It’s set, primarily, in New York, around Greenwich Village - where I have never been - and for the first four, five times I read it, I had to imagine what the area looked like, how the streets fitted together and where things were in relation to each other.

The last time I read it - a couple of years ago - I realised I could look up the area on Google Maps and I could navigate all around, looking at the positions of stuff and blurry satellite photos of the tops of buildings.

This time I read it, I went back onto Google Maps, looked up the area then clicked for the street view - I could see the shapes for all the buildings in the area then plonk my little guy down where, say, the fictional eponymous club was on Spring St and look at the street itself, both sides and moving back and forth along the road.

I wonder how I’ll be able to interact with the real version of the fictional world in another ten years time.

When the cat is ready to be planted on, pick a large pot to give the cat sufficient room to root/curl up (see right top).

Cats are reasonably hardy but can be infected with the “evil virus”. If that occurs, remove the cat from the pot (to avoid cross-contamination) and leave it to “dry out” on an old doormat (see right bottom - tell tale evil signs can be seen, namely the staring eyes, the fact her head is on backwards and the slightly manic “I’m going to eat your soul” expression). The evil is usually eradicated/forgotten about within a few minutes and the cat’s growth will continue as normal again.

Cats will raise from the curled/lying position as they grow until they reach their final height (typically around 40cm). Cats who have been infected with evil early in the growth stage may retain a rather hunched appearance and maintain the soul-eating gaze. In actual fact, they don’t eat souls, they prefer Go Cat. And tuna.

STEP 2
See this picture of a pillowcase shopping bag on the internetz.

STEP 3
Find the instructions the red bag lady used to make hers.

STEP 5
Turn the pieces inside out (everything is pretty much done on the wrong side from here on in) then ask the nearest cat (still Carbon) to help fold and pin all the diagonals for hemming. You may think the cat is in the way but you are wrong: they’re making sure you don’t get too over-eager with the folding and that you listen to Martha and fold it in twice, about 5mm a time. Cats are stickler for detail and have claws to make sure you follow their instructions, even when they’re so disgusted with your efforts that they can barely look at you.

STEP 5a
Brief pause for a quick tickle with Carbon because, let’s face it, you’re not going to get any more work done while he’s in this mood.

STEP 7
Hem away! Have a cat sat on your knee - between you and the machine - to keep an eye on the proceedings. For this step, I used a combination of Carbon and Boron.

STEP 9
Sew along the diagonals where the fabric overlaps. Martha and the red bag lady seem to have only done the outside flap but I did the inside ones too, to make the inside neater (less likely for things to get caught up) and hopefully make it generally stronger too. Your cat may have a particular preference about this so don’t forget to ask.

STEP 11
Sew along the bottom edge - nice and strong. I also hemmed a triangle at the corners to make them more rounded when turned the right way around. Speaking of which…

The pillow case seemed to be a bit longer than normal so the “straps” are really pleasantly long - imho much better as a shoulder bag than Martha’s version. It’s pretty big too and easily holds my brand spanking new laptop (in the padded slip carry-case thing it came with), and the related bulky paraphernalia (power supply, mouse, headphones…). It’ll be great for swimming and/or shopping too because unlike most tote bags, the strap is pretty broad so won’t go like cheese wire when carry more than helium balloons.

Next time the cats are available to help, I might add an outside pocket or two for things like my keys (the pillowcase was one of a pair, but I might use some orange felt I’ve got instead) or some fun over-sized buttons or something for decoration.

TOTAL PROJECT TIME: about three and a half hours including cat stroking, a cake-break and an episode of ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ (wasn’t a good one; Riker made it with a hot alien chick).

MATERIALS & EQUIPMENT:

• 1 x pillowcase
• cotton/thread for sewing
• Additional decorations as desired
• Scissors/pinking shears
• Pins
• Sewing machine (or a trusty needle and a whole lot of time)

TOTAL CATS REQUIRED: four.

Like birdsong, with swearing
The girl grounded, the door locked
The fat fuck will slap her, she will.

“Not while I’ve been here.”
“Dayrider please.”
“Thanks.”
“Just that please.”
“Thanks.”
“Thanks.”
“I don’t need a bag.”
“Thanks.”
“Just this.”
“Thanks.”
“No, thanks.”
“Do you go down Town Street?”
“Armley Town Street.”
“Thanks.”
“I’ll put the lemonade in here so that bag isn’t too heavy.” (Said bag split open anyway, shopping went everywhere, shitty Somerfield bags.)

Word count = 46
Thanks count = 7
Thanks/word ratio = 1:6.6

Six of us - me, John, Paul, Tim, Simon and Rob - went out mapping and then we went back to Dave’s afterwards to start turning the traces into maps.

It was the first OSM event I’ve organised but I had some advice from Tim (aka chippy) about timings etc and I think it worked out ok. We met for about half an hour to decide where we were all going and we decided on filling in some blank spots around East Leeds. I’d printed out maps and highlighted areas I thought needed attention, and once we’d double-checked no other speedy Leeds-er had filled in our selected spots between me printing the maps out in the early hours of Saturday and us meeting on Sunday afternoon, we headed out.

We headed out in pairs - John & I were in his car, the rest on foot - and traced for about two hours (including travelling there and back) before heading to Dave’s for the mapping part. As I mentioned the other day, the mapping software JOSM is rather hard to learn how to use so the hour-ish of mapping with experienced users Tim and Dave was really useful. I don’t think I’m an expert user now by any means but at least I can confidently do the most basic stuff like adding nodes and turning them into named, categorised ways without wanting to tear my hair out.

(The pics of the bits we’ve added from Sunday’s session so far, using the Osmarender view - click through for it on OSM.)

Lessons learned/Things to remember for next time

• The printed maps worked really well. I did some area overview ones and some more zoomed ones around the particular area that needed mapping. I think next time I’ll do some hyper-zoomed in ones for scribbling all over too instead of just using blank bits of paper. (Clipboards would be helpful for doing this.)
• Paul managed to lose his traces some how but could pretty much reconstruct them because he took waypoints (which didn’t delete) at every intersection. Our hacked TomTom is a pain for marking waypoints and so easy waypoint making is something I’ll definitely look out for if I buy a dedicated GPS unit.
• It was useful to have internet access at the initial meet session for double-checking the printed map data and it was essential to have internet access at the post-tracing session to download map data from OSM and to be able to access the reference parts of the Wiki.
• It was more time consuming to trace than I thought it would be - what with having to write down street names and everything - and the traces-to-maps is taking longer than I thought (although that’s because of JOSM problems and because I’ve been busy on other stuff since then, hello Oscars). Tim says we should allow about an hour for mapping time for every hour of tracing - and looking at the amount we did and the amount that’s already done of Leeds, I have to commend the people that have contributed before we got here. Thanks for doing so much already, lovely people :)
• Simon came over from Manchester after reading about it on a blog of a blog of a WYLUGer or something which made me realise if we organise another event - particularly the summer seaside day trips I’ve mentioned - we should publicise it more widely as people may be willing to travel for a hour for a day-long event. (Incidentally Rob came from Dewsbury and Paul from outside Huddersfield so thanks to all three for coming to contribute to evil Leeds’ map ;) )
• I should really have gone for a wee before I set off. Or not drunk a big glass of coke in the pub. Or taken some sort of receptacle.
• And on other forgotten human functions, we were all pretty hungry and thirsty by the time we finished too.
• We had a general WYLUG social afterwards (although it turned out to just be the mapping party plus people who had intended to map but couldn’t for whatever reason - Dave, Tom and Geoff) and we kept coming back to mapping issues amongst the general geeky talk - and I thought this review time was useful and interesting.

We drove around some of Armley’s main roads - most of it was already covered on OSM but we got a few new bits down and it was useful as a test exercise, seeing how our data linked up with the OSM data. Because we were driving, we had the trace thing to record a dot every second but it seems like it only did every 5-10seconds or so — which was a pain because we were moving comparatively fast. We also went over quite a wide area - from our estate in the middle of Armley, east to the near HMP Armley (about half a mile), then back along Tong Road and out towards New Farnley, then the outskirts on Pudsey and coming back through Bramley - so that made the size of our trace a bit too hard to handle for us newbs.

JOSM, the software we’re using to turn the traces into maps, was also a little harder to use than we would have liked. It is … quirky. Apparently it’s a very powerful tool once you get used to it and learn all the shortcuts but at the moment, to quote someone I just spoke to on #OSM, we’re alternating screaming and crying tears of joy.

Anyway, despite the hell that is JOSM, I drew up a couple of tiny residential roads near the prison last night and uploaded them to OSM - and they’re already visible on the Osmarender view. It’s not much of course but it’s a start. Today I traced my walk back from swimming (well, half of the walk because the TomTom was also being “quirky”) and I’ve added another three residential roads this evening. From small acorns do impressive free (as in freedom) mapping project grow.

I’ll walk different routes coming back from swimming until the whole of our bit of Armley is done but on a bigger scale, I want to help getting Bradford mapped and I’m planning mapping expeditions to Southport too since there is very, very little on there (just the railway line and that’s coincidentally very near my mum and dad’s house).

Am looking forward to being able to contribute - it reminds me of creating “much wanted” articles on random subjects (including Czech Airlines, suburbs of Leeds and Liverpool, and Eurovision) on Wikipedia in the early days. I very much hope that OSM will grow as hugely successful and popular as Wikipedia is today.

We bought some books (including a cool photo one on human dissection), wandered around the town for a bit and ate some fresh donuts before strolling off down the pier in time for sunset - well, coincidentally being on the pier at sunset anyway. For once the sea looked to have been in to almost the sea wall in recent times so the dying sunlight reflected quite beautifully off the sand and I took some photos. I used the “Sundown” setting on my camera sometimes (the redder pictures) and the standard setting the rest of the time (the ones with the blue sky). I’m quite impressed by how my little camera managed it - as usual, all I’ve done to the photos is scale them - haven’t changed any colour levels or anything.

After all that perambulation of the pier, we went to the Guesthouse pub for John to try a Southport Brewery beer but they didn’t have any on so he had to have something from Blackburn or somewhere instead (he said it was still good). After that, we went home so Mum could make us some home-made chips (actually from potatoes and fried! such a novelty these days!) and we all watched some godawful thing that passed for Saturday night prime time TV.

Then John and I had a heated discussion about the welfare state, the role of government and the two-party political system in the car on the way home.

It was a good day.

(Manhattaners, aka Andrew: I took a picture of the majestic building and of the foyer through the letterbox - see the small Manhattans subset. I so wished I’d thought ahead and seen if I could have arranged to go inside… next time maybe. I also took a picture of the Back Bath Street roadside because we were passing and it felt it needed remembering since we forgot about the skipping at Christmas. Next time maybe for that too.)

If I wasn’t already looking at paying out for a new laptop (suitable for use a desktop) in the near future, I suspect I’d be tempted by one of the Asus machines - but as it is, we’ll probably wait until the next generation (or so) before “investing” — let everyone else be bug testers first and wait until the manufacturers have “shared” their good ideas a bit.

Anyway, my real reason for posting this message is that I’ve uploaded the photos from tonight to my Flickr account (including one of a rude but happy Potato Guy) and set up a WYLUG Flickr group for sharing WYLUG snaps in the future. Doing that also reminded me to upload some photos I took at the summer social last year. Hopefully I’ll add more in the future.

I put size and cost ahead of quality in my buying criteria - I wanted something to take photos rather than with which to do Photography (capital P) - and the Casio met that: it’s small enough to slip in my jeans’ pocket and was just over £120, which I didn’t think was too bad since I imagine I’ll used it for at least three or four years.

We’ve not had a chance to test it properly in daylight since daylight and our waking hours are barely overlapping at the moment but the flash (particularly the soft flash) stuff has turned out alright. There is a nice feature for selecting the focus point but our tests with the facial recognition stuff so far have failed (perhaps we all look too alike). There are lots and lots of pre-defined settings — everything from the basic portrait and sports, to text and fireworks, and there are three video options including a “YouTube” mode (which basically seems to be “turn quality to crap”).

The screen is very big and clear but the photo playback makes all the photos look too bright and over-exposed (going to see if we can adjust this) - the initial few second review after taking the photo is closer to the final image.

The camera comes with a cradle for downloading and charging: it seems counter-intuitive that the camera goes into it backwards but of course it makes perfect sense when you think about it (it lets you use the screen). It also just plugged-and-played in Ubuntu (Gutsy) - just auto-detected the camera then downloaded to gthumb as standard. Even though I’m usually a stickler for checking this sort of thing before I buy, I didn’t this time and so was happy that it Just Worked.

I’ve uploaded a selection of photos (mostly from yesterday) to my Photos section. I’ve shrunk them down because there didn’t seem to be any point putting the full size ones online but I’ve not made any other adjustments to them - colour, focus, cropping etc. The three pics in the cafe were done without a flash so not to annoy fellow diners but the rest were with the flash. The scones with cream and jam were yummy, by the way.