The Random pub meet-up was in Marble Arch last night. And we had reason to celebrate!

I remember the Tyburn in Marble Arch is a pleasant pub to head to from the park on a sunny afternoon, because it's very bright with its full glass front. In the evening you don't really notice this, so it's just like any other wetherspoons... a bit skanky. The main reason for going there was, I thought we'd be guaranteed plenty of space, but actually it was pretty crowded. We managed to do our usual trick of slowly taking over more and more tables and chairs.

I thought the Marble Arch area might present some interesting opportunities for a spot of micro mapping. 15 minute mapping sprint to pick up nearby shop POIs along Oxford Street and Edgeware Road before we met at the pub. But then we were running late, so didn't do any. We'll have to go back there. Also one of the interesting things which I thought was missing, the marble arch subway tunnel complex, in fact no longer exists. It's mostly been closed and filled in!

So anyway we all went to the pub

Ollie was along, talking about the Milton Kynes mapping party. Check out the monster cake diagram! That's happening in May.

I was chatting with Jeremy (think that's his name) about Garmins GPS units. I don't have one myself, but cloudmade offers up free .img files as part of the downloads service, for loading onto Garmins. This prompts a few support requests (which I get to deal with), but generally its a pretty easy way of seeing OSM maps on a garmin. But for the brave map tinkerers, there's other possibilities for the garmin, all of which seem to involve struggling with a hideous mish-mash of software, working around Garmin's awkward closed design. You can build .img files yourself, or you can get data into the garmin MapSource software and load it onto the device from there, which involves registry editing. eugh! Interesting to hear Jeremy's experiences of this.

Later on garmins came up in conversation again. A lot of OSM mappers, myself included, have simple "data logger" type GPS units, with no map displaying capability. On the Merchandise page we recommend the NaviGPS from storagedepot, but arguably buying one of these simple data loggers is a false economy, even (perhaps especially) for newbies who are unsure about the financial outlay and implied commitment to OpenStreetMap, because a little extra money gets you a garmin which can display maps. This is a device full of possibilities and uses beyond OSM mapping.

I have vague recollections of other conversations: The makers of the game "grand theft auto" should use OpenStreetMap for their 3D cities, and other computer game chit-chat (Thanks to Jenny, I now finally understand how I accidentally completed quake I). And... who's fault is it, skiers or snowboarders, for the moguls? As usual the topics became more "assorted" as the evening went on.
I'm afraid I was very very drunk (my role model)