Why I love the Internet

Today in Brisbane was hot. Stupidly hot. I was curious as to exactly what temperature 'stupidly hot' equated to, so I went hunting around here to find out. After some digging, I found the info I wanted.

At the time, I didn't go down to the bottom of that data page, so I didn't see the map of where the temperature stations were located. Instead, I went to a different part of the BOM site where you can get the lat/long of all measuring stations. So, I had myself some map coordinates for the Brisbane measuring station, but I still didn't know where it really was. So I do a Google search for 'online atlas'.

One of the links that came back was for National Geographic's Map Machine. This is one seriously cool toy. Type in a place name, and it will bring it up in the map window (it may give you a list to choose from first if you weren't specific enough). Once you have that, you get it to show you other, related maps (e.g. if you search for Brisbane, one of the options on Related Atlas Maps will be 'Brisbane, Australia'. Selecting that will change the main map view to one of Brisbane and its surrounds, showing roads and suburbs and the like).

Then there are other toys like viewing time zones, or population density, or elevation information. . . missing that map on the BOM page seems to have been a rather fortuitous mistake!

(P.S. Anyone else having troubles with w.Bloggar at the moment?)