Cycling: London to Brighton

On Saturday I cycled from London to Brighton. It's the first day long cycle that I've done since I cycled from Bletchley to Bedford and back, over a month ago. Yeah I did lots of cycling at the Woking Mapping party, but there was lots of breaks and cul-de-sacs.

I couldn't even get 10 minutes away, and I managed to get totally confused by the signage for the National Cycle Network route 23. Having the Cycle Map and an intermittently working bluetooth GPS was really useful. Looking at the trace and where the sign posts were it appears that some of the signposts around the South end of South Norwood Country Park are totally ambiguous, alternatively the route has been changed recently. There was a few other places that I had to double back because I had missed a turn.

Further south there was some nice views across the hills.

I was quite surprised when I found that the national cycle route goes right through the middle of Gatwick airport. 

Had a little bit of a wander in Brighton before getting the train home.

I added a few extra pois, road names and the southern end of the ncn 20 into Brighton to the osm data.

In the future I should try and leave before lunchtime, for these day long cycles, which I should do more often.

And finally Brighton Peir for the first time:

Mashed08

Last weekend I was at Mashed08. I stayed there overnight, so didn't get much sleep.

Didn't do any mashing up, though I did finally start writing a bit of ruby code to take a file with a list of street names, and ask the OSMXAPI whether that street exists within a specified bounding box.

It was interesting to see what people were doing. There was very few people doing anything with maps. There were a few groups who using high resolution satellite imagery rather than plain old maps. A lot of people were working on something that was tv or audio related, such as ripping the subtitles and translating them into another language in almost real time. Twitter seems to be rather popular.

The event was featured in this week's BBC News Click programme. (BBC iPlayer only works in the UK and programmes are only available for one week.)

I'm uploading the better photos to Flicker with the Mashed08 tag.

When your at a station waiting on a delayed train, just get some bean bags out to sit on:

(Kinda ideal for getting passers by ask were the bean bag sale is).

OSM: GSoC blogs on Planet-OSM

All the OpenStreetMap Google Summer of Code 2008 student blogs are now on Planet-OSM, the feed aggregator for OpenStreetMap related blogs.