Interesting Stuff

Wow! So, I’ve just spend the past 3 hours playing with a neat little thing that just came out of Google: Keyhole! It’s a compilation of satelite photos from all over the world, and you can go all over and look at things. Though the resolution is terrible out in the boonies, in big cities it’s amazing! Pictures of my house, Amanda’s house, Robert’s house, Amanda’s school, my school, HMC, and the 5C’s were surprisingly detailed. And since it works worldwide, Amanda and I went and looked at various parts of London, Paris, Rome, Athens, Thailand… it’s really neat. However, we couldn’t find Rachel’s street, let alone her house, and we couldn’t even find Mac’s city (Anchorage, Alaska). I couldn’t find my parent’s timeshare condo, but I did find the island it’s on. Robert and Rachel found DisneyLand (DisneyWorld? the one in Florida). Amanda found LAX, and we looked at the planes. Outside the White House, you can see the crowd of people looking in through the fence, and behind it you can see the windows on the cars on the street.

There are two drawbacks to this, though: first, you only get 7 days of the program free. This is understandable, however, because all of the data is streamed off of the Keyhole servers, and someone needs to pay for the bandwidth, etc (though I think that their prices are a little expensive). Second, it’s only available on Windows. Damn! Well, we all gathered around Robert’s computer and played with it (Rachel and Amanda have Macs, and I have Gentoo, as does Kenny). Huh. It just occurred to me that there’s only one person with the combo to our suite who uses Windows. So… yeah. Not yet (ever?) available for Linux. Oh, well. I suspect that by next week I’ll be bored with it anyway.

(continued 2 hours later) Wow! there’s a ridiculous amount of data in there. You can also have it highlight schools (everything from colleges down to elementary schools), banks, restaurants, streets, subway lines, bars… it’s amazing. You can have it highlight bodies of water, identify volcanoes and earthquake areas… it even can identify the different buildings on the Acropolis. Robert found Magic Mountain, and we looked at that; you can see the roller coasters surprisingly well. Kenny found his house, and showed us his car. Niagara Falls is pretty. In downtown San Diego, you can see people walking on the street! This is just incredible. It would be great if I could get this for Linux.

Here are 4 pics I took of it:
my house (that’s the corner of 70th and West Shore, so my house is the 2nd one down on the left)
my high school
HMC (my dorm is the 2nd from the right, just next to the one with the “+”-shaped courtyard).
most of the 5C’s

I highly, highly reccomend you get this and play with it for a week, if you use Windows.