I’ve successfully removed my Ultimate Ears MetroFi 220 earphones thousands of times in the few months I’ve had them. Today, however, I botched the operation.

The whole thing transpired at the Gizmodo office in New York City this afternoon. Right when I removed my earphones I knew something was wrong. I quickly looked down at the cords in my fist and saw one earbud’s driver, naked, without its protective rubber sleeve. My fear tightened into a knot in my stomach.

Without thinking I tried to pinch the plastic cup out with my nails, but this only pushed it deeper into my ear canal. At this point I started to panic a little—I could feel the piece of plastic deep in my ear and was experiencing that unique discomfort that comes with having a foreign object in your body when you don’t want it there.

Determined, I kept pinching at it with my fingers, but that only drove it deeper and deeper. My imagination turned against me. “What if I can’t get this thing out,” I wondered. “What if this ruins my hearing,” I thought. I tried pushing on the back of my ear, where it connects to the skull, hoping to get up behind the earbud and push it out from the inside. That didn’t work either.

At this point I could hardly even reach the plastic piece with my finger. As you can see in the photograph above, only a sliver could be seen peeking out of my ear canal, like a crescent moon.

Through all of this, I tried to keep the problem discreet, but eventually I had to admit to myself that I wasn’t going to get this fucker out by myself. Reluctantly, I let the two Gizmodo interns in on my shameful secret.

I proposed the idea that we fish it out with a ballpoint pen, but they quickly dismissed that (apparently the earbud was pressing against the problem solving part of my brain, because this was clearly a terrible idea). Intern Kevin leaped into action and after some rooting around in the office returned with a pair of plastic tweezers.

As he bent my head to the side, he said something about having shaky hands, but at that point I was hardly lucid. I felt the plastic push deeper for a moment, and then felt it wiggle side to side for a little longer. Then, finally, I felt my ear canal breath for the first time in minutes that had seemed like hours. The earbud was removed!

So let this be a lesson to you all: treat your earphones gently. Most of the time it’s great that they fit so snugly in your ear. But some of the time that perfect fit can be a nightmare.

Posted via email from Robert’s View

During the Winter Olympics, we’ve seen more than our share of athletic action sequences—complex motions broken into stills. For this week’s Shooting Challenge, you’ll be recreating the effect in the real world (or anywhere else you like).

The Challenge

Shoot an action sequence of any sort.

The Method

You’ll want to set your camera on a tripod and shoot in burst mode with a minimum of 3-5FPS. Then you’ll combine these images in photo editing software.

The Rules

1. Submissions need to be your own.
2. Photos need to be taken the week of the contest. (No portfolio linking or it spoils the “challenge” part.)
3. Explain, briefly, the equipment, settings and technique used to snag the shot.
4. Email submissions to contests@gizmodo.com.
5. Include 800px wide image AND 2560×1600 sized in email. (The 800px image is the one judged, so feel free to crop/alter the image for wallpaper-sized dimensions.)

Send your best entries by Sunday, February 28th at 11PM Eastern to contests@gizmodo.com with “Action Sequence” in the subject line. Save your files as JPGs or GIFs, and use a FirstnameLastnameAction.jpg (800px) and FirstnameLastnameActionWALLPAPER.jpg (2560px) naming conventions. Include your shooting summary (camera, lens, ISO, etc) in the body of the email.

[Lead photo by Marcio Abe]

Posted via email from Robert’s View

Each year the World Economic Forum at Davos holds number of technology focused sessions. Last year I moderated a high profile discussion about the next digital experience. This year, Loic Le Meur is hosting a discussion on the growth of social networks.

Participants include Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn, Greylock), Owen Van Natta (MySpace), Gina Bianchini (Ning), Evan Williams (Twitter) and George Colony (Forrester Research) and Don Tapscott (nGenera). Randi Zuckerberg, Jeff Jarvis, Russian super-investor Yuri Milner and others also dropped by to participate.

The room is packed, standing room only, and bursting at the seams. These guys are popular in Silicon Valley. Bring them to Davos, Switzerland and everyone wants to hear what they have to say.

Each panelist is giving a short 3-4 minute talk on how they frame the interesting issues around social networking (Hoffman says, for example, that privacy is only an issue for old people, young people don’t care.). We have videos of most of these comments and will embed them below as we process them..

Seven of the 15 most traffic sites in the world are social sites, Colony says in his intro. Only 17% of online users will visit a social site each day, though, including mobile usage. This varies widely by age – 27% of those 25 and under will visit a social site each day.

Below are clips from Hoffman, Van Natta, Bianchini, Williams and Zuckerberg:

Posted via email from Robert’s View

Dianne Annunziato is accusing a Dell technician of becoming a virtual peeping Tom during a support call by remotely turning on her webcam.

“First, the technician started asking me what time of day it was,” she said.

When she looked at her screen a minute later, Annunziato said she could see herself in a little box.

“He turned on the webcam; he never asked, ‘May I? Can I?’ Not a word, he just turned it on,” she said.

All I can say is, if I was in the woman’s place during this call, the technician would have seen some naked adult content regardless of the time of day. Fortunately, the Annunziato was wearing clothes, but she was quick to point out the problem with all of this to the technician’s supervisor.

“I said, ‘I could have been sitting here undressed,’ and the supervisor laughed, and I just sat there in shock,” she said.

So far, the technician’s side of the story has not been heard—but Dell claims that they are currently investigating the incident. [NBCdfw via Consumerist]

Posted via email from Robert’s View