We had a nice long merry drinking session last night for our London pub meet-up.

We arrived a bit late because Andy was on a mission to map bicycle parking. I usually drop in a few of these while I'm out mapping, but when you're actually deliberately looking out for them (and nothing else), there's quite a few of them. Andy's knocked up a wee heat map:

But there's plenty more to map in central London. You can add the capacity too (tag docs)

But enough of this mapping. This was supposed to be a pub meet-up. Again the Blue Posts near Oxford Street provided plenty of space and a good venue for map-chat despite upstairs being closed on a Monday. The pub grub was pretty reasonable too. Shaun ordered lasagne in his Scottish accent and got steak'n'ale pie, and Matt dropped half his macaroni cheese on the floor. All adds to the entertainment.

A wide a array of topics were covered, and topics became more random as the cheap sam smiths booze flowed.

There is a plan to add ventilation holes to the metal server cabinet door. This is necessary. It's not just because Andy wants to use his new power drill :-) Also on the servers topic, there is a plan to install a new one hosted at a different London university. That might actually go ahead this evening, but maybe I shouldn't speak too soon. Anyway this prompted increasingly less serious conversations about universities, including Matt's story of how to clog up a super-fancy new uni printer by sending it a little ray-tracing job. We even got onto talking about ADFS and other outrageously geeky topics.

It was nice to relax with much beer and friends after an intense couple of weeks giving talks to GIS people and trying to piece together a new career plan. In fact with all that going on, I forgot to write a diary entry about the last meet-up in at McGlynns in Kings Cross. Ah well. Here's photos from McGlynns. As for last night, I forgot to take photos apart from this masterpiece:

Not very much blood in my alcohol stream at the moment, but Steve's visiting from U.S. at the moment, so the situation is unlikely to improve.