The whole area is a gigantic clusterfuck of sprawling housing developments and go-nowhere roads. It’s easy to get lost in there, and have your 10 mile bike ride turn into a never-ending marathon of dead end roads, cul-de-sacs, and near misses by Volvo driving soccer moms.

Once I get it all mapped, maybe I’ll put together a “bicycling guide to the West Shore”. I know I could have used one when I started out.

The episode I was listening to talked about Poplar Forest, which was Jefferson’s second home / retreat. Today it’s sort of a museum, and I noticed that it wasn’t yet added to OSM. The Yahoo images weren’t very good, but I could see the building, and I knew from the podcast that it was an octagon with a long rectangle sticking out the side.

So, I drew a crude octagon, then told JOSM to arrange the nodes in a circle. I think it came out pretty nicely.

Some time ago, I added a node for Monticello to the map, so now you can plan your Jeffersonian vacation with OSM.

I think Mr. Jefferson would like Openstreetmap. After all, he commissioned Louis and Clark expedition to map the American West.

I’m pretty sure he would have been in favor of share-alike licensing, too.

He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.

No doubt if Alexander Hamilton were alive today, he’d own stock in Navteq, plan his travels on Bing, and call us all “intellectual voluptuaries.”

I own a car. This is my fault.

For a moment, I was exited to see OSM getting some press. My excitement faded rapidly, when I saw the article made a rather glaring factual error. It claimed that OSM is a product of Cloudmade.

Sloppy journalism is nothing new, and nothing to get overly excited about. In the comments, a few people tried to correct the mistake, pointing out that OSM is a project in it’s own right, and Cloudmade is a company that uses the OSM data.

Mr. Arrington replied to these comments that he “fully understand[s] the relationship between Cloudmade and openstreetmap.” Clearly he does not.

To say that Cloudmade is in charge of OSM is an error of the same magnitude as saying that Canonical is in charge of Debian. It’s totally ridiculous, and anyone who spends 10 minutes poking around the web could have figured this out.

Arrington then goes on to insult the entire readership of TechCrunch:

“for the vast majority of our readers [the relationship] just isn’t relevant.”

Evidently the difference between the actual facts and made-up malarkey is not relevant to the TechCrunch readership. Maybe TechCrunch is the high-tech equivalent of the Onion, I don’t know.

Not content to insult his own readers, he goes on to slag off the entire open source universe.

If even 1% of our readers gave a damn I’d write a post explaining how projects like these are able to stay on track, and why there is always just one for profit company guiding it.

Evidently he thinks that open projects alway have a for-profit company behind them. I’ve been an active contributer to OSM for over three years now, and I’ve never once been “guided” by Cloudmade in any way whatsoever. Does anyone know what for-profit concern is “guiding” Wikipedia or Mozilla? I sure don’t.

After several more comments tried to correct Arrington’s mistake, he decided that the OSM community is “nasty” and closed down the comments.

Well, sorry TechCrunch. We’re open source people. When we see a mistake, we file a bug. We tried to help you fix your buggy article. It’s what we do. You didn’t listen, and so your article is still broken, and you look like a fool.

So, I turned on the GPS and followed the signs to see where they went. The route goes almost the whole way to Gettysburg, connecting Route J with Route S.

PennDot hasn’t updated their maps in ages, but OpenCycleMap always delivers the goods.

Once you get out of Mechanicsburg, it’s a very scenic ride. It runs for about 30 miles through farms and apple orchards. There are a couple of enormous hills, so be sure to wear comfy shoes for pushing your bike uphill.

Here’s a GPX file of the route, in case you’d like to put it in your GPS or mapping software.

So yesterday, I went out to scope the new trail. I parked at the trailhead in Cornwall and rode to the point where the trail used to end, but it didn’t end. It went over the fancy new bridge, and it’s paved(!!!) all the way to 8th st.

Just before the bridge, there’s a new spur trail (also paved) that takes you to South Hills Park.

On the way back, I rode out to the park. It’s a nice park. I found a lovely bench in the shade and sat down to space out and relax for a while.

The trail is eventually going to go to the High School / Middle School, but you can pretty much ride there through the park now.

I gps logged the new parts of the trail, and you can now see the new hotness on OpenStreetMap.

View Larger Map

In other news, the new Rail Trail in Lewisburg is coming along nicely, despite grumblings from local yahoos.

I found it in the Yahoo! aerial imagery and traced it in.

See for yourself.

I hiked the Rocky Knob Trail in the Michaux State Forest.

The trail is a fairly easy 4 mile loop. There’s only one real climb, and you are rewarded for your labor with a nice view.

If you look carefully, you will notice that the leaves are falling here in Pennsylvania.

I took my GPS along, and now the Rocky Knob Trail is in OpenStreetMap.

4 miles down, 794 left to go before I get my ceremonial walking stick.