I was at work sometime this summer when I found out that Google Street View had documented my hometown of San Diego. First I looked up the downtown office I worked – alas, they stopped just half a block short of the building where I was sitting at that moment, trying to find a virtual image of my office building instead of doing work.

If Google hadn’t driven by my office, there was no way they would have gone all the way to my house, on a tiny side street 40 minutes north of downtown.

But there was my house, with my mom’s car out in front! I scrolled down the street trying to find my own car, looking for my own little stamp on this pixelated version of the world.

Now, Street View has made it all the way to Northwestern, even trespassing on campus property in efforts to snap a photo of Norris University Center and the library. Just a few students and other people were caught by Google’s cameras: Judging from the empty campus and the T-shirts everyone’s wearing, they must have taken the pictures during summer.

Which is really too bad – think of how much more fun it would have been if they drove down Campus Drive at 11:50 a.m. during the school year, snapping photo after photo of herds of people. We all could have spent hours scrolling frame by frame, trying to distinguish friends and ourselves in the pixels.

I’m sure Google purposely photographs crowded areas early in the mornings, or other times when nobody’s around. People clutter up the images, and create problems stringing the pictures together. There are countless Web sites with Street View screenshots of headless or half-faced people caught between frames.

Those little quirky things caught by Google’s cameras are the best part of Street View. It’s cool to find your house, but even cooler if you see your neighbor checking his mail in his boxers.

That’s why there are so many Web sites devoted to Street View shots of girls sunbathing and people leaving adult video stores.

(You might start at Mashable.com)

Maybe I’d feel differently if I were actually the one preserved in pixel posterity.

But right now I’m disappointed that, in my continuous moving around from school to internship back to school, I seem to have just missed Google each time they’ve hit up a city where I live. You can’t even see my Evanston apartment on Street View – they were doing construction on the road right in front of my building, and you can barely see a corner of the roof before the road jumps forward 100 yards.

So if your apartment or dorm is in clear view, or if, better yet, you yourself are walking down the street, consider yourself privileged. Think about the odds of you walking down that street at exactly that moment. And now your picture is up forever!

Hopefully those pesky private property concerns won’t get in the way, and the university will let the campus images remain online. It might have to wait until Reading Week, but I definitely plan to canvass our virtual campus, searching corner-to-corner for anyone I know, or any funny-looking people I don’t know.