Queensland Beach is located on Nova Scotia’s South Shore, about a half an hour’s drive west of Halifax. It’s arguably the most popular of St. Margaret’s Bay’s ten beaches, in large part, because you have to pay to access its nearest neighbour, Hubbards Beach, (shown below) when the campground by the same name is open.
Queensland Beach is a public, lifeguard-supervised beach in the “summer,” which can last anywhere from a few minutes, to three or sometimes even four fabulous weeks in Nova Scotia. Not more.
You can find its lifeguard hours (A.K.A. when NOT to take the dog to the shore) and water temperatures at the Nova Scotia Lifeguard Service and tide times and heights for Hubbards, Nova Scotia at tide-forecast.com, or, for everything else that’s going on in the village, drop in to see the girls and do some shopping at Lola’s Landing just a hop, skip and a jump down the road towards Hubbards.
Prior to becoming The Graphic Language Company, I called this copywriting business, Orchestrated Intelligence, and its tag line was “the graphic language company.” Trying to spell orchestratedintelligence.com for someone (graphiclanguage is tough enough!) would have been nigh on impossible, so since I lived a stone’s throw from Queensland Beach it made perfect sense to me to be andrew@queenslandbeach.com.
I bartered the building of queenslandbeach.com shown above (OMG that font is so horrible!) back in 1997, with a Halifax, Nova Scotia start-up called SolutionInc in exchange for some copywriting for them and their early clients.
Google wasn’t a verb, barely even a proper noun and doing no evil (at that time), and SEO still stood for Sewerage Enforcement Officer. The “as seen in Frank Magazine” graphic in the lower right hand corner of the screenshot above is there because I had won a contract with the City of Halifax to replicate the official, custom-bound, city hall guestbook and Frank thought it worth pointing out that the mayor had paid me with multiple swipes of his credit card. I can’t remember why that was but it was weird.
The site had a Beach Postcards function that allowed you to choose a vintage, South Shore, Nova Scotia beach photo, add a message and it would e-mail your “custom designed” greetings “from the beach” to anyone, so long as the person you were sending it to had an e-mail address. It was state-of-the-art social media in the days when modems were screeching at 14.4 Kbps, Zuck was 14 years old and not everyone had an e-mail addy.
Anyway, no one could figure out what the term orchestrated intelligence meant (including me if I’m honest), or why someone was professing to be conducting it on a dead end road in the backwoods of Nova Scotia, so eventually everything became “Graphic Language” and before you ask, because almost everyone does, although Canadians are known for swearing a lot, that wasn’t the reason.