This weekend is the first weekend since last weekend

I’ve got my fingers in so many pies that I just don’t have enough fingers to put two of them in this one

And here’s something from the fridge this morning, when I was searching for breakfast:

Damn right you do!

The ambulance crew were responding to one such high-priority call, to respond to house 54 on a street of which I can’t remember the name. They had been told it had a brown door, and when they found house 53 with the other half of the semi having a brown door, they jumped out and started pounding on it. A few seconds later a neighbour helpfully pointed out that it was an unmarked “53a”, so they jumped in the ambulance, and set off again. Finding house 54 further down the street, they again jumped out, but the wrong colour on the door gave the first indication they were now on the wrong street, so jumping back in the ambulance and taking the other fork in the road got them to the correct house 54, with a brown door, and when they finally got to the patient, he was dead.

Now admittedly the patient in question had been dead for a few days, so 3 minutes of faffing around didn’t cause him any significant ill effects, but when the first scene of the program was a man quite literally bleeding out, it shows such things can make all the difference. And I was surprised that the crew didn’t have some massively overcomplicated, Accenture-procured multi-million pound GPS system that had house numbers built in. Actually, now I think about it, it’s probably best they didn’t - having been involved in the periphery of a few NHS IT projects, I can say they are the best way yet conceived of turning gob-smackingly large amounts of taxpayers money into things that simply just don’t work. So these paramedics are probably better off with a consumer device that other consumers have willingly chosen to pay for with their own hard-earned cash, rather than involving bureaucrats, even though it can’t help them find particular houses in a timely manner. I’ve seen similar issues on other emergency-services documentaries - police getting stuck in housing estates due to barriers simply not on their commercial GPSes.

So the OpenStreetMap tie-in comes from having spent the last few weeks starting to look into what comes next for OpenStreetMap after we’ve mapped every road, pub and cycle route in the country (hey, what seemed wildly ambitious just two years ago is becoming increasing routinely anticipated), and what’s technically known as “Addressing” is part of that. It involves taking things one step further than just knowing where each road is, and getting to the point where we know where each house on each road is. Now that’s a whole lot of work, but in bits and pieces across Europe OSM volunteers are starting to try things out. Dave has made a start around our area - see his sketch above - which is made up of fiendishly complex blocks of flats and Matt has done some stuff near our office. Frederik and Jochen from GeoFabrik have even made a tool for helping spot mistakes in the data. There’s a lot of potential here, but a lot of hard work, but with everything in OSM it’s a case of when, not if.

So here’s hoping that in the next year or two we’ll see consumer devices working from the world’s best global community-generated open-source mapping-cum-routing-come-addressing-cum-everything-else dataset, helping ambulance drivers (and pizza delivery guys, for that matter) from here to, well, everywhere. And maybe it’ll be only a few years between us saying “OpenStreetMap is pretty accurate, but I wouldn’t use it for routing ambulances” to saying “OpenStreetMap is pretty accurate, especially for routing ambulances”. It’ll be awesome.

Whilst I’ve been back, I’ve been to the bar (once or twice), another mapping party, a Bourbon Blue band night, some climbing at the Westway, and was even interviewed by one of our German OSMers who came over to London. Next up, I’m off to FOSS4G in Cape Town tomorrow night for a week - now if only someone would come up with a more pleasant (and environmentally friendly) way to travel there… If you’re in Cape Town and fancy meeting up - give me a shout!

Last week, in amongst a bit of a hosting problem, hill colouring went live on the cycle map. And it looks awesome!

Having something more pleasing than a flat grey background really helps put flesh on the skeleton of the contour lines, but it means that some stuff needs tweaking to fit. You can see the lovely new forest and wood styles on the image below - my very own forest pattern symbol, with a subtle green tinge and a solid border. The same area before can be found (here).

But wait - there’s more! In city centres, cycle routes can get quite complicated, and in some places have to go down one-way roads. You then end up with links that are only supposed to be followed in one direction - if you go the other way you might end up facing a no-entry sign (that you’re not really supposed to blithely ignore, politicians too for that matter). So you might end up with a confusing array of cycle routes, such as in central London:

… but no longer. The swiss-army-knife-like ‘relations’ to the rescue, which can give pointers as to which way you’re supposed to go. That gives us …

(Click the pictures for more detailed lovelyness!)

But wait, that’s not all. Maybe your area doesn’t have any signed cycle routes and no cycle paths either. Or maybe you’ve got both, and also want cycle lanes marked. A nice little bit of blue casing on either side of the road shows which streets have cycle lanes.

And finally, the icon wizardry of Matt Amos has helped me out with showing more useful points of interest - we now have drinking water locations shown (here in Trento, Italy):

… which are probably a better idea than going to a pub. But what’s better than going to a pub for a nice refreshing beer? Well a pub with free wifi, of course!

And there’s been a million and one places added to the cycle map too, but far, far too many for me to list here. Enjoy!

Update: It’s back up now, and I’m resuming the update for this weeks tiles. Happy mapping!

During the first May bank-holiday weekend Dave and I scratched an itch that had been bothering me for a while. There are a few long distance paths through London, and the two that I’ve frequently come across are the Capital Ring and the London Loop, but we’d made no effort to join up the bits we had spotted. We set off to find the route of the Capital Ring from Wimbledon Common to Wimbledon Park, and accidently ended up following it all the way to Woolwich on the other side of the city.

So combining both the relations contexts and the Capital Ring expedition led me to try to render them, to see if it works. And it pretty much does. Dave had been tagging some bus routes during the development of Potlatch’s relations handling code so I rendered them too. And lo and behold, other people have been doing the same here and there.

London overview (click the picture, then the all sizes link to see it in full):

Around Earlsfield:

Bus routes around Wandsworth:

And the title of the post? Well, it’s not only that I was practising my (currently abysmal) cycling skills, it’s also what I say when I’m experimenting without having thought things through beforehand. No prizes for spotting which map I ripped off for the style sheets! Currently I don’t have any plans for making this a full service like the cycle map, which is still my main focus.

Elevation colouring! Hill Shading! How cool is that? (N.B. If you ever hear me asking, then the answer is one of ‘very’ and ‘awesome’. ‘Meh’ is a valid response, but don’t let me hear you saying it!)

Now for all the OSM types there’s a few caveats. The last time I posted a teaser (for contours) it took me six months to get things working properly. And there’s plenty of things need fixing before the hillshading will go live, like some resolution issues, tiling issues, a minor problem involving the ocean shapefiles and so on - never mind choosing some colours that are a bit more subtle. So be patient!

I’ve been to see some good music over the past few weeks - drum and bass with Nia in Camden, good old pub basement bands with Linnie and Jude, and an eclectic mix of choral stuff this time starring Nia. The latter two, plus a barbeque in deepest surburbia with Joth and Em and a whole Sunday of doing absolutely nothing rounded out a nice weekend. And I went climbing last week too, nice to find I can still climb 6bs without much practise.

The cycling has tailed off a little, apart from mammoth weekend rides with Dave. Mammoth in timespan if not in average speed that is - a fifty-two mile ride takes all day when the first 30 miles involve following footpaths around London even if the last 20 miles takes less than an hour to ride directly home! Still, we’re hopefully moving offices at work next week so I’ll be back commuting via bike instead of sauntering across Putney bridge in the mornings so that’ll get the fitness up in time to enjoy the summer weather.

Anyway, busy busy busy as ever. My thoughts on the new mayor and all that jazz can wait for some other time (or you can read Nia’s thoughts on the matter and pretend I wrote them!)

The answer is to click on the account in question (i.e. one level up from your Inbox), then click “Manage Folder Subscriptions”. From there on it should be obvious - find the folders, and tick the boxes. Job done.

Just look at those Russian abs. They knew how to make you, umm, feel impressed upon.