This is the Blue Mountain ski resort outside of Palmerton, Pennsylvania (although there’s nothing very ‘blue’ about it). That sure is some excellent snowmaking facilities they’ve got though! It might be interesting going skiing or boarding and looking out at a brown, snowless landscape as far as the eye can see…

Thanks to Chris and Steve.

SeaWorld is a chain of theme parks featuring killer whale, sea lion and dolphin shows. When I first read about SeaWorld I was very confused by the fact that “Shamu”, the chain’s mascot killer whale, manages to appear twice a day at all three parks across the states. As it turns out the name Shamu is a registered trademark of SeaWorld and the 3 whales currently going by that title follow in the footsteps of a long line of “Shamu” performing whales.

The first SeaWorld we’re visiting on our tour today is SeaWorld San Antonio in Texas. You can use the officical park map to identify the various areas and rides.

Next stop is SeaWorld San Diego in California. In the thumbnail shot you can see a crowd has gathered for the dolphin show (official park map).

Our last stop is SeaWorld Orlando, Florida. Some of those who submitted this site were sure that the black splodge you can see in the pool is Florida’s version of Shamu the whale, but I’m not convinced.

Thanks: R@lf, Roxy, Tim Gregory, Kate, Patrick Gunderson, Stephen, Tom Boyce, Jesse, Philip G, RPirolli, PapaPenguin, Dan Mowry, Alex, Brett Stephens, Michael Zacherl, Dave Kellenberger & Peter

The RSS Feed should be back to full text again (it was on “summary” mode for a short while). Thanks to everyone who sent an angry e-mail demanding it changed back

Wow, Google Earth is pretty impressive. If you haven’t heard about this yet, it is a cut down version of Keyhole that Google have released completely free. Google bought Keyhole last year and most of the recent mapping technology has been based on their work. Fellow sightseers have reported that the image data in Google Earth is slightly older than the stuff on Google Maps, which is nice to know from our point of view (no pun intended). Of course, Google Earth has other features to put it above Google Maps. For some areas it has actual terrain data and it maps the satellite images onto a 3d mesh. This is demonstrated pretty spectacularly in places like the Grand Canyon and Hoover Dam. Google have also mapped out the major buildings in a lot of cities and these appear as 3d models, sticking out of the landscape. They aren’t texture mapped, which is a shame, but it’s still cool to actually fly around New York with the buildings towering above you.

James and Alex (being Apple hippies) are also not amused that it is only available for Windows. It’s difficult to tell whether they’ll release a non-windows version as Picassa (another company acquired by Google) is also solely Windows based.

I’m also working on a little script to serve up Google Earth formatted files for our ‘Sights’. Look out soon for a link on our posts that will zoom you to that point in your copy of Google Earth.

And for my final post today from Hong Kong, check out this exposed section of the Shing Mun Tunnel in Shatin. This tunnel links between the eastern and western part of the New Territorries, which are separated by mountains.

How cool?

Many thanks to Philip Ng.