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Sam ate a bottle of Aleve – we think 10-15 tablets in all. This is bad. Sam, unable to read, had no idea.

[ the bandage from Sam's IV]

I brought him to the 24-hour emergency clinic. They induced vomiting, but it appears the tablets were mostly digested. Although his spirits were good (I caught him playing with the bottle…) he was at the vet taking charcoal, and hooked to an IV for 72 hours.

The doctor emphasized the severity of his condition, but the prognosis is good. He’ll be on a very gentle diet for a week or two, and will have more blood work done in the near future. The worst possibility is a sever ulcer, although this treatment likely will prevent that.

Pet owners – don’t let your beasties near Naproxen based painkillers: Aleve, Naprosyn, Anaprox, or Naprelan.

Dave Winer wrote about the need for reform in the venture capital industry – while neglecting to mention Paul Graham and Y Combinator.

Michael Arrington did a nice job summarizing Dave’s main points:

1. “venture capital is broken because they are middlemen and they make bad decisions (lots of online pet companies in the nineties)”
2. “and people really need less capital now to start companies, and they need it later in the cycle”
2. “so companies should go right to the users, who often have money”
3. “but Dave ends his essay by saying that some companies will still need capital, and suggests forming a publicly held venture fund to supply this capital”

Paul Graham’s thoughts on the VC “problem” a year ago:

“You might think a high valuation is a great thing. Many founders do. But you can’t eat paper. You can’t benefit from a high valuation unless you can somehow achieve what those in the business call a “liquidity event,” and the higher your valuation, the narrower your options for doing that. Many a founder would be happy to sell his company for $15 million, but VCs who’ve just invested at a pre-money valuation of $8 million won’t hear of that. You’re rolling the dice again, whether you like it or not.”

The guy has a whole series of essays on why VC sucks and how to fix it. And it seems that Paul and partners are doing something about the problem.

After leaving a position developing web-based products in the supply chain industry, I started a blog on automatic identification technology. The industry continues to draw substantial investment, and the site quickly drew an audience. In March of 2004, I affiliated with a small publishing group that had a number of similar websites. We had early success and what looked to be a clear path to sustained revenue from text ads. Despite consistent traffic and astronomical click through rates, the steady decline in our earnings-per-click doomed the format, and ultimately ended most of my involvement with the site.

After reading several webmasters’ stories of decreasing revenue from Google text ads, I decided to share my statistics.

The site will remain nameless to protect the ongoing business, although a casual search should reveal it if you’re curious.

The graphs are provided by the excellent Digital Point Solutions.

Note that I moved the ads to a different account in January of 2006, the final valley in the charts reflect that.
Earnings per click

Click-through rate

Total Earnings

(This graph is effectively the first two multiplied together, as traffic was relatively stable.)

After a long, fruitless search for a superior chair, my Titanium finish, smoke frame Aeron chair arrived.