I like how this giant skyscraper – going to be taller than the adjacent Tower 42, and taller even than One Canada Square in Canary Wharf, is slowly inching its way skywards. I wonder whether people will only really notice it when it becomes higher than Tower 42?

But it won’t be the tallest for long, there’s even taller buildings in central London on the way.

I’ve heard this a few times over the years, and it always bamboozles me. Yesterday it cropped up again, when someone was referring to an immersion heater, and said:

It’s more efficient if you leave it on all day – that way it’s just topping it up. It uses more electricity if you let it cool down and then have to heat it all the way back up again.

I’ve heard similar stuff about leaving the central heating running all day too. My questions are – why do people believe such drivel? Why is it so widely perpetuated? And actually how would you explain this to someone in a way they’d understand? If you just though about mentioning heat flux, then that’s not going to get you anywhere, but does anyone have a good analogy or explanation I can use in future?

Recently I got hold of the original video files from the OpenStreetMap State of the Map 2008 conference. Now I realise that the 2009 conference has been and gone in the meantime, but I think there’s still value in the old videos – whilst a year is a long time in the land of OSM the more things change the more they stay the same.

As for me, here’s a 20 minute video of me talking about the cycle map (it wasn’t called OpenCycleMap back then) as it was around its first birthday. This was the first conference I’d ever spoken at, and aside from making some images before I left home the entire thing was put together during the conference (some things never change…)

Andy Allan: “OSM Cycle Map” at SOTM08 from Andy Allan on Vimeo.

I’ve already encoded all the remaining videos – you can see the full list on the OSM wiki. I’ll be uploading the rest of them over the next few weeks, and probably pulling out a few of my favourites to share with you.

Apart from that, I have two more video editing projects up my sleeve. Now where did I leave all that spare time?