you can locate a wonderful local brewery. If you look closely enough at the image, you'll see me typing this at you.

It doubles as a flight sim!

Holy Cow! There you are! And by zooming in, I can see that they have Hop Harvest on draft tonight! Hey, can I have one of those nachos?

Man, this is awesome.

flight sim, wow. Panoramio, wow.

What does it do and why do I want it?

I always like to go to Venice and my hometown.

You can see Russia from there.
And Georgia.
And if your friends' cars are parked properly.

It's kind of a replica of the actual Earth. It's a 3-D map you can manipulate. You can enter a location, "travel" there with an animated satellite map moving under you, and then see points of interest noted there, connected to pictures of the places and comments from people. You can search for points of interest and geographical features and businesses wherever you want to look. It's kind of like Google Maps but a lot more sophisticated and with pretty pictures of places.

Right now I'm looking at Martha's Vineyard.

Now I'm looking at my own street. It has every detail of my street. You can scoot along the street like a car.

Whoa.

Check out googlesightseeing.com if you're not familiar with it, you can use it with google maps but google earth is better. I've wasted a lot of time there.

Of course I also waste a lot of time just screwing around with google earth just tracing roads and local places.

If you take a virtual drive down my sister's street in Buffalo, you can see her sitting in her car, fiddling with the radio.

Also give Mapjack a try - It's like Google Street View with Lasik!

Right now they've only done San Francisco and Phuket, Thailand, but... Oh wow.

You can get driving directions exported to a PDF with a neat oblique-angle view of each turn you need to make.

You can go here to the community site, and people post KML files, which you can download to see interesting things.

ummm... but mostly you just tool around looking at the roofs of friends' houses.

I am here! (google maps; you can click "view in Google Earth" in the blue bar)

Sky Walker shows our standard dog walk route. The important thing to know is that she usually does a peepee on Logginou, and then a poopy on Meletiou Piga, or Sorvolou. The corner of Kosma Mpalanou and Miniati is a very important Pee-Mail spot, and two mean house dogs on Meletiou Piga want to bite her; one time they got out, and one did! Many cats where M. Piga meets Sorvolou, but they know she's not a cat hater, and remain chill. On Sorvolou between Miniati and M. Piga, we can see the Acropolis; also, at twilight, I keep seeing a small bat flying around here (or several, one at a time). Sky hasn't noticed this. Just past Miniati on Sorvolou on the way home a new dog has moved into the 'hood; he is very pretty, maybe a young golden lab mix, and unlike almost every other dog in the area, very quiet, just like Sky. He usually silently watches us pass from his/her balcony, and Sky hasn't noticed him yet either. This is because she always has her nose a millimeter from the ground, sniffing around like a maniac. She hasn't seen him, but I'm sure she has his vital statistics on record in her Wee Files.

(You may need to click on one or both of these in the left menu, probably under "temporary places" once you are in Google Earth. Or maybe they take you directly - not sure.)

Go to Socotra! Remember those pics from a while back? Go see it, I spent an hour there on an imaginary vacation, tracing the coasts, looking at the villages...

I like beachcombing with Google Earth, pretty much any coast is fine.

Go to Arthur Kill Road, on Staten Island, find the ship graveyard.

fun fun fun

I love Google Earth. There are lots of oil fires in the world, I mean LOTS. And they are massive and all over north Africa and the ME, and I would never have known about any of them if not for Google Earth.

Google Earth Hacks has some pretty fun places to visit.

Wow, we just bought a new MacBook last weekend to replace our almost-dead Windows machine. I'm just getting comfy with the Mac and beginning to realize it's awesomeness compared to our 8-year old Gateway tower.

So I must now download this and have fun!