So ESPN.com is one of my favorite sites online. It's got an amazing array of writers, including Hunter Thompson and David Halberstam, and what seems like an unlimited budget to do whatever they want. Unfortunately, their Web developers have loaded up the site with so many bells and whistles that it often crashes my computer. Considering I have a top of the line iMac and a halfway decent (free) dial-up service, I should be lucky.

They got animated bobble-head dolls popping out of pages, ad banners galore, those little tabs that let you choose parts of the site (which always tries to lead you to the stuff you have to pay for by the way) and links galore. But all of that stuff just screws up my computer. Which is one of my pet peeves about Online life- Web Developers who throw as much crap as possible on a Web sites just because they can. Just because they all have T3 lines doesn't necessarily mean we all do. Isn't one of the basic rules of Web design & development not to overwhelm the site with so many bells & whistles that people can't download a page? Even I know that rule and I don't know that much about Web Development. Or maybe it's not a rule, but it should be a rule.

Even worse, the site seems to have some sort of connection now to the MSN network. I don't know whether it's just because I use Hotmail, which MSN seems to think means I want to be part of their stupid MSN network, and some cookie is reading it and adding all that gibberish. Or, it could be that somehow Disney and MicroSoft are now in cahoots over something and that's even scarier. Kind of like Stalin hooking up with Hitler during WWII (well, not that bad, but you get my point). What sign it is of the upcoming apocolypse I don't know......