[Talk-us] Blacksburg Mapping Party, April 5th 10am - 3pm

[Beartooth]

On Mon, 23 Mar 2009 11:50:21 -0400, Russ Nelson wrote:

> On Mar 23, 2009, at 9:18 AM, Beartooth wrote:
	[...]
> I can't speak for Spencer, but the general answer for mapping parties
> is:  come whenever you want.  It's a party, not a class.

	OK; I ought to be able to manage that. 

>> 	I have a couple of GPSs with waypoints, but lots of them are
>> unlikely to be of any interest to anyone else. Is that OK?
> 
> Well, I've been adding stuff which I know is likely to only be of
> interest to maybe a thousand people across the US, but it's of interest
> to ME.

	I'm talking game trails, squirrel dens (both of which are apt to 
change radically after any big storm); good lunch rocks (to sit on, not 
to eat); briar patches (yes, as in Br'er Rabbit); things with weird a/o 
private names (blacksnake meadow, because that was the most distinctive 
thing I saw; I don't suppose it has any other name -- if it isn't 
overgrown by now); a culvert (because it's a good landmark); people's 
houses; my doctor's office; and on and on. 

	Consider those last two. With the Muck-o-Shaft suites I have and 
know how to use, I can figure out whether one loop including the grocer, 
the baker, and the doctor is any shorter than some other loop; having 
figured, even I will delete them, when I get around to it. They just 
clutter up the map. Otoh, stuff like the Food Lion and the Doughnut Shop 
make good landmarks when I want to zap off a map to my house for 
prospective visitors.

>> 	Finally the Gretchenfrage : do any of you run Linux??
> 
> But of course!  Not on this machine, but on the two other machines in
> front of me, the machine to my left, the server at the colocation site,
> and the house server off in the mechanical room.

	OK, am I alone and unobserved? Then let me confess: I haven't 
straddled a bicycle in fifty years. Well, hardly ever. 

	What I really want is some M$-free way of getting my GPSs to talk 
to *topo* map software that I can use. 

	All the linux-native apps that I've looked hard at seem to 
require graduate degrees in CS, EE, and cartography -- as do most of the 
posts on this list, afaict -- but I've disregarded OSM till now (despite 
looking since '98), because I took the name literally. 

	Maybe a mapping party is a place to get a sense of how tall and 
steep the learning curve is; it does handle contour lines, intermittent 
streams, and all that good stuff, right? 

	The map I see at, for instance, http://www.openstreetmap.org/?
lat=37.23&lon=-80.417778&zoom=12 does not make me sanguine. I'd never 
know from it that Azalea is any steeper than Redbud, nor that the funny 
white squiggle in the upper left is part of one bodacious jeep track. 

	Brass tacks : I run Fedora 10 on, inter alia, a T-30 Thinkpad 
(It's way old, but it still has a serial port, and my Garmins all require 
one. Adapters to USB fail dismally.) What all do I need to get installed 
on it before the 5th?

-- 
Beartooth Staffwright, PhD, Neo-Redneck Linux Convert
Remember I know precious little of what I am talking about.