Well, by the end of today, I will learn if I have been elected to municipal office or not. Wish me luck.

As a Canadian, I watch usually every US election with a sense of dread, especially in the last few years. Today, I am filled with hope. If Obama does nothing else good as president (and I am going to assume we are not going to see a repeat of Dewey/Truman) and he will do many good things, he has already accomplished one thing: got young people out to volunteer and vote.

So please, if you are in the US, go and vote today. Don't let anyone stand in your way, be it registration or other dirty tricks.

Vote Obama.
Californians, vote No on Prop 8 and Yes on Prop 1A
Seattlites, vote Yes on Prop 1

Seems I have a burst of insanity and decided to enter politics. Specifically, I am running for municipal council in Oak Bay, one of the smaller cities that make up Greater Victoria*.

Why am I running? To promote bicycling, transit, a greener world and similar ideas. As such, I am running under the Green Party banner.

I won't bore the rest of you to tears with campaign stuff, so check out my campaign website at coreyburger.ca.

* Victoria, the city that most assume is one, is in fact 12 different fiefdoms, ranging from 5,000 to 105,000. Oak Bay is one of those. See Greater Victoria on Wikipedia.

The OpenStreetMap crew met here in Victoria again tonight. We ended up short a few people, due to that evil thing known as work, so it was only Jason, Tobias and I. After just over two hours of driving and walking, pretty colours were made:

Tobias & Jason's tracks in purple and green, respectively and myself in yellow.

Tobias and Jason ended up walking around Cedar Hill Golf Course and all the little connecting trails to the roads, as well as driving east of Mt. Tolmie while I biked just south of Cedar Hill X Rd and also just south of McKenzie Avenue.

Sadly we just missed the planet dump day, when the default rendering gets redone, so we will have to wait another week to see our work there.

We didn't decide on the next date, due to lack of people attending, so the announcement of the next party will have to wait.

The OpenStreetMap crew met here in Victoria tonight. We had a pretty good turn out. Aside from Sam and myself, who have been meeting for mapping fairly regularly now, we also had Tobias, Jason, Justine and Ryan. Of them, only Jason had any mapping experience and the weather didn't help:

Ironically, the weather report says it will clear tomorrow.

Regardless, we still went out mapping, Sam braving it on foot, Justine, Ryan & I in Ryan's car and Tobias & Jason in Jason's. After just over two hours of driving and walking, pretty colours were made:

Sam's tracks in blue, Tobias & Jason in orange and Justine, Ryan and I in yellow.

Better yet, we agreed on the next mapping party. We are meeting on August 13th at 6pm at Little Thai Place. We will be meeting for dinner, followed by some mapping, rain or shine. For the forgetful, the Victoria mapping party event on Upcoming.