My logo design for the Open Street Map conference “State Of The Map” has been chosen as the favourite entry from the sea of other submissions (two). Apparently it’s going to be on tshirts and everything, how exciting! Unfortunately I can’t make the conference but I’ve recently been getting very enthused about Open Street Map. A couple of weeks ago I saw an Edlug talk by Chris Fleming and was inspired enough to go out and buy a GPS device. I got a Holux 236 pretty cheaply off ebay.com. It’s a tiny wee unit that has no display, but can communicate through usb or over bluetooth. So, I can run a java app on my mobile that connects to the Holux and receives the data stream automagically. It all Just Works, most of the time. Here is a random route that I’ve run through GPS Visualizer to get some KML that is then plotted on our old friend Google Maps.

Wahey! William Gibson is doing an event at the Book Festival in August. I’m booked myself a ticket already. Hopefully I can get a signed copy of Spook Country whilst I’m there.

Last week I attended the Friday Coffee Morning’s “end of term” drinks, hilariously dubbed “beer 2.0“. Whitespace had generously donated their boardroom as the venue in their very swish offices. Met up with a few of the regulars who I hadn’t seen for a while and caught up with Nico who is off to Iceland soon. Mike and Jamie had also generously sorted out free beer and food. Behold all of our ugly mugs on flickr.

‘Folksonomy’ tops most irritating list

It was my birthday yesterday, as the title suggests I’m now the ripe old age of 26. To celebrate we went out for an (always awesome) curry at Kushi’s with Ian and Neil. Good food and good company.

Architecture Portal News: City of the future?

Modern architecture – Los Angeles photo gallery

Drifting rubber duckies chart the oceans

Shown below is my haul of presents from all the fantastic people I’m no longer working with at Scotweb. The frame at the back is an awesome Scotweb Instant Gift for a Kilt, for me! I’ve been in Scotland now for nearly eight years so I don’t think I’ll lynched for wearing one.

I worked at Scotweb for almost three years, and it has been great fun, I’ve met a lot of really great people and hopefully made some friendships that will survive us not working together. In my last thirty minutes of employment I quickly gathered some random stats from my time at Scotweb:

• I created approximately 2 Gb of data. Graphics, scripts, source code etc
• I resolved 2052 bugs in our Mantis bug tracking system
• I put 226 bugs into the system
• I may have eaten more than 150 slices of cake as part of our Friday meetings
• I got to love using an Apple Mac

The best of luck to everyone at Scotweb, especially Doug who has taken over from me as Web & Database Developer.

New-found friends, often as not, rented high-ceilinged rooms in crumbling townhouses, their slate rooflines fenced with rusting traceries of cast-iron, curlicues I’d only seen in Charles Addams cartoons. Everything painted a uniform dead green, like the face of a corpse in those same Addams cartoons. If you took a penknife and scraped a little of the green away, you discovered marvels: brown marble shot with paler veins, ornate bronze fixtures, carved oak. In the more stygian reaches of cellar, in such places, there were still to be found fully connected gaslight fixtures, forgotten, protruding from dank plaster like fairy pipes, each with a little flowered twist-key to stop the gas.

Man, I love Gibson’s style. Read the rest of the article over at Canada’s Globe & Mail.