Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Goooooing gooooing Google!

For anyone following the markets during the recent turmoil the last minute Google jump might've seemed as just another sign of the Financial Apocalypse.

In the last 5 minutes of trading GOOG seemed to take a nosedive from 400 to 250. Luckily NASDAQ came to it's senses shortly and flagged this as an "possibly erroneous trade", but with this market I'm sure I wasn't the only one thinking ohh crap..

The NASDAQ Official Closing Price in GOOG will be adjusted to $400.52. This will be reflected on the tape shortly. Clients who had executions in today’s closing cross in GOOG will get the shares at the adjusted price ($400.52) in clearing tomorrow, and will receive an electronic break today. Any questions please call Market Operations at 212-231-5100.


The best part of this whole thing (thanks to RainbowShrimp for the tip) was this post on Google Forums:


From:
jimn...@gmail.com - view profile
Date:
Tues, Sep 30 2008 5:34 pm
Email:
jimn...@gmail.com
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SHIT!!! MY 12 million dollars just came back to $3000 again!!! Well, i
can say at one point of my life , I had 12 million ....

Monday, September 29, 2008

Bailout, shmailout

A lesson from Warren Buffet. Even when you seem confident in the future, protect against the downside surprise.

With the bailout being held hostage to the election cycle and GS hovering around 120, his 10% divided sounds awfully attractive. Considering that the warrants he received are for GS at around 115 I think he made some shrewd calculations that are holding up even in this insane market.

Even though some don't view his bailout advocacy as particularly ethical, it seems that it wasn't that effective. Even though he is an oracle, he can't compete with the fear of making the wrong move in an election.

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Slashdot updates

This just in....Slashdot turns into Digg. More news on the story rating feature at 11. Not sure if this has been around for a while as it looks like the feature dissappears when you log in under a username.

Is Slashdot trying to pull an Amazon with this?

Life Without Walls....well maybe with only small walls

Chris Flores from the Vista team was recently blogging about a new stage of the Microsoft Life Without Walls advertising campaign.

The campaign originally started with some completely incomprehensible TV Spots, featuring Jerry Seinfeld, Bill Gates and...shoes?

Sunday, September 7, 2008

The Difficulties in the Art of Image Resizing

Fighting with the Blogger image upload tool and the Gimp are not a fun way of spending a Sunday afternoon.

Where is the Ajaxy resizing and cropping goodness in Blogger? I must've uploaded 10 version of the same Flushing Meadows picture, each time being surprised at what I saw. I think my dream would be a little plugin that allows you to just drag-n-drop pics right into the browser window as though it was a big Word document. Google Chrome anyone> :)