The entire movie player is wrapped in the advertisers messaging on top of a commercial slot. Also not a bad way to showcase the ads.

But the weird and wasted part is that about every other commercial they’re showing is for… Lost. How is that helpful? I’m already here and captive.

Don’t even know what the scar looks like yet, as it’s quite sealed up. I get my first look on Wed when I followup with the surgeon. Good times.

That is all. Xoxo, Erik

• I am still irked by the cable situation: You can have the iPod control cable, or the traffic cable, but not both. What’s up with that, TomTom?
• Crappy FM transmission to the radio. Admittedely, this is an almost universally sucky problem unless you live on Mars, but in the bay area, and anywhere with a lot of overhead wires (electric bus lines, in particular) its essentially unusable. For folks without an aux port to their car stereo, it’s pretty much the only solution, and its sad that it doesn’t work.
• Now the really bad news: The connecting via aux port is bad too. I recently bought a new car with an aux stereo port, but there is a ton of high pitch over the 1/8th inch stereo plug (and I tried another cable, just to be sure). I’m now plugging my iPod directly in to my car stereo, and letting the TomTom’s internal speakers give out overly chatty directions. So much for allowing the TomTom / iPod control, and allowing the TomTom to act as a hub.
• Finally, disregard of traffic conditions. It’s easy enough to see 101 is a mess on my iPhone, but for some reason the TomTom can’t or doesn’t care. Using approximately the same traffic information, it seems to think that I can squeeze a 1.5 hour drive into 45 minutes. Rerouting? Why bother. Those solid red and yellow lines all over 101 can’t possibly mean a delay!

So, in conclusion (for now) I won’t recommend this device to friends. It works well enough getting me from A to B and I don’t intend to replace it anytime soon, but I’ll definitely borrow a friend’s Garmin or other device for a week next time I am in the market.
I’m getting a lot of referral traffic from GPSTrackLog, which has compiled a list of reviews for the TomTom 920T (and every other GPS device on the market), so definitely check them out for potentially more balanced reviews

Wow, I can’t believe I didn’t notice this when it happened. Recently, it was “discovered” that the Okami Wii cover art contains an… abnormality. Amaterasu is barking a translucent IGN watermark. Yep, that’s right, they stole their own artwork off IGN’s web page. I guess the cover art staff could not be bothered to actually use press packs from the original release of the game. (Read More)

As a designer, I am vicariously amused and mortified for Capcom’s agency or design staff. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been rushed to deadline and just grabbed a photo off the web as a placeholder– always with the intention of replacing it with licensed, royalty free, or otherwise appropriate and usable images in before the thing goes out the door to a client. In my case, it usually doesn’t matter much since the contexts are design specs, and either not a final product, or final but web-ui based so any photographic stuff or text will almost always be populated on the fly.

But, you never know what will happen to a document once it’s electronic and not solely in your control. Our team recently put together a tasty little deck that was only intended to help communicate what we were working on one-on-one, with other folks internally. So tasty, in fact, that it was passed up the chain until it became The Presentation used at a Very Public Event. There was a fun, last minute scramble to scrub our once-internal deck of unlicensed art and inside jokes.

In conclusion: Always throw FPO on everything, as a not so subtle reminder to yourself that your work isn’t finished. Make sure you have an alert editor on hand to double check everything before you ship it out the door. And finally, to everyone else: Lighten the hell up.

I’m a bit brain fried right now after spending 2 weeks in a cave with our amazing design team* to produce the presentation shown by Ari Balogh (Yahoo!’s new CTO) at today’s Web 2.0 keynote, so I’ll just link over to Cody Simms’ short and sweet post about the project.

*Particular shout outs to Hans Kim, Mary Choi, Nicole Gregory, Jonas Hinn, and our fearless and truly visionary leader Micah Laaker. (and wade. and chris. and ash. and Denis Roy, our PR guy. And tons of other folks.) I couldn’t be prouder to be at Yahoo! working with such talented people.

Updates:
Jono is excited by the prospect of not answering the question “So, what ya workin’ on?” with the answer “I’d tell you but I’d have to kill you.”

Max is similarly excited, and found the keynote video:

Last night a 27-year-old man was shot and killed while driving on the 280. This is the second freeway killing in less than a week. 37-year-old Luis Solari of Richmond was driving his Honda car at around 6 p.m. going southbound between the Alemany and Monterey boulevards exits when the shooting occurred. So far no arrests have been made, but according to the Gate:

San Francisco police Sgt. Neville Gittens said the suspect vehicle was a small red four-door car of unknown make. He said initial reports that the suspect’s car was gold or tan were incorrect.
Two children were also in the car Solari was driving, a seven- and eight-year-old. None of the kids were injured. Investigators are still trying to figure out what sparked the rush hour attack.

(Read More)

Gps solution for beetle, originally uploaded by erikgibb.

I bought a new VW Bug this weekend (photos to come) … in the mean time, I’m posting a fun DIY hack for my GPS.

The Beetle’s windscreen is too far away for the GPS, and the dashboard is just a bit too curved and a bit too matte for the suction cup to stick. I attached a 3/4" dowel to a bell jar plastic lid with epoxy, wrapped the dowel with a couple of rubberbands to prevent spinning, and the suction cup stays attached to the lid nicely.

I can touch the GPS with my index finger while my hands are on the wheel.