A volley of Winter Virus breached my defences — the first in 10/15 years — so I’ve spent a week or so indoors with Bronchitis.

At one stage I examined my phlegm in a piece of tissue & it was the colour & consistency of a mid-green emulsion paint typical from the 1980s. My more recent sputum is clear, with the odd bit of yellow stuff in it, and the earlier result may well have been a delusion caused by sleep deprivation (every time I fall asleep I cough & immediately wake up again). Well, whatever, I finally got to the point that I could convince myself that I was both strong enough to go out, that I was no longer a male variant on Typhoid Mary, plus I needed the fresh air. The boundary streets of Phoenix Farm Estate in Gedling, Nottinghamshire were waiting to be surveyed.

I actually reached a street sign on Arnold Lane, Gedling as I walked towards Gedling Church that said “Gedling Village”, which suggests that there should be some GIS for the village. The section that I’ve been doing so far is called “St James” (electoral ward), whilst the next bit on the east side of the (closed-down last September) Sherwood Academy is called Phoenix Farm Estate (also an electoral ward, although far more interesting as a physical link between JRR Tolkien & the initiation of Lord of the Rings).

Sherwood Academy is rapidly rotting on Wollaton Avenue, and it was on that same road that I first spotted today’s very fine example of Street Art / Garden Furniture. It is a miniature water fountain, and the Householder offered to switch it on, so we all have two bites of the cherry for this one:–

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‘MPG’ = “Middle-Class Paranoid Guy”

These are the previous ones that I’ve documented:

August: Tracked & Mapped
July: Exeunt stage-right, pursued by a bear
March: Middle-Class Paranoia

Today, it is:

‘MPG’ = “Middle-Class Paranoid Gal”

For me, ‘Mapping’ is a process of:

1. Survey & collect info
2. Order the survey info on paper
3. Use JOSM to transfer into OSM

I have found it very easy to get confused when back at my desk as to exactly where I was at particular points when surveying, so I make a habit of photographing every street-sign. That gives me continual, solid reference points as to my location throughout the survey.

Yesterday I was mapping Welbeck Avenue in Gedling. The Welbeck houses at one end of the street are semi-detached houses which lie at an angle across the corner; one house is numbered on one street, whilst the other is numbered on the other street. It’s a confusing practice which is common locally.

I was at the Westdale Lane end of the street, and was getting myself clear as to the reference of each of the houses in the corner. I then took a photo of the Welbeck street-sign (see bottom). As I completed that, our female MPG burst out of her car and started shouting at me. It was difficult to decipher what she wanted, but it seemed to be on the lines of “what do you think you are doing?”. Calmly, I explained that I was taking a photo of the street-sign & turned the smartphone around so that she could see the screen (I hadn’t yet saved it). She grabbed hold of it & pulled it out of my hand!

There was a short tussle as I grabbed it back. She then started hitting me. I informed her that if she did that again then I would deck her. She hustled away into her house (I think to telephone the police).

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Mapping within the St James ward of Gedling today, and in particular a set of flats on Beckett Court. There are gardens at the rear of the flats. So often in these circumstances, the fact that no single family has responsibility for the gardens means that they end up derelict. That is not the case here. This garden is immaculately maintained.

This is the garden for you to judge for yourself. Personally, I’ve never seen another garden like it. The section on the left that you cannot see is plain grass (and, in spite of the colour, I swear that this is natural grass rather than some kind of synthetic variant). I’m not qualified to make any judgement on it, so will not even try:

Just up the road from that garden are yet more of those plaster creatures that I love to find:

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Having discovered that the part of Gedling south & east of Mapperley Golf Course that I am currently mapping is called Phoenix Farm Estate (not true, see below), I’ve wanted to know where that farm is, and have finally found it, with bonus extras.

Thanks to a post in nottstalgia.com I located Phoenix Farm on Arnold Road opposite the junction with Jessops Lane.

The farm supplies a surprising connection for Gedling with JRR Tolkein and his most famous writing (“Lord of the Rings”) - see the BBC website, although the link to Andrew H Morton’s talk is defunct. The farm was bought by his Aunt Jane Neave in 1911; it was called Lamb’s Farm in a Tolkein drawing (below) (named after the previous farmer) although was called “Church Farm” at sale. The farm was close to Gedling Church (a long-range view is here), but Aunt Jane swiftly changed the name to Phoenix Farm. It is said to have been demolished in 1954. I still do not know why Phoenix Farm Estate was named after the farm.

Contrition

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Continuing to work my way through the Phoenix Farm Estate today, catching up in late-afternoon, with a late-Autumn sun low on the horizon at England’s high latitude & damn cold, on houses missed on Stanhope Road. And yes, it turns out that there used to be a “Phoenix Farm”, though I have zero hard information on that to date.

Regular readers will realise that I constantly seek to alleviate the boredom of collecting endless lists of house numbers by spotting & photographing good examples of art on the houses that I pass ([1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]). Here is the latest: –

Coda:

Phoenix is actually the next estate and not the current one.

The chap that I saw on Phoenix Farm Estate yesterday (Sunday 27 November) could not believe that I thought that his shed was worth a photo. My reasons were simple: partly it was the quality of the build: Google StreetView is October 2014 & shows a very nondescript garage, whilst the modern shed+garage is very smart. However, the reason that clinched it for me was the name that he had put upon the door of the shed next to the garage:

“The Man Cave”

Coda:

Phoenix is actually the next estate and not the current one.

There are some gardens that I come across whilst mapping that simply cry out to be featured in these Diary pages. There are two today, both located on an unadopted road (the householders have to pay for all road upkeep) in Gedling that I first walked on Wednesday 23 November on a truly dreadful day. The rain was interfering with the smartphone’s capacitative action, so I went back on last Sunday 27 November.

The first garden below is included simply because I found it sweet (and why not?):

The next seemed to epitomise water action. It was pouring down from above and even flowing in a culvert below, so it seemed only fair to have galleons in a pond as well:

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There is a splendidly-named 1903 house & land called “Scot Grave Farm” (farmhouse, farmyard) on Arnold Lane that I revisited today (on the older maps it is called “Scotgrave Farm”):

The owner has both an old BT red phonebox & red Postbox in his yard:

… See full entry

Mapillary is a Swedish organisation that, like Marvin the Paranoid Android in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, has a Data Centre for storing photographs as big as the planet. When you Register with them you can store GPS-registered photos on their site (really useful when surveying for later mapping).

My profile on Mapillary shows that I’ve uploaded 3,500 photos and have travelled 179.6 km whilst doing that. It also shows that I’ve uploaded the last 81 photos 6 times (making 486 total uploads in that sequence).

I’m currently mapping in the north of Nottingham in a district called ‘Gedling’ (south of Arnold Lane and north of Westdale Lane). 81 is a very typical number for me to shoot in a morning or afternoon whilst mapping. I used to use the Mapillary app in JOSM to upload, but tend to upload directly from a browser these days (the JOSM app requires a confirmation within a browser, so I cut out the middleman).

The sequence went very normally with those 81 photos, except that the Mapillary browser did not confirm the uploads within my profile. At first, I also got zero reply from Mapillary support. I kept trying to upload…

I eventually got an email from Katrin at Mapillary support, and she copied the email to Peter. According to the email that Peter sent this morning, the issue was because the “harvester for manually uploaded images has not been running” (he restarted it, so all 6 identical sets of images were harvested at once). Problems with a Harvester seem the correct kind of issue for this time of year.

Update:

I sent an email to Peter saying “So, no-one could manually upload photos? And I’m the only one that manually uploads photos?? Good lord.” Fortunately, he seems to have a sense of humour. He replied that:

• no web-uploaded images have been processed in the last 2 days
• that affected ~200 people
• it involved ~500k images
• mobile apps use another method, so uploads did not actually stop
  (they halved, hence no-one at Mapillary noticed)

Joke:

… See full entry

To distract me from the difficulties of mapping the houses within Manderley (a recent development of £400,000 GBP houses ($494,000 USD, €467,000 Euro), half of which do not yet appear on Bing) here is a useless challenge for you:–

Find the Tree Rat

Non-golfers are warned of the danger of death from hi-speed golf-balls, and therefore not to trespass on to Mapperley Golf course. However, I walked all around the perimeter of the course, and took pictures every few seconds the whole way. At one point I came across some of the local wildlife; it tried to hide from me but I did manage to get a single frame with it in view.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to (virtually) walk the perimeter of the Golf Course. As a virtual walk protective head-, elbow- & knee-gear are optional.

So, starting at the first frame of the walk, find the tree rat (sorry, squirrel). Be warned that the only way I could get it in shot was to photograph from a distance, so it is small & well blended in with the tree trunk as it rushes to get away from me. If you reach the houses then you have missed it (although the walk continues after the houses are mapped until we reach the clubhouse).

Golf:– a good walk, spoiled

words — wrongly — attributed to Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain)

After surveying the desert of Manderley — it was midday Wednesday, 16 November & the place was almost entirely devoid of human life — I walked clockwise around Mapperley Golf course starting at the traffic lights at the top of Arnold Lane (having bought Pink Floyd’s single + LP as a young man I love that road just for it’s name), passing through Digby Park along the way (check out the Alphabetical Arboretum if you think that you can identify every tree & bush from it’s leaves) & finishing at Mapperley Golf Club-house. The Golf Course is full of dire signs warning walkers of imminent death, so the walk does not dare trespass upon the course but instead circumnavigates the perimeter.

… See full entry

Test out your detection faculties: what is wrong with this picture of the 4 Seasons?

It was shot last Wednesday with the kind permission of the householder on Plains Road, Mapperley. Try to ignore the fact that the camera is within a cheap smartphone & that the operator still does not know how to manually control the contrast whilst mapping.

The answer, of course, is that one of the Seasons is missing (stolen!).

Although they look like marble, they are in fact made of fibreglass, and are thus nice & light. That is exactly what some youths discovered many years ago when first put in place, just before those youths absconded with the statues. The police discovered the abductors, but only three of the Seasons. The statues returned are now concreted into position (whilst they yearn & mourn for their sister, of course).

86 + 92 Plains Road, Mapperley NG3, UK

• Q: What’s almost as good as a Green Field to a Housing Developer?
• A: A single house on a large green site at the edge of town close to shops & schools

Here is the view between two houses positioned 100 yards up the road from these two properties to try to underline why developers want to build there (the view is of Mapperley Golf Course, shot on Wednesday 16 Nov on a classic sunshine-&-showers English day):

Finally, my mapping gets me (almost) to the Ultima Thule (the lands beyond the suburbs of Mapperley & Gedling) (‘Ultima Thule’ was a bookshop in my University town of Newcastle Upon Tyne, and the name was explained to me as meaning “the unknown, unmapped, dangerous realms beyond the civilised world”) (or, Gateshead). Finally, my photos can begin to show not just bricks & tarmac but trees & mud. Excellent.

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…than to go out mapping with him in the face of an English soak-to-the-skin drizzle.

I’d gotten an invite to a “Shakespeare Schools Festival” for Friday 11 November at Gordon Craig Theatre (4 schools, with Micky’s Presdales School on first with an astonishingly good extract from The Tempest).

Friday was dry, but the following day was a classic English day (which is to say, it was wet). Just as the Inuit are said to have 32 words for ‘snow’, we English have 32 words for ‘rain’, and this one was “drizzle”, which is a light rain that looks ever so innocent, but will be running in small streams down the inside of your trouser legs in 30 minutes if you do not have the correct clothing.

I was fine. I’d bought a Mountain Warehouse Extreme ISODRY 10 000 fully-waterproof jacket (Mountain Warehouse have a store in Nottingham centre, so I could try it on before buying; it is not only fully waterproof but also breathable). After an hour I was perfectly dry, but their jackets were soaked through, poor little sots. We did both sides of one little road then quickly scooted back home.

I did take a photo of them & Buddy the dog, but their mum did not want them plastered across an international Diary page. So, instead, I present to you (ta-da-da-daa-da-daaa! (fanfare)) more Ware Khazis photographed on Queens Road, Ware:–

… See full entry

Do other parts of the world display odd and/or strange figures on their garage tops? It certainly has proved to be a popular meme in the parts of Nottingham that I’ve mapped (see also [1] [2] [3] [4]). Here is the latest, a stick figure in a top-hat on the top of a garage in Westdale Lane East, Gedling:–

If it’s funny then it gets into these Diaries (possibly a “Never Mind the Dog…” series? [1]).

This one was on the end of a garage facing the street, on Digby Avenue in Mapperley (a very posh area of Nottingham but with, I’m delighted to say, very approachable & down-to-earth occupants) (a complete contrast to some other posh areas, who are very up themselves):–

At 09:45 UTC the OSM sites are back up again after ‘too many people accessing’ notices for ~45 minutes. Do we have some info on what was happening, please?

The Existential Question

08:45 5 November
Having slept on this I’ve come to realise that it is far more important than at first I realised, since it concerns the very existence of OSM: in what form is it going to continue? (all life on this planet grows, withers or transmutes; what is OSM going to do?).

In short (there is fuller info with links at bottom):

1. 28 Oct: zerebubuth (Matt Amos) opened a discussion on Github : the tile-servers are hitting capacity; what policy is OSM going to follow in the future? Restrict to open-source apps or restrict to publicly-accessible sites (notice that both options involve denial of access)?
    
   There are 59 machines internationally — including 20 globally distributed tile-caches — serving up OSM tiles to anybody that asks for them. Funded entirely by donations. Outbound peak traffic on tile.openstreetmap.org (served from cache) peaks at 1 Gbit/sec (6,800 GB/day; 528 million requests at 13.6 kB/request), but a recent measurement indicates that just 11% of this is supplied to OSM websites. The rest is 3rd party sites and apps.
    
2. 4 Nov: the system seized up tight.
    
   ironbelly had to be restarted (look at ‘uptime’) and re-init (at a guess) on the ramoth network (look at ‘memory’ and also ‘network’ - the server system became saturated with FIN_WAIT & TIME_WAIT connections for all of 2 Nov, possibly indicating TIME-WAIT loading problems)
    
3. As soon as you provide something good at zero cost there is large demand. How is OSM going to respond? 

Added at 24:00 4 November:

Zero assistance from OSM Folk, so had to find an answer myself. Took a long while.

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GNJ Motorsport (removed - thank you) - this is known as Profile Spam.

0 Edits; 0 Traces; 0 Diary posts; just 1 Comment on day of Profile creation to make sure that Google will find the spam.

Please remove this turd.

One thing noticed by seasoned webmasters is the clever spammers that post an innocuous message which they leave until suddenly it gets edited into being a conventional spam message (reported on SFS as sometimes being left untouched for years) . That behaviour is made more difficult on OSM since many many folks make just one edit & are never seen again.

I’ve spotted a lot of these nonsense Diary postings. This is simply the latest (the single letter ‘A’). On my own website I simply deleted such users; if they were not spammers, then they were a total waste of disk & db space. However, after 7 months mapping for OSM my anti-spam brain has suddenly clicked into place; these potential spammers need watching. That needs to be done programmatically (links of latest updated diaries crosschecked with original postdates) but in the meantime I’ll assemble a watchlist here (almost all these folks are 0 Edits 0 Traces 1 Diary):—

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• Pakistani ‘Escort’ whilst Mapping in Dubai (removed -thank you) (‘hot body language’ promised)
• Burger Grill Varlemann (removed -thank you) (0 Edits, 0 Traces, just 1 spam diary entry)