September 22, 2005

This is the end...

That's it...no more free time for me...it's pretty much the end of things for me...

I blame Steve Duke for introducing me to Google Earth, another free service from Google's amazing labs. A while back, Google released Keyhole - a pretty similar service, maybe even the same thing, but Keyhole was a free trial service with a payment due at the end of the trial. I gave Keyhole a try but let the thing lapse when I didn't want to pay up.

Now, however, Google has made Google Earth a free service, and it's absolutely incredible. You do have to make a small download, but the payoff is phenomenal. The view begins at the entire globe, zooming down to wherever you're chosen to see - from the largest city smallest home. I've looked at my house; Princeton High School; the Cincinnati Tennis Club (where you can see people playing doubles); Niagra Falls; Las Vegas; the Grand Canyon (where I retraced my hike from rim-to-rim-and-back); the Sydney Opera House; Manhatten; Mount Saint Helens; Aberdeen, Scotland (looking for my overseas dorm); Disney World; Paris, France (for the Eifel Tower and Roland Garos); the Secret City in Beijing; the Hoover Dam; and the Golden Gate Bridge.

If it were just the satellite images, themselves, that would be pretty amazing, but Google Earth adds in 3d buildings to provide fly-throughs for a number of major cities - including Las Vegas, NYC, Cincinnati - and provides services like driving tours and directions from place to place. It's absolutely amazing, and you can grab a bunch of free sight-seeing tours and overlays (including for the New Orleans Hurricane damage):Phenomenal...abso-freakin' phenomenal...

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