August 25, 2004

So yeah, I'm in a Humboldt kind of mood, but I promised myself I wasn't going to beat that dead horse too much, for the benefit of you guys. But I found another old bookmark that I had filed away without looking at, and it got me all geeking out for the next hour.

It's the TerraServer, a website that will show you aerial photos of any place in the U.S., although some of the photos are pretty old.

I've played around with it before, but not very much. When I found it I wasn’t really in the mood to look at it, but I knew I would be, someday.

Talking about Humboldt was apparently what I needed to make myself find this stuff cool again--go figure. For a semester, I was majoring in Natural Resource Planning and Interpretation, with a concentration in Remote Sensing and GIS (I majored in many, many things at Humboldt) and I spent a lot of time looking at, and analyzing, aerial photos. I switched to this concentration because it was a practical subset of my impractical major, and was, on the surface, interesting. What I discovered during the course of that semester was that studying GIS is like studying architecture--fascinating in theory, dreadfully dull in the nitty-gritty (despite the fact that I was very good at it).

Perhaps that's why I found it so easy to cut the Friday afternoon labs.

Anyhoo...I was thinking about all this stuff, and found TerraServer, discovered that I do actually love this stuff, in theory, and I went to town. So I figured I'd share my findings with all you fine people. All three of you.

Here, for your viewing pleasure:

My apartment in Arcata (actually the old future site of my apartment in Arcata, because this picture was taken in 1989, and my building wasn't built until 94):

The house (apartment) I grew up in:

The house my parents bought, once they had sent me away to Arcata:

Shorn and my first apartment (easy to find, because it is behind Albertsons):

The place where we live now (easy to find, because we're close to The Mall):

There, now don't you feel like you know me just a little bit better?