Shaun McDonald's Blog

With the English bank holiday weekend (Scotland has the August bank holiday on the first Monday instead of the last), I thought that I would go for one of my longer cycle rides and see if I could beat my previous record of 150 miles. On the Saturday morning I packed the 4.5 litre of water, home made pasta, chocolate and extra clothing layers into my panniers. I finally got going at 1pm, which was a lot later than I was expecting.

The first part of my journey was heading north to the River Thames on the Waterlink Way/National Cycle Route 21. Then I followed the Thames to the Woolwich ferry using the NCN4 and 1. I decided to add a little extra adventure to my journey by crossing the River Thames a couple of times. First using the Woolwich Ferry to get to the North bank, which is free. Then following a part of the new Cycle SuperHighway 3, which is a rebranding of the previous cycle path that it runs along, to head east towards my next crossing. To get back to the South bank of the Thames, I used the Dartford crossing. You can’t cycle over, however a free pickup truck service is provided to take cyclist and bike over to the other side.

After a nice chat about traffic and cycling with the traffic officer who took me across, I then re-joined the National Cycle Route 1 most of the way to Whitstable. I decided to follow a straighter new cycle route from just before Gravesend to Strood, which is part of the old A2 prior to it being upgraded.

Shortly after Sittingbourne while following the NCN1, I seen on the right hand side of the road a car with the two door windows smashed a couple of people and another vehicle, which looked rather unusual. I continued further up the road until I was out of sight, as I didn’t know how they would react and then reported the car break-in to the police via a 999 call. As I didn’t know how to describe my current location well, thus I took a photo of the screen on my phone (which ended up against my face while talking thus unable to look at the screen) with the latitude and longitude, and gave the lat/lon to the operator, which worked. On Sunday afternoon I got a phone call from the police following up with some clarifications to the useful evidence. They were pleased that I had phoned in the incident as a witness as most people would have just turned a blind eye.

A bit further down the road I stopped to eat some of my pasta, and suddenly some dark rain clouds came over and the heavens opened. Luckily it was just a fairly short shower and I had managed to find a bit of shelter for it to pass. It did worry me a bit as to how much more rain there would be for the rest of my journey. Luckily once that cloud passed it was clear for the rest of my journey.

From Whitstable I followed the coast, much of which was on the path or promenades that runs along the edge of the sea. As I was getting into Ramsgate at about 2 am after 107 miles, I was getting too tired to be able to continue the rest of the night further round the coast safely, so I found a nice bench and shelter overlooking the sea to put my head down for a few hours. Luckily I had a towel with me that I was able to use as a pillow.

Shortly after 5am I set off again slightly refreshed with the first signs of dawn. The route of the NCN1 down to Deal is quite nice. After Deal however it turns inland a little and into a very long climb that seems to just go on forever. It was nice to be able to get to the top and see the nice view across the English Channel. After a little decent there is the White Cliffs of Dover National Trust site, which has a nice view overlooking Dover ferry port. (Yeah, I’m sure you already know that I quite like travelling by ferry from time to time.)

From there I headed down the short and steep downhill into Dover, the downhill was over way too quick considering the amount of uphill. I then took the train home, going the full length of the straight track from Ashford to Redhill (with a change at Tonbridge). The reason I mention it, is because it does look quite strange or unusual at lower zooms on a map, when there generally is more curves in rail lines.

On the Sunday late afternoon/evening I took a nice 5 hour nap to catch up my sleep, before getting up for a few hours to catch up on a few things before heading back to bed for a full nights sleep.

In total it was 133 miles over 20 hours, which is my second longest cycle in one go. The Dunwich Dynamo was 127 miles including the ride to the start. At some point in the future I want to ride from Dover anti-clockwise round the coast, particularly to try hill out of Dover and the long downhill into Deal. I’d also like to do Dover-Brighton via the NCN2.

You may remember some of my tweets from the end of last year from an accident on my way home from work.

I was cycling past Peckham Rye Park along the London Cycle Route 22 as I was usually doing, a motorist decided to come out of a side road even so he didn’t have priority and had plenty of time to stop rather than me ending up going over his bonnet. Luckily the people in the car behind me stopped and helped, including calling the police and ambulance, unlike the driver of the car that I had the collision with who drove off instead. He did come back to see if I was ok, but needed convincing from the paramedics to stay to talk to the police, who hadn’t quite yet arrived.

I was taken to hospital as a precaution after giving the police a statement while lying on the bed with my head strapped in position. The police took my bicycle to the police station for safe keeping until I was able to pick it up. It turned out that I only had a few bruises, grazes and some shock, so was discharged and took the bus home.

A day later I picked up my bike from Peckham Police station. At this point I found that the front wheel was a little buckled. Thankfully due having a hub brake rather than a rim brake I was still able to ride the bike safely to work and back home. It took 3 weeks to get a replacement front wheel for just short of £100. The train travel also cost an extra £100 that I wouldn’t have have spent otherwise. It was quite nice as the Oyster Pay As You Go had come in just after the accident and turned out to be a bit cheaper than a travelcard based on my specific travel pattern.

After a couple of months I was sent a witness form to fill in, which I filled in and sent off:

Yesterday I got a letter from the Metropolitan Police stating that the court proceedings with incident were completed last week. The result was the driver being convicted of driving without due care and attention with a £100 fine pus 7 penalty points.

It’s good to see that the driver has been given some punishment for not being careful enough with his driving, rather than it being ignored by the police as I’ve heard has happen on many occasions in the past.

Last Saturday I took a train from Selhurst to Milton Keynes and started cycling back home. (At the moment you can get 15% off off-peak Southern tickets when you buy them at least 2 hours before travel, online.) I’d been thinking about doing that cycle since the Milton Keynes Mapping Party back in May last year.

The first part across Milton Keynes to the Grand Union Canal, and then down to Leighton Buzzard went fairly well as the towpath is paved and some of it is part of the National Cycle Route 6. South of Leighton Buzzard however, the towpath turned to grass and for some of it mud. There were patches where it was paved nicely. There was one point the mud had got so bad I had to stop to clean the bike.

Heading through Berkhamstead there were some birds that  really didn’t like anyone going along their path, so had to hop off the bike and walk around them.

Past the M25, and almost into Watford and I find another pile of mud in the path, so I stop to take a look at TrackMyJourney’s map viewer to see if there is an alternative route that may be better. Via the help of the OpenCycleMap (from within TMJ), I seen that there was the National Cycle Network Route 61, that hopefully would have been less muddy. About to move off and notice I had a puncture. So instead of trying to fix in the dark, with a muddy bike to hinder things, I decided the best option was to push the bike to Watford Junction station to get the train home and deal with the puncture once the mud had dried a bit, thus the mud would flake off.

Also on the way to the station pushing the bike I manage to map a couple of missing street names, post boxes, benches, bike parking and found a street name that was mis typed into OSM.

After the first attempt, I found that I had a slow puncture. It was another puncture elsewhere in the tube rather than the repair failing. It was a total of just shy of 40 miles, which is about half of the distance I was expecting to do. Considering that I’ve been doing very little cycling at the start of this year due to the bike being serviced from the accident at the end of last year, and the not so great weather, it’s not too bad. I suppose I’ll have to just postpone my annual maddly long first long cycle of the year until March. I also got a bunch of nice photos to add to the CycleStreets Photo Map, and test a new method that makes it faster to import photos from Flickr. This will mean that there will be photos of the route, when someone plans a journey that takes part of the route that I took.

As part of my recent job search I setup a few job alerts. One of which was with the keyword OpenStreetMap on CWJobs. I wasn’t expecting there to be anything coming up.

Out of the blue a job alert did appear, and it sounds rather interesting, though I have just started a new job at Headshift.

It is for a three month contract, and is asking for some quite high requirements, such as requiring to be security cleared; experienced using Ordnance Survey data; OpenLayer; Python; and optionally Mapnik; OpenStreetMap and QGIS. Based on the job description, I’m speculating that it is a contract for some government job. I’ll let you readers to speculate about the details of the job in the comments.

See a PDF of the Job Advert: 20091214-OpenStreetMap GIS Developer – CWJobs.co.uk

On a side note, I found that putting my CV on CWJobs yielded quite a high number of recruiters phoning, however the recruiters seem to all be chasing for candidates for the same handful of jobs. My current job was found through the help of the wonderful people who use twitter and directly talking to the potential employer.

Yesterday I presented to the Greater London Linux User Group (GLLUG) how to edit the OpenStreetMap data, with a short field trip. Apart from running a little late, I think it went fairly well with some good participation from the audience. Things I’d do better the next time include:

• preparing the slides more, particularly the server side ones for this audience;
• giving the 2 minute introduction to OpenStreetMap, as there were people who didn’t know the basics about OSM in the crowd;
• also doing it as a lab session, rather than rushed example demonstration of the editing before being thrown out of the lecture theatre.

I have made my slides from the talk available below.

http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=ajc2v9mk3cvb_4cf9wsthd

Yesterday (Saturday) I done one of my rather large February cycles. I didn’t go quite as far as last year’s 150 mile cycle, though I still done more than the 70-100 miles I was anticipating doing. In total it was about 115 miles (the last 4 miles were from Bromley South station home). The total journey time to Dover was about 12 hours. When I set out I decided that my camera would stay at the bottom of the pannier, otherwise I’d spend too much time taking photos, rather than getting somewhere.

The route I took was heading out fairly direct to Faversham, via Bromley, Swanley, unmapped Cobham, Rchester, Rainham, and Sittingbourne. After Faversham I headed to the coast all the way round to Ramsgate, where I hit the A256, and then the A2 to race down the road to Dover to get the last direct train back to Bromley South.

I hadn’t prepared quite enough with my GPS tracking. For those who don’t know I use a private beta of TrackMyJourney on my Sony Ericsson K850i with a bluetooth GPS for most of my location logging and mapping. I know that my main 5Hz bluetooth GPS lasts only about 8 hours, so I got my older, less reliable on cities, GPS partially charged, but not enough to last until the phone ran out of power. After I ran out of power I was using a fast direct route, so it was easy to get the route’s distance using CloudMade’s routing. I did have a GT-11 GPS as a backup, however the 16MB card is too small for my extravagant cycle journeys, though the battery did last for the whole journey. Ah well, couple of lessons learnt.

It’s been great to be able to have live re-routing over the web,  constantly updating my ETA, and the ability download map tiles live, thus able to have the cycle map wherever I am within mobile phone signal range.

I did find a part of the NCN1 to the east of Sittingbourne, where the route took you into a pile of trash at the side of a traveller camp, with no further signage.

I really enjoyed cycling along the coast, I found it quite rare to be able to go for so far that close to the coast, because usually you have private properties next to the coast for much more of the coastline. There was one place where I saw a sign telling cyclists to slow down and give way, where you would normally just get the irritating and unnecessary ”cyclists dismount” sign. I really should have taken a photo of it, but then would I have had to go via London Bridge?

In the future I’ll hopefully get around to cycling from Margate to Folkstone at a more leisurely pace to be able to take in the scenery.

Last Wednesday there was an OpenStreetMap meetup in London on the South Bank. In all there was 15 people there. It was an interesting evening because there was many new faces, most of whom were developers using OpenStreetMap data in some shape or form.

Does anyone have ideas for central London pubs that we could go to at the start of next year? If so, please add your local knowledge to the wiki page.

Linux Expo Live is an event being held in Olympia to showcase the latest software for Linux. This year the event has been combined with Mac Expo Live and Creative Pro.

OpenStreetMap has a stand there, so drop by and have a chat if your in London today, tomorrow or Saturday 25th October 2008. More info on the osm wiki.

Here’s some photos from setting up last night:

On Friday I headed along to this Months Critical Mass. It was very strange that the Police weren’t there at all to do the corking of the junctions, and hold back any frustrated drivers. The two usual off-duty bike paramedics were there. It took a while for the mass to get used to the idea of corking the traffic themselves. There was a few times when some drivers tried to have a run at some of the cyclists, which was quite frightening. These possibly would have been less likely to happen with the bike police there. The key to preventing the drivers from being annoyed is to keep the whole ride moving all the time.

After Buckingham Palace the ride managed split in two, with both halves meeting up later. At one point we did bump into a bunch of organised roller skaters.

As the sun is setting around the time the ride starts off, so it becomes more difficult to get good photos, particularly with most people wearing reflective clothing.

Overall it turned out to be a good night without any major incident.

Tomorrow, will be the final installment of the Summer 2008 London Mapping Marathon. We will be moving to the Fortnightly Winter 2008-9 Random Pub Meetup. Each week will be a different pub in a potentially unmapped area, for those hard core mappers out there. I’m looking for suggestions on where we could go. On the 24th December we will be going to that thingy pub at latitude 90, longitude -0.12345.

Matt Amos has started organising a mapping party in the Wembly area of London on Sunday 12th October 2008. Hopefully we will have a few weekend mapping parties, in the more outlying parts of London, over the course of the winter.

Later in October I will be going to a mapping party in Kyiv.