Anyhoo (yes "anyway" was already taken).

And in this week's programme, we'll be discovering fire; millennia after everyone else. It's all Murdoch's fault.

No, really, it is. Hotmail had some Flash-based Sky banner that made my CPU go up to 100% and sit there. Yes, this is an old computer, but for some reason I've noticed a similar effect of Flash adverts within Firefox on far newer, more capacious computers. There's just something about the coding that hogs everything it can, meaning the computer doesn't function nearly as well as it should. Given the effect is so bad that typing within Hotmail becomes problematic (the lag is so great either the thought must stop or one is half a paragraph in before the string "they ==n" appears, which also disrupts thought) and trying to use Multimap is simply impossible; the ads load before the map tiles, so the maps tiles either never load, or half load in a jumble, which is none too useful. Am I alone in wondering how it came to pass that a site accepts so much advertising of a nature which impairs the function of the site that the site becomes all-adverts-no-function?

So what did I do? Finally get round to investigating ad-blockers. Yes, I know admitting to only doing this now makes me rather slow on the uptake and undermines my sneering stance on Stephen Fry's latest Guardian offering (abridged: Get Firefox to play with skins), but I've not really noticed they ads until now. About the only that seep through were those *clicks fingers trying to remember* (why do people, and by people I mean me, do that?) not Fry and Laurie, not Cosmo and Dibbs, oh blast, the Spac... er Peep Show people, you know, Put-Upon and Oddly-Quite-Cute, not Armstrong and Miller (does anybody watch that? And should I be worried that I can happy miss the first half of Ugly Betty by watching HIGNFY and not miss terribly much? I could probably miss the whole thing bar one Dulux ad and still understand the plot. Or should I be worried that the highlight of my evening tends to be flipping back for QI, and this on a Friday night?)... Anyway, Mitchell and Webb, who did those Mac ads that made you ponder Linux, they've crept in, though not very deeply in. The only others to break the surface are anything from Orange because I already have an Orange phone, so read it before realising it's not aimed at me, and those infuriating vocal smiley banners, which are trigger the FOAD-ometer (or for the more sensitive readers, the *O&D-ometer).

Continuing annoyance: remembering to go back and fish out the misspelt words from the custom dictionary (helpfully called persdict.dat) in Firefox, which one accidentally added because "Add to dictionary" sits right beneath the selection of correct words in the right click menu. Which muppet thought having what amounts to the overwrite button right next to the corrections would be a good idea? Of course to make it even better it only gets updated when Firefox closes and read when Firefox starts, so one has to remember to do it in the gap between. Of course by the time Firefox gets shut down the errant word has been completely forgotten, which may explain some of the contents of persdict on this computer. And yes, I lost an n in 'millennia'.

While wording, new word for the, er, post: Enfilade. From the French for 'skewer'. A linear feature, such as a shotgun arrangement of a suite of rooms forming a grand vista through all, or attack along the axis of an enemy position, so from the flanks.

Anyhoo,