It was Friday 3 June & I was surveying Norman Street, off Porchester Road in Nottingham NG3. The semi-detached house had a house-name on a piece of wood facing on to the street, but that wood was very old. Only 2 metal letters remained attached to it, 5 more were missing and, in spite of a fading imprint left on the wood, I could not decrypt the original name.

In classic programmer-mode (anal-retentive & fastidious) I decided to ask the home-owner what that name was, had gone around the corner to the side door & knocked on it. A young girl — she was probably 3 years old — was staring at me through the glass of a small window ⅔ up the wall at the right-hand-side of the door & had shouted at her mum. Shortly after, Mum opened the door.

I explained that this was the first time that I had been called an “old man”, and asked her to give me a few moments whilst I processed that fact. The young girl was mighty pleased by all this & was beaming all over her face.

(I’m not denying the facts; the government awarded me my State Pension 18 months ago, but it was still a bit of a shock)

Just before I finish, allow me to recommend surveying for OpenStreetMap as a useful pastime for other old farts like me. It guarantees some fresh air & physical exercise — and particularly if you live in a hilly district like NG3 — and is a good reason to meet & talk to other people (none as lonely as the old). Plus, improving the Map is good for everyone, so helps to offset those feelings of being utterly redundant.

PS
Mum did not know what was on the plaque, so adding a house-name to OSM was abandoned.

This is a strange one to have as a quandry:—

I’m surveying Porchester Road (formerly Thorneywood Road), Nottingham NG3 & have reached the corner of Norman Road / Porchester Road. Down the side of Norman Road is 180 Porchester Road (go figure), which is the Registered Address of F. Holmes & Sons (Porchester) Ltd.:

This chap is a builder (he has converted his former home into a set of 4 terraced houses which, let’s face it, is what a building contractor is likely to do, and the reason that his registered office is now tucked down the side of Norman Street). Now here is the quandry:—

I guess that a builder can be called a ‘trade’, or it could be called a ‘craft’, but regardless of it’s group-type, non of the sections in JOSM feature either a “Builder” nor a “Building Contractor”, so how on earth am I to enter this commercial activity?. It is difficult for me to believe that no-one has come across a builder in the previous 10 years whilst entering stuff into the map.

Nottingham Suburban Railway
Nottingham Suburban Railway, Part 2

A good deal of my Diaries seems to be one long, continuous set of brick porn as I detail my affaires with various walls positioned in different parts of St Anns, Nottingham NG3, England. Sadly, today is no different. Witness your surveyor as he gets up close & personal with the tattoo on a wall next to (what used to be) Thorneywood Station.

I began surveying Honeywood Estate last Sunday 22 May. The estate (and particularly at the upper end) is sat within the site of the former Thorneywood Brickworks (Nottingham Patent Brick Company). Robert Mellors, the owner of the Brickworks in the 1880s, was anxious to get access to a railway as to be able to ship his bricks to all parts of Britain. He was therefore one of the instigators of the Nottingham Suburban Railway (NSR) (I believe that St Pancras Station in London is faced with Thorneywood brick).

Here is a picture of the rear of the New Engine House Pub:

… See full entry

Why is it impossible to report spam in these diaries? A simple ‘report me’ link would do it.

Here are the latest examples (just in the last hour - all Chinese, naturally):—

@bobbleheadscustom/diary/38724
@holleywebc/diary/38715
@Dachzelt/diary/38713

---

Added 10:49 UTC 01:00:
I ran a website for 10+ years and am a moderator on stopforumspam.com. I know precisely what it takes to stop spam…

The simple method would be:—

1. Make a Report Link
   (at the backend send an email)
   (that will take an hour to setup)
   (mods & admins get an immediate heads-up on new spam)
   (once in place, do next steps)
2. Start blocking on combos of IP+email address
   (if a new user tries to create an account from a known bad IP + Email, then block it)
3. Start reporting IP+email address+username from spammers
   (note that this loops back to [1])
   (it means that the amount of spam on the site rapidly begins to fall to zero)

I’ve been giving JOSM a lot of grief. I think that this is because it is written in Java, and my webmaster experience has caused me to be deeply suspicious of Javascript (don’t bother writing; I’m well aware that they are different beasts).

A few days ago, whilst about to create a new terrace in City Heights, Mapperley, I selected a node in a building rectangle inside JOSM. It turned blood-red, which was perfectly normal. Then the whole screen turned the same colour, whilst the only key that the computer responded to was the electricity supply on/off button; that was perfectly abnormal.

To cut the long, horrible story down to size, it was not due to JOSM, but was rather because one of the two 2GB memory sticks that were bought a few years ago from Crucial had gone bad. When memory touched ~411MB the whole system died, and the entire screen was left painted the same as the last pixel used. (Added later: a phone call to Crucial and collect a Freepost address + RMA number to return & they will send two new replacements; that’s what a “Lifetime Guarantee” means, even though they were bought in 2011.)

Using memtest86+ caused the same shutdown. Removing the 2 sticks (leaving the original 1GB memory in place) removed the problem. Bum.

Fixing the problem is the easy part (a new Lenovo H30 from PC-World - strip out the useless Windows10 & replace it with Debian Jessie 8.4 & we are away) (why on earth am I forced to pay for Windows?). Moving all my stuff from the old computer to the new is the difficult bit.

How To Install Debian on a modern AMD Desktop Computer:

Some truly geeky stuff for anyone else with similar equipment & problems, to try to help; first, my target system:-

1. Lenovo H30 / Windows 10
   (is discontinued on Lenovo site; thus very cheap on PC-World)
2. AMD A8-6410 APU
3. EFI boot
4. “F1” to access BIOS

… See full entry

It is almost 8 weeks since I began mapping (21 March 2016). In my first Diary Mapping Thorneywood Mount I wrote:

One thing that keeps becoming clear is that I need Cards to id myself & give to others, plus, perhaps some literature to give to save myself 5 or 10 minutes explaining each time what the hell OSM is.

Thanks to a comment from LivingWithDragons I was able to get some funky little hand-outs from Andy Allan (thanks Andy), but still no personal ID. I was reminded of this following an unpleasant interaction with a little sh*t at Nightingale House, City Heights (the survey was made last Wednesday, 11 March 2016; I’ve consciously let 2 days pass to cool down, and to try to make sure that I didn’t swear whilst I wrote this diary; as you can see, I haven’t fully succeeded).

City Heights is built within the grounds of the old Nottingham Borough Lunatic Asylum (see the diary entry Nottingham Suburban Railway, Part 2 for more info) and has both new build houses in the lower parts and flats built within the original buildings erected for Nottingham’s lunatics.

This is Nightingale House (built 1880, this is just the front; there is also a long, long section behind & then another wing beyond that):

… See full entry

In Part 1, the current track of the Nottingham Suburban Railway (NSR) was traced from an extraordinary 9m high metal ventilation pipe above the Sneinton Tunnel, then as straight as a rifle bullet via the Thorneywood Station and the currently-inaccessible Thorneywood Tunnel to the Bridge that killed St Ann’s Well.

After my initial write-up on the NSR, I was astonished to be driving down The Wells Road & pass an old house with identical chimneys to the Thorneywood Station-house at 1 Porchester Road. I had never noticed that house before; surely the chimneys could not be a coincidence?

My chance came yesterday (Sunday 8 May) as my surveying took me up to The Chestnuts, a small cul-de-sac that is opposite (what turns out to be) the St Ann’s Well Station-house at 459 The Wells Road.

… See full entry

(‘Dead Kitten’ == the pink fluffy thing hanging from the left head-can)
(with grateful thanks to Nadeem at “Fabric House”, stall 244/245, Victoria Market, Nottingham)

This actually all started when my ancient Motorola L7 mobile died last Christmas; or rather, when the central bevel fell out from the O-ring, making navigation ultra difficult. The Moto was old – (2005) predating even the earliest iphone – but had originally belonged to my brother (now deceased) so I tried super-gluing the bevel back in.

In February 2016 I dashed to Newark to see The Flying Scotsman pass by & my attempt to photograph it faltered due to the bevel. That was the last straw. Discarding the Moto felt like discarding my brother for a second time, but it had to be done.

These are the steps to the Dead Kitten, and also what brought me to be mapping for OSM:

… See full entry

The trek ‘n’ trace that I did Friday 29 April 2016 included a section of the (long dismantled) Nottingham Suburban Railway (NSR), including the sole tunnel still available to view. I love steam trains, tunnels & hidden places, so this diary entry will be about the NSR in St Anns.

I use Mapillary to store photos taken whilst tracking. At first, the only way that I could display them in this diary was via my personal site. However, Mapillary support (support at mapillary.com) pointed out the Download sub-menu, and that allows a photo to be shown here.

On Carlton Road, a little east of the junction with Porchester Road, on the south side of the road, is a blue-brick wall that is actually the top of the NSR Bridge which previously carried Carlton Road over the NSR Railway line between the station at the north side & the track to Sneinton tunnel at the south side.

… See full entry

A patch local to me (now called Stonebridge Park) proved to be a white triangle on the map (Stonebridge Road at the base, Beacon Hill Rise on the town side & Saint Matthias Road on the 3rd side). It was part of the St Anns-wide redevelopment at the end of the 1960s. 50 years later poor, lost souls were still being discovered in the shrubbery. Like English versions of WW2 Japanese soldiers they had wandered into the new estates & promptly got lost. Most were quickly discovered & gently led out to be rehabilitated in one of the local insane asylums, but some went feral & survived only by being fed by children from the estate (I know this is true as I’m sure I saw a film about it).

Something had to be done. The council renamed the whole triangle of land & gave a contract to Keepmoat to re-redevelop the whole area. That post-dates our Bing imagery. I’ve tried to contact Keepmoat, but they have not returned my calls nor emails. I’ve had better success with the GIS department at the local council.

SK53 (Jerry) gave me a contact to a councillor who is Executive Assistant for Housing and Regeneration, and he passed my email on to the council GIS Team. I got an email back from Laura, saying that my request “sounds very interesting”. Nottingham Council have their own OpenData initiative, but the Ordinance Survey stranglehold on British GIS Data causes Laura to believe that they cannot release anything to OSM.

I spoke to Laura today, and she will approach the OS to discuss releasing info to OSM. I spent most of yesterday collecting info + links which I put in an email to her. I thought that others may find that info useful, so here is the content:

I hope to speak to you on Thursday 28 April 2016. Here is some background info + links on OSM relevant to the topic of your recent email to me, but first the section of that email possibly most relevant to this discussion:-

On 26/04/16 16:48, (GIS Team) wrote:

… See full entry

or,

Watch Out for the Middle-Class

I’ve been mapping regularly since 21 March 2016, but this is my first Diary entry since then. I’ll attempt to blog as often as I can from now on. Meanwhile, my most recent trace was uploaded a few minutes back. The longest vertical trace is Thorneywood Mount, starting & finishing at the bottom, at the junction of Donkey Hill†, Thorneywood Mount & Thorneywood Rise, and covering it’s entire length up to it’s junction with Porchester Road. The trace was made this afternoon as I gathered house number info, etc. from Thorneywood Mount & all streets between it & Porchester Road.

Most of the OSM street info for my neck of the woods (NG3:- St. Anns, Nottingham, England) seems complete, but not the houses nor the house number/names. Across the last month or so I’ve filled in most of that information for a section of St Anns bounded by Donkey Hill, Thorneywood Rise, Carlton Road, Saint Matthias Road, Southampton Street & Saint Ann’s Well Road. After the April 2016 Pub Meetup I reviewed the whole thing & decided to continue – it seems that I like having to deal with the middle-class chewing at my neck – and began to extend the mapping to the north-east of Donkey Hill‡.

… See full entry