So, we were just reading the newswires, and came across this story of how one of Yahoo's co-founders, Jerry Yang, has been named CEO. Well, "yahoo" for him . . . we guess. Perhaps he'll help trickle down some better business practices. Or solve one weird and annoying one in particular.

Normally this announcement wouldn't be much of a blip on our radar . . . but we subscribe to the aforementioned newswire through our Yahoo mail. Which, as of about a week ago has been crazy with advertisements. Not spam -- we mean that all over our webmail screen there are now flash ads and other types of adverts embedded (see above for an example; ads vary depending on what you're doing with the web mail). So this personnel announcement got our dander up, because Yahoo is on our s-list right now.

The ads are wholly annoying. Should that be happening? Because, c'mon -- we PAY for the email . . .AT&T/Yahoo is our DSL/email provider; since we're contributing that $20 or whatver per month, we don't know why we should be subject to looking at invasive flashing ads and micro ads all over our formerly pristine email page.

We looked for contact info to ask about it; a phone number was a mere four clicks away. Ugh. Called the line. Autovoicedetector failed to get our account number right. We keyed it in. Then we were offered three choices, none of which fit our question (not cancelling, not upgrading, not wondering about our bill . . .) Then we were put on hold. Five minutes turned to 10, then 15 . . .