Systeme D

17 September 2007

Blowing away the dust



I haven't got a Daring Fireball-type long post to hand, nor a witty one-line apercu (as if I ever do), but given that it's almost two months since I last posted something here I figured a few sentences might be in order.

We've been cycling. Quite a bit: a week around Brittany, a weekend (just gone) around Somerset, and the usual pootles around Oxfordshire. And we did get wet in Brittany, but not quite as wet as we did here in Charlbury. On the days the heavens opened, I was driving to James Needham's wedding. In Ledbury. How do you get from Charlbury to Ledbury? Well, Tewkesbury, Moreton, Cheltenham, Gloucester, they're all good places to drive through. Usually, that is.

I heartily recommend the Philips Navigator and AA Close-Up Britain atlases for such occasions, because they show even the most minor of streams, so you can plan your route to cross as far upstream as possible and thereby avoid your Pluriel being swept away in a raging torrent.

The AA Close-Up Britain atlas is wonderful in another way: it shows the National Cycle Network. This is kind of useful given how slow the Sustrans map site is. Of course, in the true tradition of building-a-better-mousetrap, we can actually do something about the latter, i.e. prepare an OpenStreetMap replacement. Andy Allan has produced this excellent Mapnik-powered National Cycle Network map from OSM data, and Anna and I are having great fun - as, it seems, are many others - taking every opportunity to gather new data for it. How can you not love a route that takes you past Glastonbury Tor on a little windy lane (pictured)? (The bed and breakfast we stayed in was using Eviivo Frontdesk. I laughed.)

Potlatch, my OSM Flash editor, has come on quite a lot recently. It now almost does everything in my surveying workflow: imports and simplifies GPS tracklogs, copes with points of interest, and so on. The one major thing missing is support for OSGB, so I can trace over the New Popular Edition.

Tea Cottage - Mum's lovely Rutland house - is for sale. Anyone looking for a beautiful house for sale in Rutland, especially search-engine spiders, could do a lot worse than look there.

We went for a week around the Warwickshire Ring on Iago, aided by Ben and Louise, and I'm not going to spend half a day blogging that because you can read it all in the current Waterways World instead. And I still haven't finished the WW website, but I'm getting there.

Comments

c328t

Posted by ma50zda on 19.10.07 01:42

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