Category: Notes

I am, somewhat optimistically perhaps, going to nine events in June. They are all local or district events – at this time of year, the vegetation gets too high in the remoter, bigger areas, to be able to hold regional or bigger events.

Four of the nine are low-key midweek evening events, involving jumping on a train with the commuters after work and heading straight into the forest. Another two are Saturday local events, again likely to be low key. Two of the events are just down the road from the Sevenoaks event that I was at yesterday and enjoyed very much, I look forward to running on similarly nice terrain. Only one event out of the nine is on a map I’ve run before.

I really like June – it’s the one month where I have a half-decent chance of winning some events. I guess all the really good people have emigrated to Scandinavia for the summer.

Photograph by DigiSport, reproduced with permission.

One word – superb!

I really enjoyed this year’s JK. I had low expectations of the areas and my own fitness – but I was pleasantly surprised on both counts and glad I went.

The sprint race was superb and I’m definitely keen to do more. Day 1 was a true classic on moorland, with technical, moranic terrain, fast open moor, and cliffs. Best of all the last seven controls were all downhill! 🙂 Day 2 was also an enjoyable, well-planned challenge, weaving through tough physical forest with enough technicality to keep you on your toes, before an intense but attractive technical section. The contrast between areas was dramatic, the first day requiring Nordic-style constant contact with the map and good bearings, and the second day offering continental-style route choice. The relay area was a bit grotty and muddy, but was flat and fast and fine for a relay race. The weather was in general good, except for a cloudburst just before the relays. And I got around the courses much more successfully than I thought I would.

Thanks to YHOA for putting on a memorable JK.

I’m currently ill (since last Thursday) so not doing any orienteering at the moment. At this point I’m hoping to still be at the JK in two weeks, if only as a spectator. One thing’s inevitable though – once I’m back in health, all my form this season will be long gone. Oh well, bring on 2006-7.

Update: Finally felt at 100% strength four weeks later – so made it (just!) to the JK.

The latest “Oxford Today” magazine, sent out by the university to its alumni to make sure we don’t forget it, has a great full-page article on OUOC and orienteering in general, featuring a map of the University Parks (with JOK logo prominent!) and a great action photo – that photo is worthy of the front page of CompassSport! I wonder how many times they had to repeat that action shot. And it’s good to see the Permanent Orienteering Course is still in use four years after me and Matt (the prez at the time) spent a physical afternoon hammering the many posts into the ground. A great lay-man’s introduction to the sport, and the latest in a long line of articles OUOC has got in the press.

I’ve scanned in the page, for your perusal until I get the take-down notice. Click on the picture for a full-size version.

I’ve updated the Fixtures Map code with a couple of new features:

• Ability to exclude events more than 100 miles from you, except nationals/internationals. This is set from the page where you choose your postcode.
• “Alert” reporting feature – if you spot a mistake in the listing, click on the “Alert” link for the event concerned, mark what’s wrong and press “Send” – I’ll receive a notification and will take action to fix the issue. Especially important for bad grid references and dates – the map won’t work well if the source data is wrong.

I also got a mention in Google Maps Mania. 🙂

I somehow missed Rob Williams’ excellent Orienteering Fixtures webpage, which has been online for several months and is a very similar concept to my own page. It has a number of features that my own fixtures webpage doesn’t yet have, such as an RSS feed, pesistent storage of a person’s location, and the ability for people to add in their own events. I am hoping to incorporate all of these into my own one in due course.

Hopefully all these alternative fixtures pages will encourage BOF to get its act together and enhance the official one.

Following the Map of Maps 1 and 2 projects, I’ve been working on an unofficial, location aware database of UK orienteering maps. It is based on the official UK list, for which I have a script which grabs and parses 90% of the events there (it has trouble with the multi-day and really big events, so I add those manually.) I’ll be clearing and repopulating the database on a regular basis from BOF, so if there’s mistakes on any of the events added by “bof_reg_basic”, you’ll need to contact BOF, not me, for the data to be corrected.

Take a look yourself and leave feedback or ideas for improvement below.

It’s in beta at the moment and there are some bugs – events with special characters in their names are not parsed perfectly. Also, it doesn’t look too great in Internet Explorer – I recommend using Firefox for the full experience.

Acknowledgements to Luke for the regex and code for screen scraping the BOF page, Attackpoint for the idea for location-based information, phpcoord for the directioning code, Jibble for the UK postcode geocoding, Google for their Maps API and members of Nopesport forums for the inspiration.

Interesting discussion (page 2) on NopeSport – disclaimer: I’ve contributed to the discussion – at the moment about the fixtures list for UK orienteering, and a general desire for it to be more comprehensive and incorporating more Web 2.0 functionality (e.g. RSS, Google Map API with maybe a bit of AJAX, Location-based service.) I’m bursting with ideas but they are all quite time consuming to implement.