Can't afford a vacation this year?
Concerned about the high cost of fuel?
Worried about the plummeting valuation of the dollar overseas?
Then just hop aboard your computer and take a ride on the Google Earth Express!
I fell in love with this app a few years ago when I first played around with it. And they keep adding such fun new features to it.
In case you don't know, it's a free application put out by Google (hence it's moniker "Google Earth"...duh!) and for a geography buff like me it is a slice of heaven on my hard drive.
It is a 3-D model of the earth, comprised of thousands of full-color satellite photos taken at various resolutions all over the world.
(They also now have an option of a 3-D model of the visible stars and galaxies with zoom capability…very sweet!)
On this globe, you rotate it and zoom in to your hearts content. You’re able to zoom in from what looks like near the orbit of the moon down to street level within seconds! And, as long as your processor and internet connection is fast enough, it is resolving the images rapidly as you go.
With added points of interest called “layers” there are all sorts of added features. User submitted photos are my favorite. Click on the blue dot (or camera icon at closer resolutions) and you see a photo taken by someone of something at that precise location and uploaded to the Google Earth servers.
There are also pre-programmed “guided tours” that fly you around and show you various landmarks, etc.
But I like to make my own itinerary and it’s usually just random….destinations are chosen by just spinning the globe (just like you’d do with a real globe) and then arbitrarily stopping it.
Here are some of the recent virtual vacations I’ve taken.
San Juan, Puerto Rico and the people on the beaches
A beached shipwreck rusting away on the coast of Southern Mauritania to
A huge runway (as big if not bigger than the one at Cape Canaveral for the Space Shuttle) in a remote desert in Western Sahara (wonder what that’s used for…couldn’t find ANY info about an airport in that region…hmmmm….who’s that knocking on my door…oh shit! CIA agents! Arrrrghhh!)
Jets taking off in mid air from Logan International Airport in Boston.
Erupting volcanoes in Kamchatka.
The massive urban sprawl of Varanasi, India
The cascading waters of Niagara Falls
The stark and rugged beauty of Kerguelen Island in the far South Indian Ocean
Of course, the Eiffel Tower in Paris
And for that matter, the CN Tower in Toronto, the Space Needle in Seattle, Taipei 101, Empire State Building, Tokyo Tower and even Burj Dubai (though the most recent rev of Google Earth is a little dated….only has about ¼ of the tower erected, but the user added photos are more recent)
A fun side tool to use in this virtual vacation, if your destination is select cities within the US, is Google Maps, as well.
With Google Maps, you can get down to “Street View”, street-level photos made by a specially equipped car driving through the streets of certain cities and towns. You can click along down the road as if you were actually driving down it and get a virtual 360° view of your surroundings. Happily many of the places I’m familiar with are already photographed…
I saw, as if standing right there, my house that I lived in Providence. (In real life, I haven’t been there in almost 10 years.)
“Drove” through the streets of Boston, New York, LA and Phoenix. Even Orlando! (But they haven’t got all the Orlando area (like Lake Mary) so I couldn’t see my house.
What would really be sweet though is if you happen to be lucky enough to have been photographed the day the special car goes by….either you or your car or someone you know…that’d be cool!
Well, I gotta get back to my exploration. I’m viewing pics of the Burj Dubai again…this skyscraper is amazing…it’s not yet done but they are making very quick progress on it and it is impressive. Going up much faster than the “Freedom Tower” in New York and that eye sore in Altamonte.
Ugh! Let me tell you about that…
This televangelism Christian broadcasting channel got the idea about 10 years ago to build a 20 story “skyscraper” in Altamonte Springs to be their headquarters and to lease out office space to other businesses. And they would fund it’s construction, as it went along, by viewer donations! That’s right, they didn’t secure funding upfront, they pay out contractors working on it as the money filters in.
Needless to say, the economic downturn of 2000-2001 hit their constituency and even though the economy rebounded, their funding apparently didn’t. They made some progress on it during 2002-2004 but I haven’t seen a lick of work being done on it since about then. And now with the real estate crisis…well, you can imagine…
So Altamonte Springs, a city of about 50,000 so it’s certainly no metropolis, has this monolith of glass, steel and concrete, exposed to the elements in many spaces and vacant for what looks to be the foreseeable future, right off I-4, the heavily traveled highway leading to and from Orlando and Daytona Beach.
I’m sure tourists that come to Florida for vacation probably drive by that thing and wonder: “When will that be finished? It looks unchanged since we last came to Disney World…8 years ago!”
How embarrassing for the city planners of Altamonte…
Concerned about the high cost of fuel?
Worried about the plummeting valuation of the dollar overseas?
Then just hop aboard your computer and take a ride on the Google Earth Express!
I fell in love with this app a few years ago when I first played around with it. And they keep adding such fun new features to it.
In case you don't know, it's a free application put out by Google (hence it's moniker "Google Earth"...duh!) and for a geography buff like me it is a slice of heaven on my hard drive.
It is a 3-D model of the earth, comprised of thousands of full-color satellite photos taken at various resolutions all over the world.
(They also now have an option of a 3-D model of the visible stars and galaxies with zoom capability…very sweet!)
On this globe, you rotate it and zoom in to your hearts content. You’re able to zoom in from what looks like near the orbit of the moon down to street level within seconds! And, as long as your processor and internet connection is fast enough, it is resolving the images rapidly as you go.
With added points of interest called “layers” there are all sorts of added features. User submitted photos are my favorite. Click on the blue dot (or camera icon at closer resolutions) and you see a photo taken by someone of something at that precise location and uploaded to the Google Earth servers.
There are also pre-programmed “guided tours” that fly you around and show you various landmarks, etc.
But I like to make my own itinerary and it’s usually just random….destinations are chosen by just spinning the globe (just like you’d do with a real globe) and then arbitrarily stopping it.
Here are some of the recent virtual vacations I’ve taken.
San Juan, Puerto Rico and the people on the beaches
A beached shipwreck rusting away on the coast of Southern Mauritania to
A huge runway (as big if not bigger than the one at Cape Canaveral for the Space Shuttle) in a remote desert in Western Sahara (wonder what that’s used for…couldn’t find ANY info about an airport in that region…hmmmm….who’s that knocking on my door…oh shit! CIA agents! Arrrrghhh!)
Jets taking off in mid air from Logan International Airport in Boston.
Erupting volcanoes in Kamchatka.
The massive urban sprawl of Varanasi, India
The cascading waters of Niagara Falls
The stark and rugged beauty of Kerguelen Island in the far South Indian Ocean
Of course, the Eiffel Tower in Paris
And for that matter, the CN Tower in Toronto, the Space Needle in Seattle, Taipei 101, Empire State Building, Tokyo Tower and even Burj Dubai (though the most recent rev of Google Earth is a little dated….only has about ¼ of the tower erected, but the user added photos are more recent)
A fun side tool to use in this virtual vacation, if your destination is select cities within the US, is Google Maps, as well.
With Google Maps, you can get down to “Street View”, street-level photos made by a specially equipped car driving through the streets of certain cities and towns. You can click along down the road as if you were actually driving down it and get a virtual 360° view of your surroundings. Happily many of the places I’m familiar with are already photographed…
I saw, as if standing right there, my house that I lived in Providence. (In real life, I haven’t been there in almost 10 years.)
“Drove” through the streets of Boston, New York, LA and Phoenix. Even Orlando! (But they haven’t got all the Orlando area (like Lake Mary) so I couldn’t see my house.
What would really be sweet though is if you happen to be lucky enough to have been photographed the day the special car goes by….either you or your car or someone you know…that’d be cool!
Well, I gotta get back to my exploration. I’m viewing pics of the Burj Dubai again…this skyscraper is amazing…it’s not yet done but they are making very quick progress on it and it is impressive. Going up much faster than the “Freedom Tower” in New York and that eye sore in Altamonte.
Ugh! Let me tell you about that…
This televangelism Christian broadcasting channel got the idea about 10 years ago to build a 20 story “skyscraper” in Altamonte Springs to be their headquarters and to lease out office space to other businesses. And they would fund it’s construction, as it went along, by viewer donations! That’s right, they didn’t secure funding upfront, they pay out contractors working on it as the money filters in.
Needless to say, the economic downturn of 2000-2001 hit their constituency and even though the economy rebounded, their funding apparently didn’t. They made some progress on it during 2002-2004 but I haven’t seen a lick of work being done on it since about then. And now with the real estate crisis…well, you can imagine…
So Altamonte Springs, a city of about 50,000 so it’s certainly no metropolis, has this monolith of glass, steel and concrete, exposed to the elements in many spaces and vacant for what looks to be the foreseeable future, right off I-4, the heavily traveled highway leading to and from Orlando and Daytona Beach.
I’m sure tourists that come to Florida for vacation probably drive by that thing and wonder: “When will that be finished? It looks unchanged since we last came to Disney World…8 years ago!”
How embarrassing for the city planners of Altamonte…