What to do when a stock you own is bought out in cash by another company?

This is happening to me, with one of my stocks right now: RCRC.
A few months ago, I bought about 50 shares of RC2 Corporation (RCRC), a maker of die-cast  and wooden toys, at $20. My wife and I were looking for an investment idea based on the toys and media we’re buying for our 2-year-old son. What I’d really like to do is own Thomas the Tank Engine, but the company owning the license (HIT Entertainment) is privately owned. The best we can do is to buy the companies with contracts on …

Activision Blizzard (ATVI)

A couple months ago I opened a position in Activision Blizzard (ATVI). Blizzard is the Pixar of the gaming industry. All of their games are blockbusters. The most notable title World of Warcraft collects $15/month from their millions and millions of players.
I got interested in the stock after picking up Star Craft 2, another blockbuster game from them. I knew that game was going to sell better than expected. I had been watching pro Star Craft 2 tournaments that were run off the game’s beta for a few months. At …

More Finance Calculators

These folks emailed us and they have some decent finance calculators on their site: Ultimate Calculators
I found the loan application one particularly interesting… haven’t seen that one before.
Cheers!

Unfiltered #3 – HR5034 and Craig Wolf Puppet

Paul Maybray of VinTank gives a nice overview of HR5034. That’s a bill in Congress that would add even more restrictions on shipping wine, which we’ve covered before. Safe to say, it’s a bad bill for wine lovers (but a good bill for distributors with lots of lobbying money, so we’ll see how it turns out).

Paul chats with a puppet version of Craig Wolf, who is CEO of the Wine and Spirits Wholesalers of America (WSWA). Just watch. It will make sense, and you’ll have more insight into this mess.

Click here to view the embedded video.

More info, including sources for the Craig Wolf quotes, on the VinTank blog.

WordCamp Philly 2010 Presentation Slides

Here are slides from my talk. I was told a video of the presentation will be up at WordPress.tv sometime soon. I’ll post a link when it is. And I’ll try to get these in SlideShare or something similar. I was having trouble with their site earlier.

Business Models for WordPress Plugin and Theme Distribution
What You Need to Know About the GPL

Download: ppt, pptx

Use Coupon Code WINELOG for MyWinesDirect

MyWineDirect.comI’m happy to bring you this deal. Remember to use the coupon code WINELOG to get the promotion.

MyWinesDirect.com features the best wines for the value from undiscovered vineyards around the world.  With fall and holiday celebrations around the corner, it’s the perfect online wine store to find impressive wine gifts and wine gift baskets to celebrate any occasion.  For a limited time, they are offering 10% off all wine gifts plus FREE shipping to WineLog members.  Use coupon code WineLog at checkout to take advantage of this great offer.

How Recent Government Action Has Benefited Me

I went through this list in my head, and it sounded fairly substantial to me. So I wanted to share this with folks to see that (1) what happens in Congress matters and (2) the Obama administration has done a lot of good things that are beneficial at least to me.

The recent Health Care Reform (Obamacare) has benefited myself and my family in many ways:

  • Because our 2 year old son has “pre-existing conditions”, we were not able to change our healthcare plan before HCR provision went into affect in September. We are in the process of applying for a new plan, and should be able to get it. If we get the plan we’re shooting for, it will save us about $100 per month, have lower deductibles, and just generally be a better fit for our family now.
  • Under HCR, our LLC can write-off health care premiums BEFORE social security tax is taken. This means that if our insurance premiums are about $5000 per year, we will save about 13% of that or about $650 on our taxes.
  • My step sister, who is finishing up college now, was kicked off her mother’s health insurance one week before the HCR provisions went into affect that would let her stay on her mother’s plan until she turns 26. She’s now in the process of getting back on her mother’s insurance plan. If she couldn’t have done that, she would have had to buy a more expensive plan herself that is hard to afford for a student.

Other tax cuts as part of the stimulus and elsewhere have saved us hundreds of dollars in taxes, and will save us hundreds on our taxes next year.

We are also currently in the process of refinancing our house under the Home Affordable Refinance Program (HARP). This program, which is widely regarded as a failure because people are not using it for various reasons, is going to help us save about $200 per month on our mortgage. Because we initially purchased our home with just 5% down and home values have dropped, we would not have the 80% loan-to-value ratio needed to qualify for a refinance without this program. I don’t want to jinx it, but it looks like it will work for us.

There is also a ton of potential legislation that may impact myself or people close to me.

  • Job growth ideas that focus on tax credits for creating jobs (like Joe Sestak proposes) vs. tax cuts for wealthy individuals and businesses (like most Republicans favor) could affect our business. We are on the cusp of hiring contractors or employees for our business. I would be more likely to hire someone if there were more credits in place for that vs. tax cuts that won’t affect me (unless we do really really well next year ;).
  • Candidates who are more hawkish are more likely to extend our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or engage in new wars in Iran, etc. Less war = less chance my brother who is in the air force will spend more time at war. Obama is 50/50 on this so far, having drawn down forces in Iraq while sending more troops to Afghanistan. I do think that (a) someone like John Mccain would have resulted in higher troops counts at war than this, (2) Obama does seem to be serious about withdrawal dates and should draw things down in Afghanistan according to plan, and (c) he is more likely to use diplomacy to handle situation in Iran, etc.

I hope this list helps you to identify ways that your own life has been improved by recent government actions. Even if you don’t have any personal accounts like this, you can at least see how it has affected someone like me: a middle class small business owner with a new family.

Duplicate comment detected; it looks as though you’ve already said that!

Not sure how long WordPress has been doing this, but there is a check for duplicate comments. If the same user/email posts the same exact comment on the same post, the user will get a message like:

Duplicate comment detected; it looks as though you’ve already said that!

This is great actually, and keeps people from submitting the same comment twice if they get impatient waiting for moderation or otherwise click that submit button twice.

As a blog owner and WordPress developer, there may be situations where you want to allow people to post the same comment. If you want to enable duplicate comments on your blog for some reason, you can use this code here. Just add it to your theme’s functions.php or put this in a .php in your plugins folder and enable it.

function enable_duplicate_comments_preprocess_comment($comment_data)
{
	//add some random content to comment to keep dupe checker from finding it
	$random = md5(time());	
	$comment_data['comment_content'] .= "disabledupes{" . $random . "}disabledupes";	
 
	return $comment_data;
}
add_filter('preprocess_comment', 'enable_duplicate_comments_preprocess_comment');
 
function enable_duplicate_comments_comment_post($comment_id)
{
	global $wpdb;
 
	//remove the random content
	$comment_content = $wpdb->get_var("SELECT comment_content FROM $wpdb->comments WHERE comment_ID = '$comment_id' LIMIT 1");	
	$comment_content = preg_replace("/disabledupes\{.*\}disabledupes/", "", $comment_content);
	$wpdb->query("UPDATE $wpdb->comments SET comment_content = '" . $wpdb->escape($comment_content) . "' WHERE comment_ID = '$comment_id' LIMIT 1");
 
	/*
		add your own dupe checker here if you want
	*/
}
add_action('comment_post', 'enable_duplicate_comments_comment_post');

For reference, here is the dupe check code in wp-includes/comment.php. A newer version should probably have a hook above and/or below to allow people to override the dupe checker more directly.

// Simple duplicate check
	// expected_slashed ($comment_post_ID, $comment_author, $comment_author_email, $comment_content)
	$dupe = "SELECT comment_ID FROM $wpdb->comments WHERE comment_post_ID = '$comment_post_ID' AND comment_approved != 'trash' AND ( comment_author = '$comment_author' ";
	if ( $comment_author_email )
		$dupe .= "OR comment_author_email = '$comment_author_email' ";
	$dupe .= ") AND comment_content = '$comment_content' LIMIT 1";
	if ( $wpdb->get_var($dupe) ) {
		do_action( 'comment_duplicate_trigger', $commentdata );
		if ( defined('DOING_AJAX') )
			die( __('Duplicate comment detected; it looks as though you’ve already said that!') );
 
		wp_die( __('Duplicate comment detected; it looks as though you’ve already said that!') );
	}

Jason Speaking at WordCamp Philly October 30th at Temple University

I will be speaking on Business Models for Plugin/Theme Distribution. What You Need to Know About the GPL at WordCamp Philly October 30th, 2010 at Temple University in Philadelphia.

With lots of sweat and little luck, we’ll have our membership plugin available for some sort of release by then. But really I’m excited to share my thoughts on how to distribute, market, and make money off this plugin… and more interested in others ideas about the same.

If you want to hear me speak or are otherwise interested, get your ticket now.

SS-Downloads WordPress Plugin

Testing our new SS-Downloads plugin. It basically will require an email address before serving a specified file. Right now, I’m using a zip of the pre-release plugin for testing. I will update this to point to the latest version once it’s ready.

Should see a form or download link here.

Enter your email address to download ss-downloads.zip

Future plans:

  • Option to require account creation (instead of just an email address). Done
  • Option to email file as attachment instead of showing a link. Done
  • Icons for files in template.