Insider dealings

A few days ago, the share price of my blog came crashing down, from $0.04 to $0.00 because it was so overvalued that the share price was automatically readjusted. And that's massively overvalued. As in, second most overvalued out of 32,000 blogs (I never did check to see whether it got to #1).

So the share price is currently at $0.00 (or 0.47¢ to be more precise). And with all my shares inexplicably sold out, no one'll be buying any more to push up the share price at all.

Step in Mark Pilgrim (hopefully), who has said he will start doing insider trading deals - in return for free shares, he will prominently link to someone's blog for a week, thus pushing up the valuation, pushing down the P/E of the blog (making it 'undervalued') so that lots of people will buy the shares.

Good so far, except that I have no available shares for people to buy. However, there's something called Leveraged Buy Outs where the owner of a blog can buy back shares that have been bought, at three times the share price. So what I'm going to do is to buy back all my shares (at a price of $0.00) and then give all the former shareholders one-fifth the number of shares they previously had (rounded up where necessary). In monetary terms they've lost nothing because of the zero share price. I sell the remaining shares I have (minus the ones destined for Mark) and they're back on the market. Mark links to me (again, hopefully!), valuation goes up, hopefully share price goes up.

That's the theory, anyway. Posted here just in case you were wondering where all your shares had vanished to!

Update: In buying shares from my 19 shareholders and gifting Mark free shares, I have reached my limit of 20 transactions in a 24 hour period. So apologies, but everyone else will have to wait until tomorrow to get any shares back from me.

The Interview and expensive haircuts

A number of things have happened over the last few days, the biggest of which has been the Interview, which took place on Wednesday.

For those who don't know, I'm currently looking for an IT job for my gap year (next school year), before I go off to university to study Physics with Computer science. So far I've applied to the Year in Industry scheme and IBM's Pre-University Employment scheme. YinI came up with an interview for me at company in Farnborough for a web design post, which sounds ideal to me.

I felt that the interview went fairly well, although I was asked a few tricky questions. In this case 'tricky' means 'vague or ill-defined'. I find it quite difficult to answer a question of the "What would you do in this type of situation?" sort without having more specific parameters for the situation.

I was quite surprised by how much detail the interviewer went into with his questions regarding the software I use. What browser do I use? [I think I gained some unexpected brownie points for saying 'Opera and Mozilla' rather than IE.] Why do I use those browsers rather than IE? And which versions of those browsers? Which HTML editor do I use? [Notepad; more brownie points, I think.] Which other HTML editors have I used or heard of? Which search engine do I use? Why? Which OSs am I familiar with? Which versions of those OSs? [He started laughing when I included Windows 3.1, not unreasonably.]

My answers to all of the above were meticulously noted down. It's good that I was able to come up with reasons why Google is the best search engine - I read quite a number of articles about Google when they bought Blogger a couple of months ago. And I kept mentioning that I had a website, but he never asked for the URL, which was kind of annoying, in that I wanted to show off my (relatively) nice clean (almost valid) HTML and CSS, and almost fully accessible website (according to Dive Into Accessibility).

The interviewer also took the phrase 'can read books in French' to mean 'fluent in French', which almost made me laugh. There's a big difference - as someone who can do the former, but certainly cannot claim to be the latter, I know.

I was told today by YinI that they had narrowed it down to three people (for two different jobs), and I was one of the three. I now have to wait until after Monday to find out the result. Fingers crossed.

In other news, I got my hair cut on Tuesday, and was gobsmacked to learn, at the point of being asked for money, that they charged extra to dry my hair. The default is apparently to leave your hair wet (or at least damp) and then send you out into the street. Of course, they didn't tell me this when they offered to blow-dry my hair, and so I only found out afterwards that it cost extra. Whereupon I pointed out that this had not been mentioned, and so he let me off without paying the extra.

Not only that, you won't believe how much I wasn't charged for drying my hair.

£16.50.

Let me say that again: sixteen pounds and fifty pence.

Maybe I should withdraw my uni application and enroll on a hairdressing course?