I yam zee worlllld travellair!!!

I've been having fun with Google Earth...

Oh, the places I've seen and the things I've BEEN...

...wait, that didn't come out right.

I've discovered a few little "gems" while exploring the possibilities...did you know, for instance, that there is a giant postage stamp painted on the roof of the Canada Post building in DT Vancouver? Did you know that the Google campus near Palo Alto CA has a pool with a google logo painted on the bottom? Did you know that the images collected from CFB Cold Lake, AB were taken during an airshow last summer? Did you know that some of the footage taken of DT Vancouver was taken while the Molson Indy was on (hint, look for the yellow-and-purple striped tents near BC place stadium)? Did you know that footage of DT Montreal was also taken while the Molson Indy was in town (look for the same tents near the Expo 67 site)? Did you know that you can see the "Ararat Anomaly" on Mt. Ararat in Turkey? It's supposedly a possible resting place of Noah's ark!

There are several Crop Circles in England and elsewhere throughout europe and north america that show up beautifully on Google Earth. There is even a utility file you can download and open (with Google Earth) from the Wikipedia article on crop circles that will show you most of them. The mysterious "landing strip" lines near Nazca, Peru are also visible using google earth. The mysterious Great Pyramid at Giza is still just as mysterious when viewed from the geosat images. Teotihuacan, Mexico...Machu Picchu, Peru...Santorini...The Eiffel Tower...The Millenium Dome...The Leaning Tower of Pisa.

And my house...

Footage for my neighborhood has not been updated since at least last year. The empty lots on 84th ave now all have houses on them. The 4-way intersection at 116th and 82nd is now a traffic circle. Other places: the olympic site in Torino is still under construction in the geosat images Google is using...weeks after the olympics have ended.

As I am not using Google Earth Plus...I have a few complaints about the detail level available for some areas. Or perhaps that's just the level of detail available currently. You cannot see the Confederation Bridge in PEI. You wouldn't even be able to tell where it was if you had the roadways layer turned off. Ditto for the Taj Mahal; the search tool points you to an indistinct blob of green in the middle of nowhere in northern india. Half of the Panama Canal locks are so blurred you couldn't tell WHAT they were...if the other half were not clearly visible.

But hey, it's still fun...

I will be biking to work tomorrow, as Laurie has a dental appt. at 10 am. She'll probably just have the standard check-up and cleaning. I myself need to see a Dentist soon...that hurting tooth which I thought was abcessed may actually only be impacted: it's growing...and I can feel it abrading against the upper teeth when I flex my jaw side-to-side. Cavity or no...that tooth is probably going to have to come out. Dr. Carol Shpak of the Ladner dental clinic already mentioned (years ago) that extracting that tooth might mean fracturing the jawbone, as some bone loss has occurred. Dr. Shpak also saddled me with a 400$ piece of plastic that actually made my crooked teeth worse. I have suffered MUCH at the hands of the Dental "Profession".

Gonna be cold and rainy tomorrow. Joy. Need to get all my gear back together and get everything prepped for an early departure...