I was just testing out something about the way the Yahoo imagery support works in the new WMS plugin and as the imagery appeared, I couldn't resist sketching in some details to help the Ciaro map again. Lots more time consuming road sketching need to happen, so rather than just getting lost in some little detail of Cairo, I thought I'd zoom out a little, and add some landuse=residential areas to try and delineate how much of that kind of work there is.

But even slapping in big areas takes quite a long time. In the imagery, and also from experience of being there, I know that tall apartment blocks suddenly give way to little strips of farm land. This is good in a way, because it leaves me in no doubt (or less doubt) about where the landuse=residential goes up to, but it meant that there's lots of jagged edges to trace around, and I feel compelled to zoom in and do a thorough job of it. The other problem is, the extents of the city are completely out-of-date in the yahoo imagery of course. But I guess it's worth sticking to the data we have to go on, until some Egyptians get involved real mapping to correct it.

After an hour or so, I'm looking at how much I've done, and... well I've only been looking at on one tiny bit of the city's edge on the South West side of Giza. It's one of those things where I feel obliged to do a few more hour long sessions and chip away at the task. But it eats up a lot of time.