Invasion of my aural space

Aural Space - Aural space is a term used to describe moments when listeners are hearing a lack of noticeable sound.

Sometimes when I am at work and at home, I prefer to have that "background noise" going on. I make no attempts to drown it out by having a television on, or a radio, or my computer playing tunes. I figure that if I'm in my office, or my home ... I should be able to choose which noises I want going on within my immediate space. Sometimes at home my dogs disagree, and they'll bark til the cows come home, but I can live with that ... for the most part.

What I cannot live with, is websites which have now taken to playing video automatically. ESPN dot com is notorious for this, and it drives me freaking batty. I go to ESPN dot com to read the news, not hear it. If I wanted to hear it, I'd go to my television and turn on ESPN the channel. It's a downright pain in the rear, and a total invasion of my aural space.

I remember way back when, when Al Gore had just invented the internets, that putting MIDI music files on ones website was cool ... the tin-sounding music really added pizazz to any website that featured it. Ok, not really ... it was cool for all of a couple minutes but really started sucking as soon as the file looped back and played the same crappy music all over again. But it seemed like most people figured it out pretty quickly (except for anyone who has a Geocities or Homestead account) and discontinued their use.

There are a few other websites, most of which evade my memory right now, which I've caught doing this as well ... but ESPN dot com is, by far, the worst offender in my book.

Anyone else have any other websites which have taken up this annoying habit?