Google Maps
The good people at Google – or at least I don’t think they’re evil – have photo-mapped Eureka. I’m sure this sort of thing happening in your city is old news by now. We are easily 3 to 5 years behind the rest of the country in almost every aspect of modern, civilized life.
I read about it in the local paper last week, but only checked it out today. Its pretty freakin’ amazing. I played around with Google Earth, which is amazing in and of itself, but this was a new experience because it was all Three-D and real and you can move around in it.
Naturally, I went to check out my house. I wasn’t sure when they photographed the city so my fear was that I still had the ugly brown paint job. Fortunately the house looks spectacular in its mono-chromatic green paint scheme. 
I was also able to determine that they photographed the house sometime around September of 2007. That is when I bought the VW GTI and it was parked out front and still had the paper plates on it from the dealer. Also, the green truck is parked on the side of the house and still didn’t have the shell back on. I could see there was a box of debris in the back of the truck.
There was only a few short weeks from the time I bought the VW until I put the shell back on the truck and moved it in to the garage. They drove down my street during that time. Also, since both of the cars are home that means I’m home. If I hadn’t been home I most likely would see the cats on the front porch since they were both still alive at that time.
One odd thing is that the blinds are open on the big front window. I have opened these blinds only a few times in the last 8 years. Mainly because they are crappy and about to fall down. I’m guessing my infatuation with the new car was still very strong and I was admiring it parked out front. My infatuation would have been short-lived with the car, so I probably only had the blinds open for the first few days after I bought it. I tried to look and see if I could see myself standing in the window, but I couldn't.
7 comments:
That's kinda cool. I Googled my own address, but there's no street-level view anywhere close to my town. Out of curiosity, I googled with the search terms "weird things seen on google street view". Interesting. Sometimes funny. Sometimes not. Check this out: http://googlesightseeing.com/2007/06/16/street-fight/
Cool. My town recently was "google mapped", too.. and I can almost pinpoint the day... because there is a Geo Prism out front with a for sale sign, and there are piles of weeds ALL over the sidewalk from the day in early October last year that I weeded the lawn of ALL weeds in anticipation of seeding. It looks pretty crappy, actually... with piles of weeds!
Yea, I was very happy not to see 2 foot high dandelions in the yard and weeds growing in the cracks in the sidewalk.
They did my neighborhood sometime early last fall. It looks like early morning after my truck has left the driveway. It is so cool to be able to look up and down and all around. I did a "walk" of my neighborhood. In some of the pictues I can see the little yellow truck that took the pictures parked on the wrong sides of the streets.
You're lucky your house is painted and will be so for all of Google-posterity. Just a few blocks away from you, they cause us mid-paint job so our porch is half-done. I'm trying to figure out how to request a re-do. They really should have warned us.
Ugh, I know. There is a picture of my house on some "old House Blog" page that I get quite a few hits from. The picture is from when my house looked really bad, but I don't know how to update it. It can be frustrating.
They did our block last summer while we had half of our wooden storm windows (on the paint-sealed windows) down for stripping and repainting. Our neighbors' little boy is playing on the sidewalk. Sometimes the moments they capture in these street view shots tell a story.
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