Sydney Roads F3-M2 Tunnel Project

Intro

The NSW Government together with Transurban have issued a map to the community showing the "indicative" path for a tunnel to link the existing M2 with the F3 (now "re-branded" as the M1). The path loosely follows the existing daily bottle-neck route of the Cumberland Hwy/Pennant Hills Road, which parallels the current North-West (Epping to Hornsby) railway line. See www.rms.nsw.gov.au/f3tom2/ for details

Open Letter

2 ideas - 1 email (all for better value):

1) don't "provision for future widening" do it right the first time - history shows that every single major route in and out of Sydney needs to be 3 lanes (min). Save time, [overall] money and headaches and do it right the first time.

2) IDEA: move the Hornsby to Beecroft (or take it back to the already underground tunnel at Epping) railway line underground (while the machines are down there) and then sell off the very valuable above-ground real-estate corridor to help fund the project. Long term all the existing property's land value increases as noisy transport corridors are channeled below.

Google Maps April Fools (or is it?)

Like a lot of people I look forward to April 1st when the big companies try to pull the wool over our eyes with some lame, but interesting hoax. Google has been doing it for a few years now, with different business units coming up with something unique to the products they build. This year however, the company teamed up on a single concept: Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity (CADIE) - which is basically just an bot with Artificial Intelligence (AI) with a cutesy looking panda for a logo. This was a bit of a cop-out as all the Maps team really created was a Google My Map with a about 20 placemarks (all in America) represented with the panda icon (wow).
While scratching my head thinking "there must be more to it than this" as it's pretty average - I stumbled on this at this location when in Streetview:

Now I'm not sure if this was an unpublicised April Fools or just a Streetview glitch. It looks like your trapped in the rib cage of some weird purple walrus (or panda). And what's also strange is that a continuous section of road, just stops when you get "caught" inside the view. And even more funny is that this is near "area 51".
I'm hoping this was part of the April Fools day pranks as it is actually half-decent compared to the rest of the CADIE cop-outs.

I can see you

It's true; not only did Keyhole update their Australian images, they also re-worked their viewer to be branded as Google Earth and are (were - Google has stopped the download of the application - but not it's functionality) letting you use it for free forever (i.e. no trial period like Keyhole's viewer had).

The speed and ease-of-use of this application allowed me to find my house even quicker than Google Maps.