Billions

02.20.2004

Once back in school some teacher (somewhere) tried to get across the concept of how much a million was. A million of anything. I think the example I got was that 1 million seconds is about eleven and a half days. Any way you look at it, a million is a lot.

While surfing Yahoo, I came across a page I had forgotten about. This one shows the major stockholders for Microsoft, along with how much stock they have. Bill Gates has just over a billion shares of stock (a billion seconds is just shy of 32 years - I had to find out). Todays stock price of Microsoft is $26.64, so that of course makes Bill worth more than $26 billion dollars. Everytime the stock price fluctuates by a penny, Bill's net worth changes by at least $10 million.

That's a lot of money. I want to know how you get a billion shares of stock. Did he say "My name is Bill, therefore I get a Billion shares?"

Part of my looking around stems from my lost Invitrogen stock options. I had an option price of $76 (I think for 5000 shares). 2 years after getting laid off the price finally went from the low $30s of 2 years ago (meaning I didn't care about the options) to a high this month of $82. So if I had played my cards right (including keeping a job that I got laid off from), I could have made $30,000.

But I think I'm a lot better off now than I was 2 years ago. More than $30,000 worth better.

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Hacking Amazon

02.19.2004

I signed up for an Amazon Associates account to try and get a little bit of a discount with all the movies that I usually end up buying from them. So far, so good - I'm on the cusp of a $10 Gift Certificate! I was looking at the code that's generated to link to a product at Amazon. Along the way, I found that it boils down to changing 2 parts to a link and that's what defines a product.

Since it's so easy, I thought it would be cool to add a link to my DVD listings to go to an Amazon shopping cart. Not that anyone would actually buy anything, it's just more of a programming excercise for me. It's one of those things that makes me smirk as I see how the website's evolved over the past 6 years.

But if you happen to want a DVD....

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PPV Predictions Back To Normal

02.17.2004

My confidence in at least predicting the type of matches at Wrestlemania is back on track. At the end of Raw last night, they stated that their Wrestlemania main event would be HHH vs Shawn Michaels vs Chris Benoit for the world title. I can at least say I saw this coming.

If I had to make an early pick for a winner for this one, I'd have to go with HHH for now, thinking that Shawn or Benoit would end up screwing the other one up during the match, possibly leading to a more in depth feud with each other later. But that's just me. No telling hopw far off I am on this one.

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PPV Predictions Gone Awry

02.16.2004

I've been slowly getting back into watching wrestling after not being very interested for the past 6 months or so. Yesterday was the latest WWE PPV, No Way Out. The headliner was Eddie Guerrero against Brock Lesnar for the world championship. I thought this was a lock for Brock (heh, alliteration!) since the winner would defend as one of the co-headliners at Wrestlemania.

Boy, was I wrong.

It seems that Eddie beat Brock (with a little help), and is now going to Wrestlemania to defend the title against Kurt Angle, my favorite olympic hero. I like Eddie, but I never would have thought of him acheiving the status of making it to the biggest PPV of the year AND being one of the headliners. Way to go Eddie!

I think part of the reason I'm starting to get into wrestling again is that every once in a while they manage to throw me a curve.

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Slow News Day

02.13.2004

Most of the time herein the south, prime time shows are only interrupted for the occasional tornado or college coach firing, but last night there was a crawl across the bottom of the screen telling that my high school alma mater principal had been arrested on drug charges. Granted, it wasn't the same principal as when I was there, so I don't really see the big deal. Except know I'll get to say "I went to the crack school" maybe.

Even worse, there's news that Pierce Brosnan may not return for the next Bond movie.

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