Andrew’s posterous

Abandonee... So, about 20 miles into the first day I had a crash. On the road to De Panne in Belgium I had a classic cycling crash - my front wheel slipped into a tram line crossing the road. I hit the deck really, really, hard, and slid along the road for a few metres. Apart from a small hole in the panniers, the bike was unscathed (sometimes this sort of crash can wreck a wheel). I had some superficial injuries - cuts, grazes etc. After the adrenaline and ibuprofen had worn off I began to feel pretty sore. My neck doesn't work like it should, it's a little painful to walk, and my left hand has swolllen up... I made it to Veere, but I'm not going to be able to ride the 170km to Amsterdam today. Luckily there's a railway station 5km away where I can (hopefully) take a train to Amsterdam Centraal.

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Next Wednesday and Thursday I'm riding from Dunkirk to Amsterdam!

Why?

1. To go to State of the Map 2009  - the international OpenStreetMap conference.
2. To contribute to OpenStreetMap by recording my journey.

For those that don't know OpenStreetMap is a community driven crowd-sourced mapping program. Think wikipedia for maps. Ordinary(-ish) people contribute to a world-wide map that is of high quality and free to use. Like all maps there some parts are less complete than others. Coverage of the 'North Sea Cycle Route' part of which covers the journey from France to the Netherlands is patchy, so I'm going to fill in the gaps.

And on Sunday at 12 in the Map Room I'm presenting the whys and hows of mapping from a bike in 'A New Way To Amsterdam' (there's a bad pun for map geeks).

This is what I'm riding:

Nerdy stuff alert

To do the mapping I'm taking a:

• Nokia E71 to create a GPX tracklog
• Garmin Etrex in case the E71 packs in
• Nokia N73 running a Python script taking a photo every minute
• Dell Mini 9 to upload/edit tracks

The Route

Wednesday I'm riding from Dunkirk, along the coast to Nieuwpoort, Belgium then inland towards Oudenaarde and Brugge. Then its into the Netherlands, taking the ferry across to Zeeland where I'm staying at Logement de Craecke in the town of Veere. That's about 100 miles.

Thursday I'm riding from Veere, through Den Haag, along the coast to Haarlem then into Amsterdam (about another 100 miles) where I'm going to crash on a houseboat.

I'm pretty much prepared, just need a few tweaks to the bike, until its time to roll!

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Openhack london

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Why is it so difficult to get things done in Windows? I can't even work out what this means...

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It was slightly worrying when the Windows logon jingle started playing just after the pod door closed...

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Yahoo!'s YUI editor not showing up in Drupal when using a custom theme? Make sure you're writing out the $closure variable in your page template:

<?php print $closure ?>
</body>
</html>

This adds the required javascript to your page that converts textareas into YUI editors.

This post for someone in the future.

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If the sight of all those aftermarket spotlights was not enough, question 29 introduces a new concept. The invisible car...

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Find sunshine. Sit down.

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Pop quiz. Which of these toys has the easiest to use keyboard? Clue: I'm writing this on the move from the e71...

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