You might want to look up what a merkin is before you use it as an abbreviation again...

And you'd think that someone who claims to have worked on something relating to medicine would know that doctors have MDs.

Right now I have a combo of Ghostery, NoScript, and AdBlock. A few months ago I used DoGood (http://dogoodhq.com/) which replaces ads with thoughtful messages or sometimes ads for eco-friendly companies. Too bad they haven't updated their extension to work with the latest version of FF.

agnostic --> analog ?

My recommendation would be Time Management for System Administrators (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596007836). It has lots of little tips and short anecdotes.