Photos of your house, and the Gold Bar Boulders

[lancegranite]

Check out this link to the Snohomish County Assessors Office home page. Good color photos of western Sno co.

 

 

Assessor's home page map

[MisterMo]

Yup, there it is. Pretty cool

[Off_White]

Thurston County started doing this a number of years ago and got early kudus for being an innovator. I had a recent interesting encounter with the now widespread technology.

 

I have a subscription to Reason magazine, a monthly libertarian publication. The June issue arrived in my mailbox with my name in bold print on the cover, the comment "They Know Where You Are" and an aerial photo of my property with a red circle around what they thought was my house (it was actually the hay barn in the front field). This was part of the lead article about the unsung benefits of a database nation, that we should get used to a loss of privacy, and really, it's all for the best. They did a special run of covers for the subscribers so that each got their own feature, including assorted tidbits about my neighborhood such as the average commute time, that only 22.88% have 4 year college degrees, and that 3% of the children in my zip code are raised by their grandparents.

 

As a general contractor, I use these aerial photo databases all the time, whether for drawing up a quick site plan or checking to see if there are any wetland or easement problems with a given project. It's all pretty wild, and who knows where it will go in the next decade.

 

One drawback though is that the crag in my front yard is invisible from the air, too vertical to make much of an impression. However, apply the 2' interval contour overlay, and there it is!