I’ve never had any dealings with the folks at Etymotic, and while I’m sure their headphones are impressive, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing when I saw this ad on another Web site:

The ety8 headphones might sound amazing for all I know, but they look too much like big, clunky earrings for me to ever be comfortable wearing them out in public. When I saw them my first thought was of Star Trek, and not in a good way - if I geek like me gets a negative impression from that, then on the street it could only be worse.

It’s kind of ridiculous that the leading MP3 players (iPod, Zune, Sansa) still don’t have Bluetooth built-in - yet with Bluetooth designs like this, maybe it’s not so surprising…

So the lads in Radiohead decide to do something crazy: release a full album online, and allow people to decide what they should pay for it. That’s right, you can download their album and pay nothing for it. Ballsy concept, but it’s massively flawed in one way: there’s no way to listen to the songs on the album first! If you’re going to let people pay whatever they want, shouldn’t they be able to hear what they’re buying first? It seems rather bizarre that they’d not have some sort of embedded player to let me hear what I’m about to buy. I decided to go ahead and pay 1 British Pound for the album (about $2.50 CAD) since I had no idea what I was getting - if I could have heard it first, I would have paid closer to the price of a CD (around $12 CAD). I tried to check out, but their system demands the registration of an account, my address, and even my mobile phone number. What the…? Sorry Radiohead, you’ve made the process too frustrating - I don’t want your album that much.

I’m a long-time fan and user of ACDSee, a photo viewing/editing/cataloguing program, and the company decided to profile me as one of their users. It’s just me and the snowboarding guy (another new profile) amongst all the scrap-booking moms. Sweet. ACDSee has the profiles as part of their shopping cart system, so unfortunately I can’t link directly to it - you need to go to the product page then click on profiles and mine should be the first.