As I Was Saying

Mystery OOM Map Extract

So, parkrun. Any future in it? Five years ago I tried it for the first time. Since then it has grown and grown, and my personal tally now stands at 32 races and I'm wondering how long it will take me to get to 50. We are spoilt for choice around here, and Verulamium has been joined by Ellenbrook Fields, Panshanger Park, Cassiobury, Gadebridge and Fairlands Valley, all within 20 kilometres of St Albans (and all mapped Hertfordshire Orientering Club areas as well). Still a simple concept, brilliantly executed.

Meanwhile back at orienteering, another of the things I wrote about was OpenOrienteeringMap. This is still going strong as well, and has a solid user base in this country, and the unbelievable ability to generate an orienteering map of just about anywhere in the world. A small prize if anyone finds me and can say where the map extract is from. Anyway, Hertfordshire Orienteering Club now have a Tuesday night series of 45 minute score events throughout the summer, most of which use OOM. You can see examples on HH Routegadget site, like this race in St Albans, and this one in Hertford. Numbers at these Tuesday night events are gradually moving up, and what started with 10 as a good turnout now sees 20 or more most evenings. What's even more encouraging is that quite a lot of these are complete newcomers to the sport.

And that has conveniently dragged Routegadget into the conversation. Back in 2013 I was somehow talked into trying to implement a Javascript version of what was originally a Java application. (Nerd humour alert: Java is to Javascript as Ham is to Hamster. Or Car is to Carpet. Or various other versions I'm sure.) Routegadget needs a few pages of its own, so we'll leave it there for now.

But now we must return to where this blog started: the World Orienteering Championships. This year WOC is in Estonia.  I've never orienteered in Estonia. James fancied going somewhere to fill up the long summer holiday. And so we're off to Estonia on Friday to follow the GB team, and sample the delights of some maps that have quite a lot of brown (with some interesting contour detail) but possibly more green and blue than is ideal. Time to get back into spectator-geek mode. Watch this space.