3D Thursday: Hydro pole hole

In advance of the upcoming reconstruction of Gladstone Avenue starting this summer, Hydro Ottawa is replacing the hydro poles along Gladstone from Cartier to Bank. Here, five buckets hoisted by three cherry picker trucks are holding workers as they anchor the fixtures for a replacement pole at O'Connor:

It's a tricky job, because they need to put the new pole in right next to the old one, dodging the wires along the way. To do this, they need to dig a hole for the new pole, using a big 'badger' vacuum truck. I took a 3D photo looking down into one of these holes:

Source photos for the 3D images:
Left, Right

In case you're wondering how deep those wooden poles go beneath the ground, here's a pole on Wellington West in Hintonburg where they dug out underneath the sidewalk, leaving the pole and sidewalk in place:

Since I know you're wondering, construction on Gladstone isn't supposed to start until mid-July at the earliest.

[Tune in on Thursdays at noon for a new 3D image. View the 3D label for other posts with 3D images. 3D FAQ]

Minto Park Sale tomorrow: BBQ, Plant Sale, e-Waste drop off and more!

The annual Minto Park Sale is tomorrow (Saturday, June 15, 2013) from 8am to 2pm in Minto Park on Elgin Street.

A new record of 75 tables have been booked by people selling their household items, crafts, art, etc.

The CCCA will be renewing its suite of popular activities, including the electronic waste drop-off, where you can bring your broken/unwanted electronics to be safely recycled without charge--also raising funds for the community! A full list of what can be dropped off is on the Recycle Your Electronics website. Let's see if we can collect more old Centretown electronic junk than we did at our last e-waste drop off in October!

The CCCA barbecue will be back again, with yours truly as grillmaster, and I'll be firing up two grills this year! In addition to the hotdogs and veggie dogs of the last four years, we'll also have sausages from the Glebe Meat Market, and there'll be grilled onions this year to top them off! Service starts at 10am.

There will also be two specialized CCCA activities in Minto Park during the sale, the annual plant sale to raise funds for the CCCA Tree Fund...

...and a bake sale to raise funds for the Minto Park Games Tables project.

We'd greatly appreciate your help with any of these initiatives, even if you just show up for an hour or two, to help sell and serve the dogs and to help promote the community association and recruit new members.

If you're not into that, at least come out to the sale to get some great finds!

Note: the annual Minto Park Sale is organized by Councillor Diane Holmes, in whose office I work.

[Look for more one-photo posts under the label Singles]

Google Charles View

Google Street View first launched in Ottawa in October 2009, using photos taken in the spring of that year.

In summer of 2012, they came back to take more photos, and these started to go live this past winter. This time around they used branded cars so you knew they were Google Street view. I saw them a few times myself, like here on Wellington Street in late April 2012:

When you view that location in Street View, it does say that the imagery is from April 2012, but clearly from a different day since the weather and traffic are both different.

However, there were some other spots where I saw (and hastily photographed) the Google Street View car where the corresponding images also captured me. Here's the Google Street View car on Gladstone Avenue at Bell Street:

And here's the corresponding photo of me in Street View, a few seconds before I noticed the Google car was there:

Here's another sighting, on Kent Street around Gloucester and Laurier on a mid-April morning in 2012. I had chased it for a couple blocks, tying to get close enough to photograph it. The only two photos I did manage to get are pretty blurry:

I had to get to work, though, and it caught a photo of me peeling off at the Laurier Segregated Bike Lane:

But by chasing it for a couple blocks, I had inadvertently managed to get my picture taken a number times by Google Street View.

It gets better: because I was chasing the Street View car but never quite catching up to it, when you click on the arrow in the above Street View shot to move the view south, I'm still in the same part of the frame for a number of shots until here:

Fun ;)

While we're on the topic of maps, check out the City's new GeoOttawa Maps. These replace the less-user-friendly eMaps, and have a number of new features, including:

• Click "I want to..." at the top and then "View the historical air photos" to see aerials of Ottawa as far back as 1958! (Some of which were used by the URBSite author for this recent post)
• Click on a property to bring up a property report, including a link to the zoning for the site
• Click the little yellow street view icon on the left above the zoom bar and then click a spot on the map to go straight to that location in Google Street View (although it takes you to a limited-feature version of Google Street View hosted by the City)