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One of my Uranium stocks, Energy Metals (EMU), was rumored to be taken over by another (unknown) company. The stock had a huge run, so now I’m sitting on an 85% profit. However, despite the continued gains, Cramer says to sell. In fact, he called for a triple sell on Friday. Here’s his explanation:

Dear Jim: On Friday’s Lightning Round, you pushed the “sell, sell, sell” button what seemed like a million times after disclosing there is a company in negotiations to acquire Energy Metals Energy Metals Corp (EMU), and did not give a reason for why. I would think one would hold onto EMU as there could be a dollar premium associated with a takeover?also, the fact that uranium is still in demand and commodity prices continue to rise. Could you please explain why you feel EMU deserves to be sold? –Robert

Cramer says: “Bulls make money, bears makes money, hogs get slaughtered. You are about to become Jimmy Dean sausage. We?ve got a great gain in that thing. What are you doing? What do you want, a sharp stick in the eye? I?ll be right over there!”

Since I got into EMU on Cramer’s recommendation, I’m going to get out of it on his recommendation. I believe that the stock will continue to rise until the company is sold. However, this will free up some capital to put into some other Uranium stocks that are poised to jump. Besides, the last time I held onto an 85% gain, I lost almost all of it inside of a week (and the sector has been so volatile lately, why risk it?). So I’ll chalk up my 85% profit on EMU as my first big Uranium win.

Gas went up ten cents since yesterday. I passed up the gas station last night on my way home, thinking for some reason that gas couldn’t possibly go up any higher overnight. And this morning I filled up at $3.57 per gallon. I paid $42 for a tank of gas this morning… This picture sums up my feelings on the matter.

I don’t buy the excuses that the gasoline companies are using to drive up gas prices. You just don’t lose a refinery for a week over electrical problems. If one inoperative refinery ties up 20% of the nation’s fuel, then you damn well better use some of the nine billion dollars in annual profit to prepare them ahead of time. Grrr…

I beat the main quest for the Oblivion expansion pack. The story was actually very well done, giving a little more detail with each successful quest. At the end of the quest, the defeated bad guy spills the beans on the whole story and throws a little twist in there too. It was much more satisfying than the “congratulations, you won, but you and your party die” ending in Neverwinter Nights 2.

Although I beat the main quest, there are dungeons and ruins scattered all over the Shivering Isles that I haven’t even touched yet. The main roads are crawling with monsters, so I snuck through the countryside to get around, so I found most of the dungeons (and marked them on my game map) just by following the main quest.

I’ll probably play through a few more side quests in the expansion pack and then give up the game again. I never actually played the main quest in Oblivion, but got to level 35 by playing through all of the non-main quests and dungeons. I could always finish the main quest for Oblivion… However, I hear that the Neverwinter Nights 2 expansion pack is coming out.

I went into Chicago for my Oracle deposition today. It was a lot longer than I thought it would be, but it wasn’t terrible. It was in a regular meeting room, with two lawyers from each side, a court stenographer and a videographer. There were a lot of questions, and I answered everything as truthfully as I could (sometimes I just didn’t remember the details).

I had never seen a stenography machine before. This is the weird typewriter that a court reporter uses to type in everything that is said during the proceedings. The stenographer asked me to spell a couple of things, like “Endeca” and “PERL”. That can’t be an easy job.

The whole thing was an interesting experience. I don’t think that I would want to be deposed every week, but it wasn’t awful. I wasn’t really nervous until the cross-examining, since I was worried that they would aggressively try to trip me up. The lawyer said that I was the “least combative” witness that he had ever deposed. I guess that means that I was my usual chipper self.

I have been subpoenaed to appear at a deposition for the case of Infinity Resources v Oracle Corporation. I worked at Infinity about two and a half years ago, and managed the project to implement Oracle i-Store software. I left the company in October of 2004, but the i-Store project died about a year later. Infinity decided to sue Oracle for the costs of software ownership and damages.

I met with the lawyer to prepare for the deposition, and he cautioned that a deposition is not like a normal conversation. You have to take it slow and think about what, exactly, is being asked and what, exactly, you want to say in response to each question. In short, no rambling. So the entire deposition will require an act of will that I may not be able to muster.

The kitchen counters arrived this week. The installation crew showed up at around 8 AM and was out by 9:30. I stuck around to supervise but left for work shortly after they left. The counters look great though. We got the Corian brand of manufactured stone in the “Terra” color, which is brown with white and black flecks. The kitchen is really coming together now, so we should be done with it soon.

For the last twenty-five years, Australia has had a national law that limits the number of Uranium mines in operation to three. Three shall be the number of the mining and the mining shall be no more than three (to paraphrase Monty Python and the Holy Grail). On Saturday, the Australian parliament voted to overturn this law, which should allow mining in Uranium-rich areas like Queensland and Western Australia. Many people expected Uranium mining companies with interests in Australia to skyrocket. Unfortunately, the opposite happened.

The problem is that even though the Australian parliament voted to lift the national ban on Uranium mining, the individual state governments still have their own local ban. Queensland Premier Peter Beattie has gone on record stating that he would not lift the ban in his state, which is the exact opposite of what he said before the vote looked like it had a chance. The national vote will put pressure on Queensland and Western Australia to open up to new mining, but I don’t think it will happen overnight.