Covent Garden is one of those very central London areas where there seems to be a tendency for everyone to leave it for somebody else to do. We've had the streets mapped just fine for a long time of course, but when it comes to the next level of detail. Well POI mapping here is a big job. Loads of shops, and restaurants and bars along every street. As I've said before, Covent Garden is "POI central", more so even than Oxford Street. So for our final "summer mapping evening", our final assault on London completeness before we hunker down for a cold winter, this seemed like a good place to plonk a cake diagram.

Overall there was a fair amount of mapping done, but there's plenty more POIs left there. In fact nobody tackled slice number one. The central piazza building, on two storeys. The POI centrepiece of POI central. ...Some other time maybe.

Happily we continued a streak of attracting along new people. Shaun and I were showing Martin and JC the process of gathering POI data. They got the hang of it pretty quickly, then ran off and did a street by themselves.

We were back at "The Theodore Bullfrog" pub again. Previously it seemed like a rather sneaky off-the-beaten-track spot. Great for launching our assaults on the Covent Garden POI completeness. But this was Thursday, and it was rammed with people when we arrived. Luckily we sent Derick in advance. He spotted a pair of ladies and... "I saw one of them downing their wine, and I thought this is my chance" (quote from Derick) Not sure what kind of chance it was exactly, but we had a table when we arrived.

They managed to serve us some good food, but overall the pub has gone down in my estimation. It has a nasty packed full of tourists slash PriceWaterHouseCoopers people feel to it, which felt extra nasty when someone decided to nick Andy's rucksack. It had a couple of shiny new OpenStreetMap books in it, which will no doubt be fairly useless to the thief. No... I don't think we'll go there again. There's only one way I would forgive them. If they were to do the right thing with that utterly lame "contact us" map on their website. Replace it with OpenStreetMap and get the marker in the right place! I'm not even going to link to it, it offends me so.

Despite all this, we had a corker of a meet-up...

We had another new guy, Max, who was at my Remote Pakistan Mapping Workshop. He's done some work for the world bank, which can be interesting from a HOT point of view. He was also knowledgeable in the mysteries of U.S. boundary definitions (I chatted to him for a while about that) Useful kind of chap to have involved, so hopefully we'll see more of him.

I almost had a serious conversation about PBF Format newly supported by Osmosis. I was wondering if we should offer a planet download in this format. PBF is compact, and my experiments confirm it's a lot faster for bbox extracting, but I did run into some problems with version numbers getting dropped (Maybe I'll be more specific in another blog post)

But my "minutes" started to take a diagrammatic form, as we discussed feng shui, and how, according to my girlfriend, we need to remove the OpenStreetMap poster from the entrance hall at our house, to re-balance the energies.

A long (illustrated) discussion of different types of doodles we used to do when we were little.

I think it was this doodle of "Ophaal brug", which kicked off that (It's a Dutch type of bridge) :

With this kind of work, I think we need to collectively start entering some art competitions. Let's see what we can come up with next time we meet.

We'll have plenty of time for that kind of thing next time, because it's winter time! The clocks changed, and it's just a bit too dark and miserable for mapping now, so we'll be focusing on the pub part of the evening (as if we didn't already) The first pure pub meet-up will take place next Tuesday 23rd. More details to appear here shortly