Agreed! I wish I could control the ads. Google AdWords has a way to individually pre-approve the ads that will run in advance, but it's apparently labor intensive, and I don't need more things to take me away from actually writing stuff.
In the long run, I'll let you know my secret ad strategy for this blog. No adsense or credit cards or anything else. Just three squares on the right sidebar or footer, for cool things like a solar panel company, or the Nissan Leaf, or high-tech company job postings, or a discount computer equipment store like Newegg, etc.
These would each rent for $1000/month and be longer-term rentals so they don't change often. That's more than enough to pay for the best server, a few hours a month of developer time for advanced Wordpress work, a slush fund for some bigger MMM laboratory science experiments and occasional travel for stories, and even pay me a reasonable amount for the hours I spend working on it. And yet it would be less than a tenth of what a blog of this readership usually earns, which would be a nice statement about "take what you need, then focus on something else besides making more money after that".