Ugh. Sick today. Stupid germs. Ah well, I guess this will give me some time to catch up on my sleep. Maybe do some reading. I've got that Agile Modelling book on my shelf...

On the bright side, at least I have Slashdot to keep me company. Oh, and my girlfriend's damned cat. Oh look...there it goes playing amongst the speaker wires again. yay.

Ugh. Damn, are these MSDN banners annoying. I am not a Windows developer. I have no desire to become a Windows developer. Any attempt to sell me an MSDN subscription will fail, no matter how many flash-ridden onMouseOver ads you show me. The first time I saw these new ads, I said, "Wow! That's cool in an annoying sort of way!"

Now, after a week or two of them constantly appearing at the top of the page, and unfurling every time I move my mouse up to the menu bar, I'm about ready to hunt someone down and make them eat their damned ad impressions.

Why is it that modern advertising reminds me of some frat party compention gone out of control? The competition is not to see who can attract the most customers, but who can design the largest, most gaudy, most annoying advert known to man, in the hopes that we will all buy the product, if only so they'll stop shoving it down our throats!

"Subscribe and you can turn it off", you might say. Which is true. It's not CmdrTaco et al.'s jobs to tailor the site to my peculiarities, especially when I haven't ponied up the dough to make it worth their while. But, this rant isn't about turning them off.

What this rant IS about is my incredulity that someone, somewhere would ever think, "These ads aren't big and annoying enough. I think we'll increase our sales if we make them expand to fill the screen whenever the user moves their mouse over them." Because the problem is obviously that their ads aren't big enough to catch our collective attention.

Right.

Ok, I'm done ranting for now. Must really get some work done today.