The pub choice was a bit disastrous for last night's random pub meet-up. An England match was on, and it seems the Freemasons Arms in covent garden is a good place to watch it (screens on every wall), which pretty much makes it the worst place ever for an OSM pub meet-up.

Chris Osborne got there early (or maybe on time) and managed to bagsie half of a table. I sat with him and Jeff, who had some questions about editing with JOSM. I showed him how to set the projection so the UK streets don't appear vertically squished, and basically reassured him that he could go ahead and move the streets which other people had put in, but which appeared to be in the wrong place.

Meanwhile a bunch of people were furiously discussing the new database hardware, and how well PostgreSQL is performing on there while Matt makes the poor server do somersaults and pirouettes for his amusement (and testing API 0.6 migration scripts) No doubt MySQL vs PostgreSQL was discussed too. No. We're not switching to Monet DB.

Speaking of which, I don't think we actually played any April fools tricks last night, but we chatted about the various April fools blog posts. Steve's announcement was followed up by more foolish technical details from Matt. I particularly like the tweeting planet diffs idea. Meanwhile we decided Shaun's Crap-o-surface Detector project idea was a bit too plausible. Someone should submit it as google summer of code project.

The pub got more overcrowded as time went on, so we abandoned Freemasons Arms and went around the corner to the Lowlander; a far more swanky establishment where we enjoyed a whole floor all to ourselves, and belgian beers aplenty.

Despite this, Leroy managed to find us. I met Leroy last Friday at the Greater London Linux User Group where Shaun gave a talk about OpenStreetMap and we'd all gone out for a bit of POI mapping. He had more questions about which GPS device to buy and also best approaches for offline mapping. He's planning to map some rural areas in Jamaica.

Did I mention we had belgian beers aplenty?

(flickr)

My memory of other conversations gets a bit sketchy. We talked about State of the map accomodation options, how we might arrange to do something together including an invitation from Jenny to sleep with her.