FeralBlog

Due to some fortuitous moves in the BS(BlogShares) funds over the last few days, my net worth is now hovering right around $2 million.

Now that funds have been withdrawn, the moves in stocks are too low (or with too few shares available for purchase) to make any sort of large moves, so I have to think about what I want to do. There will be banks opening soon, which could be fun. I could also donate my money for some sort of contest. I could even try and sell my virtual cash for the real thing on ebay.

Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later. I got my first BlogShares advertisement last night. Someone gifted me 5 shares of a worthless stock last night, and the accompanying email said “I like the way you do business. South Dakota thanks you.” Of course I had to go look and see what sort of porn ad-infested popup hell the site in question was. Strangely enough, it wasn’t. I’m not quite sure what the point was (except maybe to drive traffic), but it was an interesting technique, to be sure.

In other news, the SLF and I are going to see A Mighty Wind tonight. I thought Best In Show was one of the better movies I’ve seen, so I have high expectations for this one.

Three times now, I’ve bought something in BlogShares to the tune of a couple of thousand dollars, and then the next morning I see it’s worthless. Literally worthless. Sucks to have to continually make up that ground. I was up to about $130K yesterday, and now I’m back down to $80K or so.

In other news, I had a decent workout at the gym last night, and I’ll be heading to the Co-op tonight. I realized that while my 30-mile bike commute is keeping me fit, I’m not nearly as strong as I used to be climbing, so time to fix that. Tonight should be some bouldering, and then a campus session. If everything falls into place (especially with the weather), I’ll be able to go bouldering at Cooper’s Rock Saturday, and then hit the lead wall at the gym Sunday. Woo!

The site just officially went live, and it’s crazy!

I thought I totally screwed up this morning and bought some available shares of Movable Type because I thought the game had already switched over. But then it hadn’t! Ack! Thinking I was going to be stuck with shares that I couldn’t unload (and only being left with a pitiful $1k-odd cash balance), I started poking around on the forums. I saw a post there that if there was an outstanding buy order for a stock, you didn’t have to wait for the 6 hours! So, I dumped most of everything I had picked up (down to $14k cash from $19k last night, not horrible), and sat tight.

When the site came back up, I saw that I had around $29k cash?!?!? WTF? I guess they sold the stock for me at the going rate when the beta site went down. I tried to grab some of the better-performing (at least, they were in the beta test) stocks out there, and I think I did pretty well. I snagged some slashdot (already up 25%), some Blogdex (flat so far), and the best one, BlogShares itself (already almost doubled).

• I ordered tickets for the Preview showing of The Matrix Reloaded, which is happening at 10 p.m. on Wednesday the 14th. With the release date being the 15th, I thought I was going to have to go to a midnight showing on the 14th, but now I can get an early start. Thanks, Fandango!
• Watched Scotland, PA last night while in my hazy, NyQuil-addled state. It’s a cute, funny movie, with some nice stylistic touches. Everyone drives old Camaros, for example. Not nearly as gorgeous as another Shakespeare “re-imagining”, but it was still entertaining. And, of course, Christopher Walken rocks.
• I am officially making a killing on BlogShares. About a week ago the site owner announced that when the site goes live (which should be happening today) all cash you have will be carried over, but your holdings will be gone. To keep the bottom from completely falling out when everyone makes a run for the exit at the same time, he put a large buy order out for every stock. But sometimes after he issued the buy order (say, for $1.50 per share, which is around what the stock is valued at the time he issued the order), if the price drops (say, to like $1 per share), then you can buy a ton of shares for a buck, and turn around 6 hours later and sell them for a tidy 50% profit. I also noticed that when you buy large quantites (say 25% of all outstanding shares), just from the purchase alone you can “move the market” and instantly make your purchase more valuable. Plus, my site is now listed on diveintomark, so hopefully everything will be re-indexed in time for all the new shares to be issued, and watch the price soar!

As of this moment, my portfolio is worth a whopping $1419.81!!! That’s up a staggering 41.981% from when I started! It can only get better when Mark starts peddling my ass on the corner.

By popular demand, the secondary title of this page is now being randomly pulled from a database. Reload a few times and see what happens. I still need to move the code to get the dynamic title on the archive pages, and I also want to make a public-facing form where people can submit their ideas and I can approve/reject them.
Update: To get the ball rolling a bit more, I pulled a few good slogans from the Advertising Slogan Generator. Enjoy.

The newest version of SharpReader is out. I’m glad he fixed the bug that was keeping Windows from shutting down, because that was a little annoying. Other than that, it still continues to be one of the coolest apps I’ve seen in a long time.

Couple of minor changes to the site.

• As further proof of my slavish devotion to keeping track of my BlogShares status, I’ve put a “BlogShares” item in the side navigation, which pulls data from the BlogShares site using David Reynes’s nifty MTBlogShares plugin. Right now it’s showing my weblog’s current value, P/E ratio, and my portfolio value.
• I put the Nice Titles enhancement on my page (in my mind I keep hearing Sean Connery from Celebrity Jeopardy saying “Nice Titties!”), which gives the fancy popup highlight over links with titles if you’re using a “good” browser.
• I added a description for the weblog under the title. It’s lame. Any suggestions as far as what i should change it to?

I’ve been too busy to really be paying a ton of attention to it, but this whole BlogShares thing has taken off faster than an oversized Cheeto. Basically your weblog is valued based on who you link to, who links to you, and how well-linked all those people are. Just for fun I listed my site. Actually, it was already listed; i just had to claim it. You’ll notice that because of Tantek’s link, and because of my plethora out outgoing links, I’ve managed to move my stock off the pink sheets.

And look! Someone actually bought shares! 3900 of them, to be exact. Foolish Intrepid Italian-speaking investor, I salute thee!

To help out this foolish intrepid investor, I sold a little bit of my self-esteem last night. It was time to admit my stock needed help, and the Gordon Gecko of my dreams came in the form of of bespeckled Mark Pilgrim. His offer to link to your weblog in exchange for 100 shares of said weblog sounded too good to miss. I missed the first cut to get pimped by Mark, but I should be in the next one. I actually gave him 200 shares because I’m just so damn nice.