Oh noes! My backyard is online!

Yes, lit­er­ally. Folks over at Google had recently churned out the lat­est ver­sion of Google Earth. Cur­rently still in the beta stage, ver­sion 4 comes pack­aged with some great new fea­tures hence, this release was tagged as ‘a major update’.

The most obvi­ous change would be the inter­face, being much more sim­ple and easy on the eyes, as opposed to the old inter­face. Back then, I thought all Google Earth was lack­ing is in its inter­face full of bright colours and ugh, bevels. That said, ver­sion 4 is a great improve­ment, cou­pled with a more friendly nav­i­ga­tion tool com­plete with a vir­tual joy­stick that makes spy­ing on your neighbour’s back­yard more fun.

Another update to GE that is worth men­tion­ing here are the new imagery cov­er­age. Google says that one third of the world’s pop­u­la­tion can now zoom into their neigh­bour­hood and find out what your neigh­bour is up to with that new shed going up in his back­yard. And boy, the best part is, close up imagery is now finally avail­able for Kuch­ing! Yay! No more low-res imagery!

I spent less than five min­utes spot­ting out a few land­marks and finally wan­der my way into my neigh­bour­hood and there it was, home sweet home, com­plete with those palm trees around my gar­den. Due to safety rea­sons, I would refrain from stat­ing the where­abouts of my home but class­mates of mine out there could def­i­nitely make out my house (cir­cled in red).

[Image removed due to pri­vacy rea­sons]

It’s ironic how my neigh­bour planted high fence-creeping plants and palm trees all over so that a glimpse into their back­yard would be almost impos­si­ble but you can actu­ally see EVERYTHING he’s try­ing to hide with Google Earth from way up. *evil smirk*

Leav­ing home, I fol­lowed my usual route to school every morn­ing and reached school in 5 sec­onds. Ahoy all arang­nites! Ever won­dered how our school looks like from above? I must say it’s a pretty amaz­ing sight. See that open­ing there in the mid­dle that kinda looks like the shape of the super­man mark? I had always thought of it being a per­fect pen­ta­gon, but you never know..

Also notice those bare top­soil around the com­pound which is now our foot­ball field. My guess is that this shot was taken when my school was near­ing com­ple­tion, see­ing that the buld­ing is read­ily erected. That makes the date for this photo at around late 2002 before we moved in for the new term the next year. And if you take a look at the perime­ter of the school com­pound, much of the land around it have now been cleared for devel­op­ment now, but which obvi­ously isn’t the case in that shot.

Welp, I think that’s enough explor­ing for now. Oh bum­mer, I’ve got school tomor­row.. Geez. Per­haps I’d post some more inter­est­ing stuff in Kuch­ing some time later. Look out for that!

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