I just heard about this piece of software put out by Nasa, and I have to say I'm impressed. Simply put, it's an impressive 3d globe. The images it gives you have to be pretty recent too because, well, here's an example.

Truck from World Wind(1.61mb png image)

Truck from my window

Sorry for the crappy shot of the truck, it was on my mobile and shot through a glarey window.

You can find the World Wind site here. The program is about 250mb to download I think, but can use upto 2gigs(or whatever you specify), as it downloads the images from the satelites servers on demand and deletes least used map/image data. Definitely cool if you are into this sort of thing.

Also, the software was announced on slashdot, which has effectively "Slashdotted" a few of the satelite servers. If you are a slashdot patron, for shame, you assholes ruin everything.

how did you get so close to your house? the closest i get to places is using the place finder

Zooming in, look at the key map. Find a monement or land mark you recognize and follow it to where you want to see.