I can see my house from here!

I found an amazing bit of free software called Google Earth, which has a sort of ominous ring to it. I'ts an interactive model of the earth composed of sattelite images. And for most of the US, their pretty sharp pictures too. Some larger cities have a feature called street view, which zooms down to ground level and then displays panoramic photos of the surrounding view. Also you can turn on a button that shows where, for example, a video clip was shot. If I took a movie of my trip to Niagra Falls, I can mark that on the map for all the world to see, and they can watch my movie on YouTube.
At some level, it gives me concerns about privacy rights and purpose and power of technology. But at the same time it was just amazing that the whole dar thing worked, and worked well! It's a lot of fun but it'd be real easy to lose yourself looking at maps for a few days.
You are now here:
I found out about a lot of this while looking at someones map of their yard showing a garden layout. The folks at Path to Freedom are well aware of the amazingness of Google Earth and you can see their front yard gadens as well as watch interviews with the family, right from the map. The work their doing is at least as amazing as the software so you can check them out also.

CS