It’s Tuesday morning after a long weekend and I’m back at my desk. It was a long long weekend for me, because I got to go to Rottnest on Thursday and Friday. Such a relaxing place! There is some great calmness in the small rolling grassy hills, and it feels amazing that one can be sitting on Vlamingh lookout within an hour of leaving home, and have a 360° view of that lovely little island.

I’ve been trying to update the OSM map of Rottnest (as usual) and it’s getting closer and closer to some sort of ‘done’. Not that it ever will be of course, because things change, and the usual thing with OpenStreetMap is that the more you map the more you see needs to be mapped. But at least things like the walking trail relations are getting closer. There’s also some contention with some features: someone is adding features from 1941, and marking them as current. For example, way 1004828012 is an oval marked landuse=military, but that’s not correct. Actually, it could barely be called an oval any more (it’s a reasonably flat area of sand dunes now, mostly re-vegetated with grasses). I’ll keep reaching out to the editor and talking about the best way to sort it out.

Rottnest is a great place to walk, and my new tracking map (which soon will have ten years of my walking on it) is slowly filling up with blue dots. I feel slightly silly for putting lots of coding effort into tracking myself while at the same time objecting strongly to Google’s products that want to do the same, but at least the philosophical stance makes sense to me and it is rather fun seeing the map. The indieweb ideal is that one owns one’s own data, and in my case that means I also own a bespoke and slightly wonky system of storing it.

Former telephone exchange.

Stone masons working on restoring the limestone sea wall in Thomson Bay, Rottnest.