Ya know, I’m not sure why I put up with it for so long, but after seeing an animated cockroach crawl across my screen and feeling my stomach churn, I finally DNS blocked web ads.

The process is simple, really:

1. Web ads come from web servers, which typically are not the same servers that are feeling you the stuff you want to see.
2. Therefore, if your computer can’t find the servers sending you all that garbage, you miss pretty much nothing.
3. So you fool your computer into thinking that all of those garbage-spewing computers no longer exist.

I neither know nor care how this is done on a Windows box, but on Mac OS X you can find fairly useful instructions here. Note that if you have BBEdit and know your way around Unix line endings, you can skip all that stuff with the akamai script and dos2unix.