iPod Giveaway #7: We Have a Winner

After several days of deliberating, I’m proud to announce that the winner of the Steve Jobs Movie Poster competition is Sean Liew with his exquisite entry “Enemy of the Gates”. Sean’s entry not only showed excellent photo composition skills but unmatched attention to detail as well. There were funnier entries, edgier entries, and more time-consuming entries, but none put it all together like Enemy of the Gates, and that is why Sean is now the proud owner of a new 1 gigabyte iPod Shuffle.

• Honorable mention – humor: “iTrip” and “Dude, Where’s My iPod”, “The Big Woznowski”
• Honorable mention – photo composition: “American History”, “Adaption”, “Nightmare on Pod Street”
• Honorable mention – concept: “Being Steve Jobs”, “Lord of Apple”, “i, Pod”

Below is a slideshow of the top 40 entries. By the way, apologies to any contestant whose bandwidth limit was exceeded by this contest. What can I say? You might want to look into Dreamhost:

So that’s the end of the Mike Industries iPod Creativity competitions… for awhile at least. They’ve all been extremely fun, but the time associated with setting them up, managing them, and picking winners is more than I can spare right now. Maybe in a few months, they’ll be back. Until then, thanks to everyone who has participated.

iPod Giveaway #7: Design a Steve Jobs Movie Poster

Original photo by Norbert Ivanek.Ok, so it’s the day after Christmas and you didn’t get that iPod you wanted. Now’s your opportunity to take matters into your own hands and win one.

The theme of the final Mike Industries iPod Creativity Competition of 2005 is to design a movie poster featuring Steve Jobs. Like all competitions before it, the rules here are loose. Just feature the man we all know and love in a cinematic role, keep your image exactly 418 pixels wide, and insert your entry inline in the comments of this post. Please also give photo credit when appropriate.

There’s a decent chance The Steve will actually see this blog entry so please keep it clean and respectful. Anything overtly offensive will be removed.

This competition will remain open for exactly two weeks and will end at midnight, Sunday, January 8th. The winner will receive a 1GB iPod Shuffle from me, and so will Mike B., the genius who suggested this particular contest.

Remember to keep your images exactly 418 pixels wide (any height is fine) and under about 50k or so in file size. Insert your image into the comments below using code like so:

<img src="http://yoururl.jpg" />

iPod Giveaway #7: Reader’s Choice

First off, apologies for the lack of iPod creativity competitions around here for the last two months. I’ve been a bit busy. I didn’t want to close the year without one final competition though, so tonight I thumbed through all 400 contest suggestions and have come up with a list of six I’d like to do.

Since I can’t seem to decide on one, I’m putting the final six up for a one-day vote. The idea which receives the most votes will be the theme for this final iPod giveaway of 2005… and as always, the person who thought up the theme will win one Shuffle and the person who wins the competition will take home the other.

The Finalists

Steve Jobs Movie Poster

Design a movie poster featuring Steve Jobs and post it as a 418×418 image on this site.

Best Lyric

Post the best one sentence lyric from a song.

iPod Envy

Take a picture of yourself in an urban setting with another object, pretending that it is an iPod.

Best Cover Song

Post a link to the best cover ever performed. That is, one band singing the music of another.

Name That Tune

I post one note of a song and continue to reveal more notes until someone guesses it.

iKu

Best haiku remotely related to iPods wins.

Honorable Mention

This suggestion cannot be voted for but it is my favorite idea of the bunch. “Toban” writes in submission #378:

“Have people send digital video files of themselves eating a food product which is visibly expired. For example, a displayed expiry date on a container of cottage cheese, or mold on, well anything. The most extreme entry wins an ipod. What would you eat for a Free Ipod?”

I love the internet.

Please vote to the right. The polls close at midnight on Wednesday.

December Randoms

Some thoughts from December:

• Head on over to Mark Wubben’s site and get involved with sIFR 3. Mark will be handling primary sIFR 3 development, but I’ll remain involved as spiritual advisor. Also, check out Faruk’s new FACE CSS technique. I haven’t used it but it looks eyebrow-raising.
• If you use a Mac and do any amount of CSS design, you must check out XyleScope. I used it early on in its beta life, but upon downloading version 1.1.5, I can say that it’s one of the best pieces of web development/design software around. Inline, on-the-fly CSS editing. Ahhhhhhh.
• Intuit has apparently started mailing unsolicited CDs of TurboTax to people. I just got mine this week. You just enter a code when you install it and your card gets charged. Although this is obviously a bit wasteful from an environmental standpoint, it’s a pretty effective sales tactic. I now have a physical CD in my possession, I know I’m going to need it, so there is a 100% chance I will end up using it. I might even do my taxes early now. Hooray for unsolicited CDs in the mail!
• Mike Industries hit a new personal record on Wednesday with 70,000 page views thanks to this slashdotting of sIFR by “Commander Taco”. Honestly, I didn’t even want to read the thread because I figured that Flash plus Slashdot would equal total lunacy, but I have to hand it to the Slashdot community… it was pretty even-handed. Any moronic remarks were generally met with reason and RTFAs.
• The great Nokia N70 experiment has failed. I’m sticking with my Treo for now. I just can’t deal with keys made for hobbits.
• I went to a concert in Seattle this weekend and The Wrens were the last band to play. They were okay, but they did do something on stage I had never seen before. The singer picked up his cell phone between songs, dialed a number, and then sat down on stage. The rest of the band then began into a song and the rhythm guitarist held his own cell phone up to the pickup on his electric guitar. Then, the singer sang through his own phone, over to the guitarist’s phone, in through the guitar pickup, and out the speakers. Pretty interesting.
• Woohoo! Danni won Survivor. How many times has Hefner called already?
• Firefox 1.5 continues to puzzle me. Aside from some unexplainable bugs related to its new handling of the overflow property, I just found out that it spits out errors when encountering the underscore hack. The underscore hack is probably my all-time favorite CSS hack and I much prefer it to the valid-but-much-more-verbose “* HTML hack”. I’m pretty sure the W3C specs say to ignore any CSS properties that the browser doesn’t understand, but instead, Firefox 1.5 reports errors. Ugh.