Microsoft bids $44M for Yahoo!

Ok, the market and I saw this coming: Microsoft just announced last night they were going to start an unsolicited bid for Yahoo! at a share price of $31. There had been rumors (confirmed with the bid) that Microsoft and Yahoo! were talking about a merger, but (as Microsoft confirmed) they went nowhere fast.

As an ex-Yahoo!, and one that cares about the company a lot, I am sad to see one of the flagships of the Internet (potentially) disappear, but it was a catastrophe long in the making. At the same time, the transaction makes perfect sense for both parties involved at this stage in their life, and I wish the best to both bidder and biddee (that sounds so like bidet…).

Intrade trading (2) - what are the risks?

Now that we have a perfect way to make money, let’s look at the risks associated with it.

Here is a list of risks, and we’ll discuss how they affect the trading below:

• There is no change in behavior: the undersold contract stays undersold, and the oversold contract stays oversold until it matures
• Of the two components of the multiplied expected value we picked the wrong one
• Intrade finds out about this method
• Method trading becomes a large part of overall trading, skewing the values
• Intrade runs out of business

There is no change in behavior: the undersold contract stays undersold, and the oversold contract stays oversold until it matures

Intrade trading (1) - is there a system to be gamed?

Well, those of you who know me well have already heard my humble endorsement for this year’s race: I am all for Hillary, despite not being allowed to vote as a non-citizen-permanent-resident.

Despite the fact I can’t vote, I still think I am entitled to an opinion; after all, I pay plenty taxes and the President of the United States of America is the Prime Mover of all tax expenses.

Plan of Attack (B. Woodward)

It’s been a while that I wanted to read the Bush trilogy that Bob Woodward put together. In three volumes, the celebrated co-reporter of the Watergate affair describes the inner workings of the Bush administration with the kind of depth that only a journalist with access to the original sources can have.

It sounds like President Bush was eager to have this reporting going on. Maybe he was trying to ensure that there was a full account of what had been going on, so that history could judge on its own with full disclosure, instead of relying on opinions of the uninformed. In any case, the trilogy has been heralded as the definitive account of Bush at War, its tag line.

Updated com_weight

I just tried out my old component (written some time in 2005, amazingly): com_weight. It’s a weight table written as a component for Joomla, as the PHP version of my programming test in different languages.

It all started with me trying to lose weight in preparation of going to the military, where I knew I was going to be subjected to a strict regime of workout. So I wrote something that kept track of how I was doing, since I really don’t care about my weight otherwise.

Perfect Day

It’s Saturday evening, and the party people in the house are not budging. There are lots of places to go, lots of booze to drink, and yet nothing moves. Why is that? Well, tomorrow is a powder day!

We decide to leave early in the morning. Whistler has this wonderful program called Fresh Tracks that gets you up the mountain at 7:30a (one hour before the general population is allowed to join). For the price of $16 (in addition to the ticket), you get breakfast and early access to the slopes.

How do I get my gravatar.com URL

This is a really easy one, but since I had to crawl across the gravatar site to find out how to do it, here is a quick introduction to get the URL for your gravatar. No thrills and frills, but it does what most of us will need.

First, you need to create a gravatar account, if you don’t already have one. Gravatar is a site that aggregates avatar images for the different social networking sites (like Facebook, MySpace, etc.) and blogs (like Blogger). It works by storing an image of you (of your choice) and associating it with your email address.

What Caused the Mortgage Crisis?

It’s amazing to sit here, see the economy tumble down at the pace it’s going, and see the connection to the mortgage crisis. My friends and my family back in Europe ask about it, want to know how it happened, why it happened, and how to get out of it. I tell them that as soon as I am President… No, ok, I don’t tell them that.

At the same time, I listen to their explanations, read those of the pundits here, and particularly check the solutions proposed by people either around me or in Washington. And all of that leaves me baffled, mostly because the situation seems so much simpler than described to me. So, here it goes, Marco’s Theory of the Mortgage Crisis:

Moving right with Delancey Street Foundation

{moszoomimglink:delancey_restaurant}Well, usually a move would not warrant yet another blog post – I guess everybody goes through them, and many of us have gotten used to the whole process. I wanted to highlight, though, the movers I used this and the last time, and recommend them to everybody that cares about their stuff.

Preparing for the Move

First things first: anyone who moves has to take care of the process. Take a calendar and mark your desired move date, choose the movers and get a confirmed date. Try to get the first appointment in the day, since you don’t want to be waiting in case something goes wrong with the move before you, and let that be a priority over the date.

Moving

{moszoomimglink:44. house}Well, it was about time. After two years in the pretty house in Westwood Highlands, the fog and the obsessive-compulsive neighbor have finally done me in and I am moving again. This time I am going to be a denizen of an area that I’ve always loved but never actually lived in: SoMa.

For those of you who don’t know, SoMa is South of Market, a formerly industrial and now very lofty and trendy area of San Francisco. It’s close to everything, including coffee shops and the gym, which alone covers 90% of my time outside the house.