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Oak point clubs: we have plenty of room for your pictures and announcements! See Clubs for more information.

If you've never used Google Earth, it's Google's "3D interface to the planet". OK, they lie just a bit: it isn't really 3D, though you can "tilt" your view so it almost looks that way, and in some areas you can get 3D drawings of major buildings.. and it isn't really the whole planet, or at least not an up to date accurate version - the satellite views are a few years old and the overlays (road names, businesses, etc) are sometimes out of date or skewed. But even with all that, it's neat, it's fun, and if you don't like it, you are a lot more grumpy than I am.

You can download Google Earth for free for Windows, Mac or Linux, but you do need a fairly new machine to run it - it uses a lot of computer horsepower. If you can't run it on your home computer, do make an effort to see it somewhere: this could convince you that you really do need to buy a new machine.

Google Earth starts with a view of the Earth from space. Type an address into its "Fly To" box (how about 200 Oak Point Drive?) and you'll start moving closer to the ground, zeroing in on your destination. When it stops, you are at an "Eye Altitude" of about 4,000 feet, but you can descend down - around 500 feet up the picture starts getting blurry, but at that height you can pick out cars and sometimes even people.

If you look at Oak Point right now, you'll see the two clubhouses, but they weren't yet connected. Lantern Lane (where I live) is just a roughed out dirt road. But if I fly to our old home, I can see our car parked in the driveway and that my lawn was drying out in spots.

There are a lot of features - you can turn on street names, identify restaurants, shopping etc. It's a lot of fun, though it can be confusing at first. Google also has "overlays", which are guided tours or other annotations of the views. I haven't found anything there that excites me, but apparently these are quite popular.

If your computer is up to the task, give this a try.