, without extra styling or scripting added. Some effort is needed, if you want the presence of the metadata to “stand out”.

Is the following true? “The people who can see future value in not-currently-valuable stuff, they have a (theoretical) responsibility to tell others about it, at least.”

The weblog on Structured blogging says it clearly: it’s not about responsibility, it’s about getting value yourself, from your own data. Sharing is cool, but value for me is what’ll draw others in as well.

I came to think about these things after I’d talked with [Ben Griffiths](http://www.reevoo.com/blogs/bengriffiths/) at [Reevoo](http://www.reevoo.com/) who aggregates product reviews. Talking to Jeremy Keith, about hContact cards was also inspiring.

Thanks a ton.

The web-and-other-things conference [Reboot](http://www.reboot.dk/) is over for this year. I attended, this my second year, with some notion of what to expect.

Meeting people again was a hit.

I got to meet Flash guy and music composer [Niko Nyman](http://nnyman.com/) of Helsinki, and many other HKI folks. [Jyri Engeström](http://zengestrom.com) was wearing thin-golden-rimmed glasses which made him look like a youthful John Backus (of [BNF](http://cui.unige.ch/db-research/Enseignement/analyseinfo/AboutBNF.html) fame). Couldn’t find the image with the likeness online, though.

Since the format of the conference is more of a space-rocket ride at 20 meters from the ground over highly interesting landscape, the participants are careful with their time, and allow detailed conversations & elaborations to spill over, into the blogosphere, for later.

Lesson: **Business cards are convenient.**

The morning of Day 1, I was packing my stuff (doing the mistake of lugging a laptop), and my wife asked me if I had any business cards left. Oops. I took 5 of them to the conference — it was too late to bike to the the office, across town, to grab them, so I attended the conference anyway. The same thing happened the next day, when I thought the activity was to commence at 10. It turned out an interesting presentation was on at 9.15, and I had to skip biking across town again. Luisa’s fix for this was simple and elegant: Print two sheets of label stickers with contact details. Adhesive business cards.

Lesson #2: **Laptops can be a hindrance.**

So, I had a more agile day 2, with only a little Moleskine notebook and a cheap pen. Switching contexts on a free, empty, white, small piece of paper is… what you do. It’s not even an activity to make a new category, a new partition, a new selection – on paper, it all flows.

Presentation picking for the curious: When presented with many choices, **among the unknown presenters, pick the one with the most interesting surname**. This leads you away from hearing only Thought Leaders and A-listers, which can be a good thing. Your best friend has already videocast the presentation in the Big Room anyway, so you’re gonna hear that later, on your way to work. The skunkworks, improvised, extra stuff: that’s often missed in the post-event documentation flurry. (Note to self: write a post on Guy’s 20×20 format!)

Meeting [Pelle Brændgaard](http://www.stakeventures.com) again was a rare pleasure. Views, ideas, literature hints, war stories, commentary: we were quite the chatters. Pelle’s lived the crypto-dream Back In The Day (those of you who read [Cryptonomicon](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptonomicon) will know), and the free spirit is still vibrant with him. He’s one of the rare men who can smoke cigars, and still look natural and simple. His work-mate Tim was also there, great chap.

(Note to self: Since this is not a list of great people, I should stop listing them.)

“At Reboot, the hacker quotient is low, and the hackers that are here are mostly open-minded folks”, said UK hacker Tom Armitage (who’ll be in the 20×20 post as well). He’s right. It’s about going outside your own domain, to learn about… the other things.

Thanks, Mygdal, and thanks Nyholm, and thanks crew. This year was also great.

Now I look forward to other reading accomplishments. Next up is another, less fictitious account: Gödel, Escher, Bach aka G.E.B. by a Douglas R. Hofstadter. It’s referenced in Stephenson’s earlier work, and I borrowed it from my good friend, the Fortran expert. “I never finished it,” he admitted. We’ll see how I fare, in meeting Hofstadter’s work.

**Update:** Review – If you read Cryptonomicon, and G.E.B. and feel like re-reading it, in an historical re-hash, then the Cycle is for you. (It was *for me*.)

**Update again**: [Thorbiörn](http://www.allconsuming.net/person/trurl) (in Stockholm, link to Allconsuming profile) has begun reading G.E.B. a week before me! [G.E.B. page at Allconsuming](http://www.allconsuming.net/item/view/14256).

**Update a third time (June 4, 2006):** [Peter Rukavina](http://ruk.ca/) was here in Copenhagen for a visit, saw my book said “My father had that book on his coffee-table, all of my childhood. I tried reading it, but it baffled me. You are most probably more equipped now, to enjoy it.”

“Yup, we are happy”, is Luisa’s caption to the picture.

So true.

Thanks, all of you lovely people, for celebrating our love.