Month: July 2012

The Oatmeal Rules! Lawyers… the ones we hear about anyway… not so much

I’m sure you’ve already heard about this item, where the creator of “The Oatmeal” (Matthew Inman) executed a wonderful, creative and philanthropic smackdown on a small-minded stereotype-producing lawyer that had originally been retained to represent the interests of someone who was not quite above board in his handling of Intellectual Property – most notably “The Oatmeal” content published without consent.

Check out the full story here (on Philip Defranco’s site – jump to 1:08 if you’re impatient) and the final result here. Basically Matthew took an attempt to abuse our sometimes sorry legal system to not only suppress his gripes about having his work used without his permission, but to also try to extort $20,000 from him on top of that. Then the representing lawyer went hog wild and tried to sue everyone and everything associated with the debacle.

Brilliant and creative people are always such a refreshing breath of fresh air. Especially when they put the smackdown on people who epitomize all that is wrong with an archaic and badly out of touch legal system.

 

Resolution for: Issue with Garmin and sending addresses from Google Maps

So, in response to my query regarding the fact that you can no longer send map coordinates to a Garmin device from Google maps I received:

Dear Marc Bourassa,
Thank you for contacting Garmin International.
Marc, I will be happy to help you. If you are still getting that error message on the Google map site, then try using Mapquest or Bing mapping and it should go through for you. Have a good day.
With Best Regards,
<name removed>
Product Support Specialist
Garmin Mobile Team
Garmin International

With Bing I couldn’t even figure out how to try to send my GPS coordinates. Mapquest worked – be warned that you will want to edit your GPS favorites once you are done with friendly names unless you are OK finding them by address.

So there’s your fix. I don’t see any indication that they think that their software not working with the only worthwhile web mapping program is an issue.

 

Issue with Garmin and sending addresses from Google Maps

I can see from the forums on Garmin’s website that this has been an issue since at least June 30, 2012.

I’ve opened up a support ticket with them that reads as follows:

Trying to send addresses to Garmin Nuvi from google maps via Chrome. Using latest Garmin plugin (it forced me to upgrade from V3.x to V4.x). On the following garmin page:

http://my.garmin.com/locate/savePOI.htm%3faction=redirect&a_key=c6a2af1c9bee6bfbebd2000da4204779&name=Arbraska+Treetop+Trekking&hl=en&lat=44.549625&long=-79.671978&attribution=&province=ON&country=CA&city=Barrie&street=Horseshoe+Valley+Rd+W&streetnum=1101&postcode=L4M+4Y8&phone=7058357600&source=http%253A%252F%252Fmaps.google.com&notes=?in=true&ni=other

I receive this error:

An HTTP 404 Error has occurred.The page you requested does not exist.

I see from the forums that this has been an issue since at least June 30, 2012.

Can you please direct this issue to the team responsible? There were no reasonable choices on the Garmin support web site and it made me select *something* so I selected this category.