I just spent a couple hours reading up on the tech news I missed while on a vacation back to the city of McKinney, so here is a wrapup of some of the goings-on I found.

Pandora Might Be Closing Up. This sucks. Pandora is a pretty cool online music player with a twist. You put in some of your favorite songs / artists and it spits out other stuff you might like based on a number of variables. It actually does an in-depth analysis of the type of songs you like and gets you very good results. Its not only a tool to use occasionaly it is my player of choice at work, or school, or wherever I don’t have my mp3 player. I know they have been in trouble for a while, but this is not cool.

How will men die in 2008? If you guys know Nate, you will probably agree with me that he is going to be the one jumping into the shallow water. (47 deaths, WOW)

Just loaded up ESPN.com which already wins for most annoying website change when it added auto-play to its flash videos. They just added one of those pre-index page full screen ads where you have to click to continue. Your not gonna get it every time, and this is the first time I saw it tonight…. but what a waste. I now remember why I frequent the sports blogs like deadspin, or the local stuff.

Last thing to note from this week is NBC’s coverage of the Olympics. Overall I give them props. Much better than last time around when we didn’t see the events we wanted, and there wasn’t any access at all to the smaller sports. Their internet push is decent, and I have seen a good range of sports during primetime and in the AM. Later I will comment on the design aspects of it, they have done some cool things involving technology and overall branding, but two things I want to comment about that have cheapened it for me.

1) The non-stop (seriously every commercial break) push for either a) the soundtrack to download online or b) the opening ceremony dvd / michael phelps dvd . Apparently even though they have this great internet delivery device they still want that extra buck so the push this seriously non-stop.

2) From Pops : The close-up of Michael Phelps after his epic 8th medal win. During the national anthem instead of giving the whole team some TV time, you got a huge picture of his face for the length of the song. Eh. Focus on the other three that contributed to a gold.