Webpages with sound

I can't think of many things that bother me more than websurfing in the middle of the night when the family is asleep and surfing over to a page that has sound on it. I went to ABC.com just now, and I was greeted with a blasting rendition of a Hanes commercial. What really hacked me off is that the volume of the page was in no way related to any of the media players I have installed on my computer. Just to make sure, I fired up each of the players and each one was playing at a reasonable level. To make matters worse, the microscopic pause button below the video doesn't actually work with the commercials. It only works with the ABC content that comes on after the commercials. Stupid, stupid, stupid. There's nothing I hate more than software that doesn't allow you to control your own computer.

Speaking of software that doesn't let you control your own computer, my rant of the day is about Real Networks Realplayer. What a freaking joke. I wanted to play last night's David Letterman monologue from CBS.com (which, by the way, looks like you accidentally surfed to GMC.com due to the size of the ad at the top of the page). I've been using IE7 as my browser, but the overly sensative security "features" won't let me play embedded video with WMP. So, not being in the mood to mess with it, I fired up Firefox and surfed on over.
Firefox will only let you play the video with Realplayer, so against my better judgement, I tried to install the plugin. Of course, you're not just getting a plugin, they require the whole bleeping program. I blacklisted Real about 5 years ago when they were installing several other things like AIM and Gator without letting you choose, so I thought I'd give them another chance. Immediately after installing I'm greeted with a flurry of crap coming from a little icon in my systray. What jackholes at Real think that I only have a PC so I can run their stupid software. So, I'm about to uninstall Realplayer for the rest of my life, and I guess I'll just have to get by without watching Dave.

The today show had a clip of last night's monologue, and I wanted to watch it again so I could quote it correctly here, but it was something like, "Al-Queda wasted no time appointing the successor to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, or as Special Forces soldiers call him, 'Next'."