A couple of weeks ago the London summer mapping parties came to Soho.

Back to Soho I should say. Perhaps not the most imaginative choice of location, but as my cake diagram hinted fairly heavily, I'm still hoping to fill in those building gaps (see coverage blobs). We did pretty well with that around Fleet Street, but I think people are uninspired by Soho's buildings. They're a bit more of a standard city block layout. Not very exciting, although I did find some alleyways which needed rearranging in my slice.

That was before heading to our old favourite pub The Blue Posts. I found everyone sitting outside. How very European. In (and outside) the pub we talked about...

Augmented reality smartphone apps such as Layar, and how they generally suck because we want mini Darth Vaders dammit! (was that the reason they suck? or did I just make that up?)

Every branch of the bank Abbey recently changed name to "Santander". That's a lot of amenity=bank nodes which need to change across the UK (and elsewhere in europe?) But we wont mention the dirty three letter B word.

Google wifi data gathering was hot news two weeks ago. Evil or not? I don't know, but if I was going to the trouble of driving a along every road. I'd definitely make sure I was gathering more data rather than less. Their mistake was letting anyone find out about it :-)

I took the opportunity to ask the uber-cyclists a few questions because my girlfriend just bought a bike, and I may well buy one very soon. It's a strange new world of transport possibilities. We also got onto talking about my dragon's den product idea: Spray-on fake rust... for ultimate cycle security. Oh rats! I've just told everyone my idea. I was going to make millions with that! The inventive minds around the table took the idea further, with: The car dirtying service for Chelsea Tractor drivers. Who said OpenStreetMappers could never find a business model? It just doesn't have anything to do with OpenStreetMap.

...hmmm in fact we didn't talk about OpenStreetMap very much did we? We needed to clear our heads with a trip to get

BURRITOS! ... nom nom nom

Over burritos Jenny told the story of how she managed to dent her fridge in a cycling accident. I actually missed the story, so I'm as confused as you are.

After that we did finally talk about OpenStreetMap. We talked about database server disk space which is becoming a concern. We talked about the need for a firmware upgrade on the DB server. That has now been carried out (causing short downtime). They've also been attempting a 'resize'... All in all there's no need to panic. There is a plan. But you can always help with donations. If you are Adaptec you can definitely help... not-for-profit... hint hint

We talked about increased detail levels and the tendency to drift slowly towards mapping everything as areas. What if roads were areas? What if pavements were areas? What if postboxes were little round areas, and power lines were not mapped as ways, but as very narrow areas!? This was all wild (and silly) speculation. Don't do it.

We talked about how "Private" is maybe not really the right word in the GPS trace upload controls, since your track points are still publicly available.

We talked about GB Chapter, but mainly to express confusion about what was going on there. I'm still confused actually. Looks like that event didn't happen. Happy to help organising a chapter meeting event, but someone might have to let me know. I should probably read the talk-gb mailing list.

Speaking of which there's several very interesting events coming up in the very near future. So interesting I might just write a separate diary entry.