Geo Surfing

I dont know what it is about maps, but I cannot get enough of it. It is facinating to see where you live or lived, what is around you, or seeing places you plan to visit. What has makes it even better are the arieal photos or sattelite images. You might actually see your appartment or house, and if the images are recent and of high resolution you might even see your car parked outside. Sattelite images have existed for a while taken from landsat sattelites and arial photos and in the past these were availabe in Teraserver but now with Google Earth they have made "geo surfing" much easier and much more fun. With added terrain and other information overlays it is amazing how many places you can now discover all over the world (some areas have better resolution than others). To use google earth you will have to download an application and most computers shuold be able to handle this. Microsoft maps.live has recently taken geo surfing one step further by allowing you to actually navigate some big cities like Baltimore in 3D by allowing you to even turn corners in a street around building which look more realistic than goolge has. However if you dont have the latest and greatest computer dont even bother downloading their application (actually a plugin) it will hog your computer resources and if you dont have the right video card it will crash your machine (you will get the blue screen of death!). Since this is very new you might wait till they fix some of their bugs. For best geo surfing experience use a pc game pad!

Happy geo surfing!