The Blaſphemous Bicycler

There’s a brand-new website from the evil geniuses who brought you the world famous Ride Lugged blog:

The Dirt Road Database is a gmaps-mashup type thing to share the locations of dirt roads that are nice to ride bicycles on.

I like the idea. I’m not thrilled about using gmaps-mashups generally^[1], but OSM isn’t quite in a state where this would work….yet.

Anyhow, if you are looking for dirt roads in your neighborhood, or want to tell the world about your favorite dirt roads, check out the Dirt Road Database.

_{[1] Richard Fairhurst’s talk, Why Mashups Suck (and Cartogrpahy matters) is an excellent discussion about this.}

I came across this article, by way of the Secular Outpost.

Early this month, MySpace again deleted the Atheist and Agnostic Group (35,000 members). This deletion, due largely to complaints from people who find atheism offensive, marks the second time MySpace has cancelled the group since November 2007.

Terrible web design, pedophilia, and how this!

“MySpace refuses to undelete the group, although it never violated any terms of service,” said Bryan Pesta, Ph.D., the group’s moderator. “When the largest Christian group was hacked, MySpace’s Founder, Tom Anderson, personally restored the group, and promised to protect it from future deletions.”

This why all the cool kids have ditched myspace and facebook, and are now rocking the mugshot.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about doing some mountain biking on the Central Mountains Shared-Use Trail System.

When you’re riding your bike in the mountains, it’s nice to know when you’ll be riding it pushing it uphill, and when you’ll be careening out of control riding downhill.

At the moment, the cyclemap doesn’t support elevation data, so I’ve been playing around with Kosmos and SRTM2OSM and have managed to come up with a pretty nice looking map.

CMT trail is the red part (Click for big)

There is still much of the left system to tag, but I’m pretty happy with how it’s turning out so far.

Update: I knocked together a slippymap.

So, I just moved into a rather new housing development. It only shows up as a construction site in Yahoo’s satellite imagery. It also isn’t in the TIGER dataset.

I managed to scrounge together my helmet and my GPS out of various cardboard boxes strewn around the garage. I rode my bicycle all over my development and now it’s mapped properly.

This is why OSM kicks ass and takes names. I put my bike away less than an hour ago, and the fruits of my labour are already visible on the map.

I think this will probably be my last bike ride for 2007. I had set a goal of riding 2,000 miles this year, and I will miss that goal by about half. House-shopping and moving took a pretty big bite out of my bicycling time this year, so I’m hoping for 2000 miles in 2008.

Today: 1.5 miles
December: 16.5 miles
2007: 1061.5 miles

Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages:
Behold, the much-ballyhooed Bald Eagle State Forest, land of trees, home of elves, and wonderous place to ride your bicycle.

Here is a larger version, for your viewing pleasure.

The light green areas are State Forest Lands (tagged as landuse=forest) the dark green areas are either State Game Lands or Wilderness areas of the State Forest (tagged as natural=wood).

The DCNR data was scraped from the PDF maps published by the Commonwealth using the techniques described on the illustrious OSM Wiki.

Klinutus and I are going to attempt to GPS log all the mountain biking trails, which will make the cyclemaps even more stupendously magnificent than they already are.