The eagle-eyed amongst you may have noticed that Mike is the first person in a long time to make it out of the Hall of Shame in the sidebar - which is where you end up when you don’t post on your weblog for six months. Mike’s recent posts on cash versus cards and his day at Wimbledon were enough to convince me that it wasn’t just a reinstall of his website - although it’s a pity he seems to have lost all his previous work. Not as much of a pity that he spotted when Dave vandalised his website last year…

Mike’s recent reappearance and Ed’s not-so-recent conversion to wordpress reminded me that my weblog needed upgrading once again - and I then spent two days fiddling with the new widgets in the sidebar. Wordpress just keeps getting better. Finally, I can show where the recent comments are lurking - and it’s not always on the most recent posts - along with who’s posting what in the nearby circle. With all the new widgets though I’m considering adding a second sidebar!

Anyway, enough meta-talk for now.

Last weekend was the “Fill the Gap” mapping party in Kew and Richmond - the gap being between all of our stuff around Putney and the stuff further south-west coming up towards Kingston. Although I had volunteered to help organise it, there wasn’t much to be done after Etienne had found a venue. Having a pile of overhead imagery already printed out was worthwhile, since nobody brought their own!

Photos of Streetsigns - sitting around in the pub working on the day’s mapping generally attracts curious onlookers - people can never work out what we’re up to!

This was after me, Dave and Mike had finished - hence the half-empty table!

On Saturday Mike made his first real foray into the world of OpenStreetMap, and he and Dave went mapping around Mortlake whilst I did the stuff further up the hill in Sheen. With the weather turning a bit miserable I volunteered to stay in the pub and mark up all the morning stuff (and lend a hand with other people), and when everyone was done we went for some pizza down at the river (courtesy of our sponsors; tastes twice as nice!). On Sunday morning Dave and I went round collecting a handful of missed bits from my Saturday zone, before I volunteered to have a quick blast around Richmond Park on my bike, hence saving Nick Whitelegg a few miles walk. Whilst I was there, I nipped out to fill in a couple more council estates that I’d got bored of doing on a previous expedition to darkest Roehampton.

One thing that surprised me in the pub - in amongst all the people with no idea what we were doing, one person remarked “Oh, OpenStreetMap? Yeah, I’ve heard of you guys”. Interesting, and I wonder where from.

All in all, another good mapping party, and now the third that I’ve been on. At this rate though, there’ll be not much left to map in a couple of years - and what will we all do then?

Almost a year ago, Ant and I walked the Pennine Way. More recently, Josh Roberts pointed me towards an article he has written for USA Today about it. You can read the full article online.

Pity I can’t even get my own age right - gah! Thanks go to Josh for quoting me in his article. I’m sure Ant is still kept awake by recurring thoughts of my terrible (and slightly repetitive) singing.