So we had the first of what will hopefully be a series of many Scottish mapping parties on Saturday, the idea is to pick somewhere which is reasonably accessible and still in need of mapping and get together and spend some time filling in some of the big gaps outside of the city.

There was enough of an outline of the roads to divide the town up into sectors and we headed off on bicycles and in cars to cover the town.

We meet back for lunch at the Peni Deli where we were able to compare our tracks on my eeePC, although my gpsbabel kung-fu failed me and I only managed to pull waypoints and not the full tracks from the Garmin. However it was still a valuable tool to see who had managed to cover what area’s, and importantly what was left to be covered.



We then split up to cover some of the area’s left, to map in the afternoon. I think that we may have got things slightly wrong here as we ended up with some duplication in terms of the area’s covered; however this isn’t necessary a bad thing as it has meant that some area’s have ended up much better than if a single person would have covered them.

But, there is a lesson for the future, especially when we have lots of people trying to map a small area is that we all would be better carrying paper maps with the area’s each person is covering written on them or possibly working much closer as a team through an area and dividing up to cover various road, paths, building etc.

Overall the day was a huge success, we managed to elevate Penicuik largely to the “mapped” status although I have no doubt that we will have missed some roads and certainly haven’t covered all the myriad of various footways around the estates.

Overall, I covered 25 miles on my bike on my bike as shown by the blue line on the map above.

The Team at the end of the day.

It’s also worth putting out a big cheers to Bob for doing the hard work in organising this, and hopefully see some of you at the Glasgow mapping party on the 22nd May.

Finding the Way

We just got back from our annual weekend away with friends.

As usual I took the GPS down with me do do some OpenStreetMapping,  however the map is so good these days that apart from the odd postbox and having to reclassify a track to a road there was not a huge amount to add. I was even able to use the garmin files to successfully navigate a small walk.

This left plenty of time to drink a few beers and take lots of pictures

New Year New Starter

So here I am again. I’ve switch the blog from serendipity to wordpress. Despite the possible security issues with  wordpress, I’ve a number of wordpress blogs and I have a script which should help me keep them all up to date using svn.

In addition, I’m in the process of moving my hosting from gradwell to a Virtual Machine hosted by bytemark partly because it will be cheaper for me and also because I was finding it hard getting support questions answered by  gradwell. This also means that at low volumes the response time from a dedicated server is much faster than from shared hosting. With the rollout of google’s new Caffeine infrastructure it’s likely that speed will become a factor in the search results.

So I’ve also built a new template for the site. It’s basically a cut down hacked around version of the standard wordpress kubrik template. From the previous site I’ve cut down on the use of colour and I’ve dropped headers entirely and kept a single sidebar. There are lots of tweaks that still need to be applied.

Before

After

So, I’m hoping to provide regular updates on my usual activities… Progress on the bread making front, photography, OpenStreetMap, Bedlamites and whatever else comes up In reality I probably won’t end up doing anything for another 3 months.

I’m impressed by the efficiency of of Identity and passport agency service. I had an interview with them on Tuesday to “confirm my identity” and the new passport arrived today.

The shadow looks almost 3D in the ice.

The view from the front

I took these pictures at the Lochrin basin at the end of the union canal. The sun was just warm enough to melt the ice, but anything in the shade remained icy. Full size versions are available on Flickr

My pictures from Agilent Live III are now online

A Big thanks and well done to all the bands that performed (Early Shift, Bad Monkey, Kirstyn Knowles, The Remedy, The Jack, Skellum and Kipper. Also special thanks go to Gavin for all the hard working organizing this once again.

We had stopped at Melrose Abbey on the way back from Katherine and Colin’s wedding, and I took this picture while walking about on a fine sunny day.

UPDATE: Thanks to http://www.syddware.com/cgi-bin/pirate.pl

A sea dog says ‘t this way:
So I jus’ happened t’ upload this picture on t’ me flickr pages in th’ early hours o’ th’ mornin’, nay on accoun’ o’ o’ talk like a swashbuckler tide, but as part o’ me general sortin’ ou’ o’ me photos taken o’er th’ Summer. Howerebecause o’ th’ swashbuckler theme, ‘t has made ’tis way onto th’ “Interesting” page on flickr!
This picture be taken at Melrose Abbey on th’ way aft from Katherine an’ Colin`s weddin’, on a fine sunny tide.
Ya scurvy dog who ortin’ t’ be keel hauled!

UPDATE2: Thanks to commenters on Flickr, the Latin above reads “memento mori” or “remember you are mortal”, or something of that ilk? (someone else recons “Mei Entomo”) anyone any ideas?