Flowers. Peace & Love

Oh well. I'm sorry. So the prospect of having to shuttle into dreary Limerick from my California mansion had me a bit depressed there. I had just e-mailed my letter of resignation to Cloudmade, said goodbye to my captive audience (that's you!), and suspended my accounts on Flickr, Dopplr and the dozen other new age services I'm on. I was about to nuke the opengeodata blog and prepare my final message to the 23 OSM mailing lists, but got distracted trying to find the right words for my friends at talk-de when Nick's henchmen bundled me into a helicopter and gave me something that made me see flowers.

Conference was good, lots of flowers in Ireland. Thankfully Nick had prepared a few slides for my keynote on Sunday. Escapes me what technical stuff our Ukrainian wizards are building but Andy fed me the right keywords so I managed. People threw flowers at me.
And Ed: I'd still be hating you for not buying the IoM data from us last year, if it hadn't been for all the flowers.



Anyway, so I'm about to head back to the West Coast, on my mission of trying to get them tigertards to map the occasional park and footway. With fuel at 4.50 bucks per gallon you'll have to at least think about using footways, I tell them. They're a bit slow in accepting English superiority but I'm the lead dog in this territory (spot my markings, ha). I asked Nick when I'll be allowed back to the London office but he said there's many other countries to evangelise in after I'm done with the US and there wasn't anything useful I could do at home anyway...