If only Facebook IPO day were a little less of a snoozefest than it is now. If only it had Zuckerberg impaling investors while riding a bull rampaging through a city. Or an elevator to space. Or Zuckerberg bouncing Ronald McDonald and the Hamburglar off a giant scale. But sadly, our surrealist dreams will never be realized.

We will just have to settle for the ho-hum performance of Facebook’s shares so far. In the meantime, you can watch this re-enactment from NMA TV or Next Media Animation, that Taiwanese animation subsidiary that riffs off current events with 3D animated videos that look like what the lovechild of Salvador Dali and Reddit would make. Oh, and did we mention that their parent company invests in tech startups too?

Well, they warned us.

Yesterday, Facebook PR was telling reporters that when the company went public this morning, there wouldn’t be much to see at the Menlo Park headquarters. Nonetheless, I made the drive down from San Francisco, and I wasn’t alone. When I arrived at around 6:30am Pacific, the small parking lot set aside for reporters and news vans was already full. Facebook provided coffee and breakfast, as well as a portable bathroom.

Facebook shares popped from $38 to $42, a 10.5 percent increase that values the company at $115 billion. While the price is going to fluctuate a lot today, there’s a crowdsourced bet from Twitter users on FacebookIPOClosingPrice.com that the company will close at a $54 price and a $135.7 billion valuation.

Bloomberg noted a premarket offer for Facebook in Frankfurt was at $70. Another report from ZeroHedge has Facebook at roughly $101 a share, which would value the company at a $300 billion valuation even before the start of trading.

Facebook’s opening trade on NASDAQ has been delayed. We don’t know why, but we’re hearing mixed reports involving both unexpectedly high demand from retail investors and problems with canceling orders. As we explained in a post about 20 minutes ago, the underwriters of the deal are meeting and trying to set an opening price.

But because of unexpected changes in demand, it seems market makers are having issues settling on an opening price. They have the option of delaying the offering in five-minute increments until they can find a final price.

Trading has now begun on Facebook after a bit of a hiccup with NASDAQ, and while the numbers are nowhere near the heady heights of $70-$100 that some people were murmuring earlier, the $42.05 opening figure is still 10 percent higher than the $38-per-share price set by Facebook yesterday. At the time of this writing, it is trading a bit lower, at $40.

In Facebook’s S-1, the company listed how many shares main players were set to sell at listing time. Based on a share price of $38, here are how the values are coming out. The first number is the value of the shares they are selling, and the second is the value of their remaining stake in the company:

Today’s Facebook IPO is a momentous, historical occasion. It’s set to be the biggest tech IPO ever, and the third largest IPO in U.S. history, second only to Visa and General Motors. The company that was once just a glimmer in the eye of a Harvard student named Mark Zuckerberg raised over $16 billion yesterday as shares were gobbled up by hungry investors, and that $38 share price point is expected to increase as the stock starts trading around 11am today.

Do you know how much money that is?

Facebook shares are supposed to go live on the NASDAQ market in about 20 minutes. But what happens in the next crucial 15?

We caught up with NASDAQ’s Bruce Aust, who is the executive vice president and head of the global corporate client group there. After several years of carefully courting the company’s management, NASDAQ beat out rival New York Stock Exchange for Facebook’s hand. NASDAQ is usually is the exchange of choice for most tech companies like Google and Apple, but NYSE has snuck away with a company or two in the last year like LinkedIn.

Companies generally go live after market opening at around 10:30 or 11 a.m. Eastern, he said. About 15 minutes before shares start trading (e.g. right now!), the underwriters of Facebook’s offering like the offering’s lead Morgan Stanley get together and discuss current market orders, he said.

It’s time for our Friday cartoon contest and this week’s cartoon asks the question: “Is a modular data center green?

This is awesome. At 9:30 AM ET, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted what’s bound to be a historical status update to his Facebook Timeline. The post simply reads: “Mark Zuckerberg listed a company on NASDAQ. — with Chris Cox and 4 others.” You can read the whole story right here from the engineer who rigged up the auto-post: “How Facebook Hacked The NASDAQ Button”

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg didn’t travel to New York’s Times Square for the company’s big day. He did it unconventionally like you’d expect a hacker would.  He opened the bell remotely from the company’s Menlo Park Headquarters after Facebook employees had just finished a long, all-night Hackathon — their 31st. They played midnight hockey and worked on extra projects, as you can see from photos we re-posted here. (It’s Facebook’s version of Google’s 20 percent time, if you will).

Just ahead of the 6:30 PST open, the company’s employees got together again in the main headquarters “Hacker Square” in front of a big stage where he rang the bell. Unlike Zynga CEO Mark Pincus in last December’s IPO, Zuckerberg didn’t give any remarks. He was flanked by chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, vice president of product Chris Cox and Elliot Schrage, who is Facebook’s vice president of public policy and communications. A Facebook engineer named David Garcia had hacked the NASDAQ button to auto-post the bell opening to Zuckerberg’s Timeline (and we have the inside scoop on how he did it!)