IT TURNS OUT THAT the Google van rolled through the East Beaches when we were working in the neighbourhood on Kingmount Park Road, and they caught us on film! You can easily identify the Green Apple truck, and even though the software censors have blurred their faces, you can still recognize John, Victor, and Carlos. Ha! Hey, what are you doing there? This isn’t a coffee break! Get back to work! I’m watching you! Just kidding, these guys are real hard workers. I’m sure that the in-house pixel-pushers at Google just Photoshop’d the heavy equipment out of John’s hands. Yeah, that’s it…
TODAY’S NEWSPAPERS ANNOUNCED that Google Maps has now put its “Street Level” feature online for the City of Toronto. That means that you can enter your own address — or any other GTA address, for that matter — into the text field at maps.google.com, and in addition to ability to see an overhead view of your neighbourhood, you can now drag the little orange icon of a dude from the top left corner of the map onto the street that you want to see in photographs. You can then navigate your way through the city streets, and manipulate the angle of the camera by clicking inside the image and dragging in different directions.
NOW THAT WE’VE POSTED about three dozens entries up here at Green Apple Pie, it’s time to officially launch the blog, wouldn’t you say? If we would have announced it immediately, you may have been disappointed to surf over to the site, only to find it rather sparse. I know that I’m excited for the official launch, so I can finally get some feedback on all of this content that I’ve been uploading for the last hundred days. On Monday morning, we will be sending out our first official e-newsletter, entitled A Slice of Green Apple, which will excerpt articles from the blog and invite readers to click through to learn more. The newsletters themselves will also be archived and accessible online. Here’s a teaser of volume one, issue one, with many more to come. See you in a few!
ALRIGHT, WE’VE UPLOADED ENOUGH content to user accounts on other social media websites, that we feel confident enough to officially blog about it here. We announced our intentions to go two-point-oh a couple of months ago in Virtues and Virtuality, and now we’re making good on our promises. We’ve started to bookmark articles and webpages that we find particularly interesting at Digg; we’ve uploaded lots of portfolio photos of our landscaping work around town at Flickr; and we’ve catalogued the videos that we’ve produced so far, and some that we’ve favourited, on YouTube. And if you don’t want to have to keep checking back at all of these different addresses to see what we’ve been up to lately, just follow us up-to-the-minute on Twitter. I don’t recommend that you have these tweets forwarded to your cellphone, since they will usually only consist of weblinks and 100-character descriptions — unless you use your cellphone to surf the web. Personally, I don’t enjoy squinting, I prefer to look at a large screen back at the office. But either way, stay in touch with Green Apple, and we’ll keep cooking up top-quality eco-content for y’all!
HEY, WHO SAYS THAT I don’t get all filthy on the job like I used to? Since I got tapped to direct communications and ecological initiatives here at Green Apple, I hardly even break into a sweat anymore, except when I’m biking to work and back. But today I got to go out into the field and do dirty deeds. It seems that plastic pylons are prized possessions, because someone — or something — has been picking off our pylons one by one for quite a while now. To combat this phenomenon, I used a skill set that I haven’t had any real need for in the last several years, ever since I was a graffiti artist almost a decade ago. I’m obviously out of practice, because it got pretty messy out there, but at least I got the job done: I labeled the orange cones that we use to alert traffic to the presence of our heavy equipment and other building materials. Now pylon pilferers will think twice before disappearing our property, because our logo announces our presence. And when you see the two-tone GA logo around town, you’ll know who’s working the earth behind the house — your friendly neighbourhood landscapers at Green Apple.
