Rijkhoven, originally uploaded by Knightwise.

In the picture : My home town of Rijkhoven.

Time to use a satelite ! Its been around for quite some time now, but it had kind of past me by. Looking at satellite images from the grand canyon was not high on my interest list. But seeing a demo of the application in a computer store did spike my interest. Google earth offers you great satellite images of places all over the world. Nice .. cool .. interesting and even a little addictive. But here at Knightwise.com we don't care for technology because its technology. It has to work for us. So time to put Google earth to work. One of the great things about Google maps and Google earth is that you have a geographical overview of the entire globe. While Google Maps offers the layouts of the streets, Google earth offers you an Arial picture of the area. Combining these two does give you some interesting options.Time to “hack-the-teck”
For example : You are going to a concert. With Google maps http://maps.google.com you can find a layout of the roads and even request an how-to-drive-there description to get from where you are to where you are supposed to go. So you head up there and just like everybody else , get caught in the traffic jam towards the concert hall, once you drive in through the entrance of the parking lot you wait in line some more . Then hope there is parking space and so forth.

BUT one of the things you can do with Google EARTH http://earth.google.com is lookup the satellite shot of the area and scan for shortcuts. Perhaps there is an adjacent parking lot somewhere nearby, or a place where you can ditch the car , take a shortcut and be the first in line at the autograph line. Or a little dirt road that’s not on your gps , perhaps even a service road you can use to make a shortcut. Using the visual (satellite) shot of the area gives you extra information that can give you the edge over the dumb masses that just use their gps.

And then some…

If you want to take a peek at some cool Google-Earth shots of my hometown, The castle of Alden Biesen and more .. just take a peek at the Flickr site http://www.flickr.com/photos/knightwise and since we are on the subject : Sign our FRAPPR map at www.frappr.com/knightcast so I know where you guys are from.