You want to know what really irritates me? When I go to a Web site where the entire page is laid out in a table, and the page display is delayed for an extra 10 or 15 seconds because the browser can’t connect to an ad server. The real content on the page has already loaded, but the stupid ad server is so bogged down that I have to wait and look at a blank browser in order to see an ad for something I know I won’t buy. What a drag.

I’d like to commend Dave Adams over at The Stuffed Dog for his attention to the important issue of urban sprawl. He continually finds great resources with information on sprawl, and ways to combat it. Nice work.

You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. The Senators who prostituted themselves to the health care industry by helping to block the legislation that would allow patients to sue their HMOs are getting a nice pat on the back from their clients in the form of “thank you” ads on TV. Isn’t that nice?

Salon has an article today about increased monitoring of computer activity of employees at many companies. While the thought of my employer logging which Web sites I visit or reading my email is pretty disturbing, it certainly wouldn’t surprise me if they did it. I do think that employers should have to disclose to their employees whether they monitor their communications. The author of the article says, “anyone with an e-mail address knows it’s next to impossible to keep your in-box free of dirty jokes and sexually explicit JPEGs.” I’ve gotten my fair share of dirty jokes over the years (although not so many any more), but I’ve never received a sexually explicit JPEG via email. Maybe I hang out with the wrong crowd. In this day and age, there are so many free email services out there that using your work address for personal email is just foolish. Just sign up for Yahoo! Mail and exchange all your personal email there, it’s a lot safer. And if you’re checking out porn sites on the job, well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Someday, we’ll probably all have a Qubit, or something much like it.

Thanks to the work of Justin Mason, you can download a Palm version of this site every day at the following URL: http://www.clubi.ie/jmason/scoops/iSilo/RC3.

Extreme programming is an interesting methodology for application development. I don’t agree with all of the suggested practices, but it certainly sounds like an interesting starting point for building high quality applications rapidly. I particularly like the idea of writing unit tests before writing the actual functionality to be tested.

Gateway has announced a thin server product starting at $1,299. It runs Linux, of course.

Connectivity to this site is awfully slow today, due to lingering problems from the big Pair move yesterday. They’re posting the status of repairs on their support notices page, but all I can do is wait. (Despite these problems, I think that the Pair move actually went really well, and their service overall has been excellent as long as I’ve been a customer.)

Perhaps before Microsoft broke all of the laws the DOJ suggests that they broke, they should have checked out this handy list of simple rules you can follow to keep from violating antitrust statutes.