assuming that volokh's observations are factually correct, i've found good reasons that the pledge could be unconstitutional. 09:15 am

Corporate sleaze carves into our trust. i'm having a lot of trouble believing in the system. checking my portfolio's today, i've lost 20% of my ira and 30% of our portfolio. i'm certainly not going to put even more money into the system. 10:58 am

ugh. George W's bloody folly describes both the middle east situation and how scary our president is. 10:37 am

i too have started using MailWasher. for some reason, i'm afraid that i'm losing email. maybe because 90% of what's been coming in is spam. 10:27 am

yesterday, i decided that i really couldn't make an informed decision about the pledge thing. i had no such doubts this morning when i heard president bush say "we need judges who understand that our rights were derived from god and i intend to appoint those judges." it may not be actually creating a law, but it is pushing really far into making the government a "christian" government. sigh. 09:14 am

Pledge Ruled Unconstitutional. i was going to write about how good this was because i always resented having to say the pledge. but then i started digging around for "separation of church and state" and couldn't find anything that specifically said that. the first amendment just says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;" then i started realizing how un-informed any opinion i gave would be. so, instead i'm writing about my complete inability to give an opinion. 06:31 pm

great. spammers are using my email as a reply-to. nothing like getting returned email that you didn't send. 09:57 am

despite my complete lack of interest in linking to weblog articles, i have to link to one of the worst, most narrow-minded, purposefully blind pieces that i've read lately. the author seems to think that the only weblogs out there are personal by "people who think their warped relationships, car trouble and mental illnesses are of interest to a vast audience". hard to believe he missed all the j-blogs, warblogs, tech blogs... thanks liz for feeling the need to link to it because it was so bad. 10:04 pm

i keep forgetting where this site is. Betawatcher.com lists all the games that are currently in beta. 02:20 pm

i'm already bored of nwn. it just doesn't hold my attention enough. the obsession is missing. 02:19 pm

mike isn't going to be keeping up his Weblog Madness pages anymore. since i don't want such a comprehensive list lost, i've created a new section in the portal for it. i haven't entered all the links into the database yet, so if you want to help, there's an add page here. 01:48 pm

i should have known. the portal just slowed down to a crawl because dave linked to it. 01:43 pm

punchie and pikachu. who would have thought. 04:30 pm

i may be considered stupid too but, i agree with ted turner. CNN chief accuses Israel of terror. 09:54 am

i don't understand the whole amazon gold box thing. first off, it won't show up on my main computer. but, if i use my other computer, it appears. next, every single offer has been something from tools and hardware. i've *never* bought or visited the tools and hardware store. sigh. 09:58 am

Exonerated prisoners are rarely paid for lost time. i find it rather scary the number of people who were wrongly convicted and are only now getting exonerated. 06:28 pm

what i've just noticed about our dogs is that even though maddie is dominant and more territorial/aggressive, she is more obedient than junga. i suppose i'd assumed that because she behaves worse in certain situations she was the less obedient of the two. stay tuned for more boring dog talk over the next few days. 03:27 pm

i have a problem with some of these articles because their solutions don't work. for instance, in this one, when a dog doesn't respond instantly you're supposed to put them behind a closed door before answering the door. we've been doing that all along. putting them in the garage before we open the door. it never improved their behavior. unless, of course, there's some key action that i'm missing that would make this work. 03:12 pm

the more stuff i read, the more i realize what a bad owner i am. saying that the dogs are jason's - because i didn't want them - isn't a good excuse for being a bad owner. the fact that i'm the one who spends the most time with them makes it even more important for me to take control and learn. i had no idea that predatory aggression couldn't be stopped. you can't teach the dog not follow instinct (i.e. chasing our cats), but you can teach them to obey your command instead. 02:26 pm

this article has much more useful advice. 02:17 pm

from reading this article: Dealing With an Overaggressive Dog, i've decided that the dogs have both territorial and prey based aggression. primarily territorial tho. unfortunately, the article doesn't give any really solid advice for dealing with it. back to searching. 02:11 pm

yesterday afternoon was quite traumatic. our dogs don't like people coming to the door. they freak out, barking and jumping and acting like vicious monsters. they also don't like it when the ups guy and the mailman drive by. they do the same thing, except up on the balcony. so, the ups guy shows up, i go outside, shut the door behind me and take the package from him. it's heavy, i go inside and push the door shut behind me and go to place it down. unfortunately, the door didn't shut all the way. maddie and junga went tearing out into the street, attacking the ups guy. they didn't have their collars on and i couldn't get a grip on maddie to hold her back. thank god our next door neighbor, barry, chased them inside. (he knew how to handle them because he used to work with big exotic cats.) thankfully, the ups guy was only scratched and bruised, no broken skin, just scared shitless. hopefully, he's not gonna sue us. it's horrible to watch your dogs do something like that, not being able to control them, not knowing what to do, yet knowing that you're completely responsible for their behavior which makes you the negligent asshole who didn't train your dogs and keep them undercontrol. needless to say, they will never get the opportunity to do something like that again. 01:37 pm

i know everyone's been waiting desperately for their eatonweb portal mousepad. 11:20 am

i don't know if i mentioned it, but i *finally* applied for citizenship. mostly because i didn't want to deal with lining up at the ins office at 5am in order to get an appointment to renew my alien card. (if you apply for citizenship they set the appointment up for you). but also because of the whole 9/11 thing. it made me realize that i've been here too long to truly associate myself with england. although i did cry when the queen mum died. so, anyway, this all came up because i get to be fingerprinted at the beginning of july. i'm assuming that the fbi has no files on me and that everything will go through all right. 05:12 pm

one of the comments on that k5 article got me thinking. someone said that no *one* thing will provide enough income, but lots of things might provide a little each that will add up. so, i added a new "featured weblog" thing. for $1/day you can now get your weblog at the top of the page. i might even set up an cafepress store. i can't help but laugh at myself tho. because realistically, i think i'll be lucky to get $10. what bothers me most is that doing this type of thing makes me feel tainted. i think that it's because i'll be working on the portal no matter what, so getting money for working on it seems wrong. 05:03 pm

We're Broke: The Economics of a Web Community. i think i could have written this myself about the portal. and probably most web site owners could say the same thing about their site. the trouble is, you can't equate how much money you *need* with how much money the site is *worth*. when i was 22 i asked my boss for a raise. i'd figured out that i *needed* $200 more a month so that i could buy a new car. my boss said to me "you can't ask for a raise because you need a new car, you have to be providing me with more value." needless to say, i didn't get enough money to buy the car, i did get a lesson in business tho. me saying i need $25k in income because of the amount of work it takes to maintain the portal and threatening to take it down if i can't get that, doesn't make it worth that $25k. 02:47 pm

ok, i know i'm a little behind on this. as is obvious since my dad was showing me *his* new toy instead of the other way round. my excuse being that i haven't needed a new palm in years. anyway, he showed me his new CLIÉ and i now want one. although, if i was gonna spend $600 i'd want web access too. 11:11 am

i can't believe it's a lie. i feel betrayed. via workbench. 10:52 am

following a link from metafilter, i went to checkout the meetup names. despite all the good names on the list, the fact that brian sroub is on there makes me question the product. pretty sad. (brian sroub was the v.p. of marketing at beyond.com and since he led the dept. was responsible for all the wasted money on advertising and other evil things.) 10:36 am

it's amazing what a little publicity does to your work incentive. i've spent the last few days working on the portal. mostly because the database has been overloaded. not that i've solved that or anything. i have, however, added city/state/region fields to the weblog description and split u.s.a. into states which should be more usable. i also added a new recently updated page which takes the weblogs.com xml feed and then grabs data about the weblog from my database. i have no idea whether that's a useful feature, but it's there anyway. i also used that page to get a half-assed date stamp on recently updated weblogs. a date has been tacked on to the weblog info. it's half-assed because the date only gets entered when someone views the 'recently updated' page and it only works for people who are already using weblogs.com. who knows, it might actually be useful. we'll see. 04:29 pm

i finally found a service for textads. textads.biz provides all the tracking, serving, payment processing and only takes 10% commission. phew. i *did not* want to code that. if you're interested, you can place an order here. 12:00 am

so i finally decided to put textads on the portal since looking at the number of hits i've been getting. but, i don't want to code my own ad server. so i look around and can't find *one* textad server. http ads is only banners not text. admatix only takes visa not paypal. adfarm doesn't look like it'll be around much longer. pyrads doesn't look like it'll ever go live. which leaves me with implementing textads on my own server. yuck. 12:25 pm

this is getting rather ridiculous:

I would like to know if your p/r dept. will require a videotape of an interview with Matthew Schifrin of Forbes (Best of the Web featuring your site). The interview aired on CNNfn's The Biz Tuesday afternoon. Basically what we do is provide a professionally edited VHS (tape has show open and the interview) at a cost of $75 + shipping....additional dubs are $25 each.

let's see... my p/r department has tivo and they recorded a later showing. if we desire to immortalize ourselves, we will proceed to make a vhs tape of said tivo recording for a total cost of $1 (how much are video tapes nowadays?). if additional dubs are needed, we will ask all interested friends and family members to provide their own video tape thus reducing the cost to $0. they will also have to pick up and drop off said tape so shipping and handling charges do not apply.

how could i have ever contemplated deleting such a valuable video clip? oh wait, i already did. how many of these solicitations am i going to get? 07:26 pm

you may have noticed the distinct increase in posts happening around here. i'm almost positive that it has something to do with cancelling my daoc account and finishing dungeon siege. the outlook for new games seems pretty grim right now, until the xmas season anyway. if i'm lucky, i'll be beta testing dragon empires at the end of the month. other than that, there's neverwinter nights which i see just went gold. all the new mmorpg's seem to have a constantly moving release date. i have hopes for shadowbane and swg (which i'm not sure about because it's sci-fi based.) 07:17 pm

for the first time in 18 months, i cooked food in a microwave. later, i plan on making toast in a toaster. i even baked some bread for the occasion. our household is no longer microwave and toaster challenged. and no, i have no idea how we lived so long without either one. 06:25 pm

proof that warbloggers are just like every other weblogger. plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. 06:22 pm

that was a rather disturbing experience. i had expected a clip about weblogs being great and oh btw if you're looking for some go here (blogger), here (weblogs.com) or here (eatonweb portal). instead, i watched my site being shown in the trailer, and being talked about in and of itself as one of three web sites shown. no actual weblogs, no tools, nothing but talk about the portal. now all i can think is sh*t i hope not many people watch that show. my hacked together database isn't going to survive huge numbers of visitors. unfortunately, Forbes Best of the Web is online and in the print version and i'm a "forbes favorite" in the weblogs category. which means, that no matter what, i'm going to get a traffic spike. i think, that i would rather have not known about this. i'll just pretend it never happened and go back to talking about my cat. 05:42 pm

heh. 03:57 pm

despite being a completely uninteresting article, A Rift Among Bloggers provided me a quote that may explain how i felt yesterday. unsurprisingly, it was a quote from jason.

Mr. Kottke acknowledged that he felt a little resentment about the rise of war blogs, but said that was natural when an underground phenomenon goes mainstream. "It's like being the punk-rock fan who was into punk rock before everyone else," he said.

via dave. 03:09 pm

i don't think i could ever have imagined, not in my wildest dreams, getting this email:

"We picked up a segment from CNN-FN's "The Biz" today with Matthew Schifrin of Forbes Magazine. Topic was The Best of the Web and a number of websites were mentioned, inc. eatonweb.com

If someone has interest in purchasing a videoclip of this news segment, we hold it for 2 weeks from day of air."

what exactly would i *do* with that video clip once i bought it? put it on the site? pull it out to show the family? save it to show the grandkids? "want to see the video where *my* website was mentioned on cnnfn? i paid someone for the videoclip so that i could watch it over and over again. here's my 10 seconds of fame!!" i will admit though, that i'm curious enough to watch it and i'm glad they emailed me in time for tivo to record the afternoon re-run. but buy it? besides, i'll be able to save it forever anyway... at least until i need space for the next episode of the sopranos. 02:47 pm

alright, maybe i should learn to like the screensavers more. i've often wished for a 30 sec advance on the tivo box. everytime i fast-forward through commercials in fact. TechTV's Secret TiVo Codes made my day. 10:32 am

this seems to be a day of surprises. while searching for that weblog list, i discovered that amazon lets you search for people. i had never really thought that i had a member page. 09:52 am

so i wake up this morning, turn on the tv, preparing for my monday morning ritual. coffee and cereal with a little bit of cnn headline news followed by hbo's sunday night line-up (sopranos, six feet under, the wire). the tv happens to be on tech tv and the screensavers is on. before i could change the channel, (i hate the screensavers), i hear the word "weblog" and of course rewind to find out what they're talking about. i felt kind of ill as they said that u.c. berkley is giving a course on weblogging. i haven't quite figured out *why* i'm getting that sort of reaction. it's the same reaction i get when i hear about all the weblog books. maybe it's because i find it hard to believe that someone needs to *learn* how to keep a weblog. i'll have to think about that one. link via david watson. 09:46 am

9 months later it's rearing its ugly head again. the horrible concept of having a baby. i know it was my birthday that instigated it. another year closer to that decision being made for you. not that it's going to happen exactly on my 40th b-day. but your birthday is when you are made truly aware of your age. actually *seeing* a happily pregnant friend who was your "never gonna have kids" role-model. seeing my mortality looming on the horizon isn't helping much either. in 5 years, i will be the same age as my mum was when she was diagnosed with cancer. in 8 years i will be the age she was when she died. this line of thought is getting too depressing. i'll stop right there. 04:59 pm

something to add before it gets lost in the bottomless pit of my inbox... amber recommended authors dorothy dunnett (historical fiction) and lindsay davis (mystery). now if i hadn't just ordered a $100 worth of books from amazon last week. (birthday present.) i'd pick them up. 04:25 pm

yesterday i finally got lasik done on my eyes. for about 10 years i've been wanting to have eye surgery to fix them and i finally got it done. in the post-op checkup this morning i had 20/15 and 20/20 vision. supposedly it will get even clearer over time. the surgery was short, simple and uneventful. but maybe that was because of the valium they give you before-hand. thankfully, i had no pain after the numbing drops wore off. so the vicodin can be used merely for recreational purposes. my neighbor wants the left-overs.

it's really hard to describe how amazing it feels to be able to see. i have peripherral vision again and no contact lense floating around. i feel like a little kid. i keep looking around testing my vision. not sure it's real. i wish i'd done this years ago. 09:31 am