Hello everybody.

I know I'm a bit late for it, but I still want to wish everybody a great new year 2009! I'm in good faith that we will still have OSM at the end of this year, so it can't get that bad after all, right? ;-)
I hope you also spent the holidays for the best thing you can spend your time on. And that's mapping of course! ;-)
I think the cold season is not that bad for mapping after all. Especially for me as my boots and trousers don't become so dirty if the ground is frozen when I have to walk into a field to map a power tower. :-)
OK, it is more difficult to determine the track grade (1-5) if there's snow on it. :-)
The thing that disturbs me the most is that it gets dark so soon. Especially as I'm a night person, so I don't manage to get up earlier to use the daylight. Believe me, it's quite difficult to find a power tower if it's so dark that you don't even see the line directly above your head. :-) Flashlights don't help much either. :-) And it's also so much easier to overlook a road sign if it's in a dark corner or next to a bush or tree...
But I never knew better about sunset times than now as a mapper. Here it was as bad as 16:29 on December 21st and has improved to 16:59 this weekend at about a rate of 1 minute per day.

Cheers,

Markus