traveling by google map street view

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Anyone else spend way too much time exploring places you've never been (or traveling familiar places, or places you used to live) using google map street view?

A couple days ago I took a trip up the coast of California. No point to it whatsoever, other than I was pretending to be elsewhere. I ran errands in a town I want to buy a house. I've never been there, but I know my way around about as well as someone who's been there a couple days.

I have my favorite houses saved in zillow. No prospect whatsoever of buying one, but I pretend I'm there, that I've picked one out and bought it, that I'm furnishing it and picking up a housemate where she lives in a nearby town.

Yeah, I spend way too much on street view. I tend to haunt places I used to live on it. And if I'm going somewhere I've not been before I'll check it out.

I used to have a VR thing which used street view images to build the world around you. That was good. I tried to use it with an exercise bike though and tried cycling through Seattle but it made me feel really sick.

I used to travel the world through google Street view.
I'd make it an event, get nice and comfy, dim the lights and put the pin in wherever gains my interest. Usually it was places in America or Asia as they are my favourite destinations.
Now though, I am more Into town walk throughs on YouTube, I prefer them because they capture the local people interacting in their environment. I get why GSV has to go to great lengths to keep the people out of it, but I think having people there really adds to the atmosphere.

Never used it that way, but now that you have given me the idea....


get thee behind me Satan!! !! !! !

I can see myself getting addicted to it.

No.

I am principally opposed to surveillance of this kind, which is mostly what it functions as for strangers. So I don't participate in it.

Sure, people can't watch you in real time, but they can look up where you live if they know your address.

Or get to know your town without visiting the place.

I used to go to SailFX (thinks that how its spelled).

A program that shows the current position of every civilian ship in the world.

It presents a map of the world. The blue oceans with little tiny red spider mites trudging across (the ships).

I would zero in on the Washington DC area. Back when they were still building the National Harbor entertainment complex near DC on the north shore of the Potomac... there was always a tugboat anchored in the Potomac that I would always see while driving on the beltway bridge across the Potomac.

When I look at the waters around washington on Sailfx there it would be! A dot representing that tugboat, with its name, shown in the Potomac.

Then I would pull out to show the whole Chesapeake, and the upper Atlantic coast...and see the many ships approaching the US from abroad...with their names.

Pull out on the map and you see all of the ships approaching the US Coast with their names (including one ship with an Arab name- maybe an oil tanker).

One time I saw a whole flock of fishing boats leaving Puget Sound at the same time. One of them was named "the Northwestern" (possibly the same boat featured on "the Deadliest Catch").

Was on the computer reading about the world's largest ship...which happens to be an oil tanker five football fields long. On impulse I went to Sailfax and typed in the ship's name. And there it was...a red dot in the Atlantic (amongst others) right off the coast of Europe...making its way up the English Channel (probably bound for the port of Rotterdam). Plying the seas just as I was reading about it.

Noticed a curious thing: the whole length of the Red Sea, plus a large section of the Indian Ocean around the chokepoint that connects to the Red Sea around Yemen and Somalia...is always shown as empty. Just blue with no red spider mite dots.

I figure that they know that Somali pirates have lap tops and could use their app to find prey in those waters so they descretely leaves those waters blank.

Never quite got "addicted" to it but it was fun for a while.

I want an app

And I want it RIGHT NOW!


https://youtu.be/LHyi74AYxx4

I don't tend to explore too much on it...though sometimes I briefly explore, especially places I've been and that I think are novel or amusing. Some favorites: Amish country, South of the Border, and Mars.

i love exploring my hometown and pushing the dates back to see how it looked back then. it's kind of emotional sometimes.

I've never used it.
I can never get the yellow dude to land on the right spot.

I've never used GPS to get somewhere, either.
I don't even have GPS on my car.