I accept fully that many sites, including some I run, need advertising to operate. My Wi-Fi Networking News site has Flash ads on it right now, for instance. But I am, unfortunately, finding that Flash ads are now frequently highly intrusive even on sites I trust. They cycle endlessly. They use visual pows to knock my eyeballs on the floor. They play audio without my permission.

Since Flash is not under my control, I have to take a stronger action and use FlashBlock, a simple Firefox plug-in that loads Flash, but doesn't play it, putting a replacement symbol in its spot that, when hovered over, changes to a play button. This means that I'm back in control of my attention, sound, and browser.

If it catches on, it's another reason for IE users to switch to Firefox, and it will probably reduce the response rate on Flash ads, thus moving

A few weeks ago, I wrote about on the 10th anniversary of my starting a hosting and Web development company that I was finally getting out of the business of hosting domains, email, blogs, and Web sites for colleagues and friends.

I'm finally done. (Almost.)

All the email is gone; my wife's account was the last to migrate to Fastmail.fm.

Almost all the domains are gone: just a handful of ones that I need a little more control over, and I'm going to move them off my office server soon enough.

Almost all the Web sites are gone: one remains with very low traffic that's several years out of date (it's an archive of the best online fiction, but suspended a while ago) because it's an .org and it's taken my friend Jeff a while to jump through weird hoops to move a .org domain's DNS.

What it means,