My Geeky Bargain of the Day!
Well, I found this gem and just had to share. One of our faculty members had one of her old UPS systems die so I was looking for a replacement for her at
CDWG.com when I found a 1250VA APC Back-UPS NS for only
$92 with free shipping for us (educational price, no tax). For "retail" purchasers it is actually less ($89.99) but you have to pay about $10 shipping! That is quite a deal for a 1250VA UPS with AVR, although I had never heard of the "NS" series before (although it looks and specs out very similarly to APC "RS" series LCD units we have.) But that is definitely a deal. And if you want to purchase 11 of these babies, it will only run you
$879.99! That's only $79.99 each! In comparison perennial favorite
NewEgg.com is selling the identical UPS for a more typical
$199.99. How can CDW be selling this unit so cheaply? I will not complain, and instead have just ordered another one for another lab in the department that just bought a new Dell Precision workstation that needs to be protected. Here I go again saving the university more money while they continue to freeze our salaries. I just can't pass up a good bargain! I am even replacing the pre-installed Red Hat Enterprise 5.3 on the Precision with
CentOS 5.4 so we can keep updating that system forever without having to pay Red Hat a whopping $30/year (our educational price again). Hey, CentOS is pretty much identical to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, so why not?
Labels: bargains, geekstuff, linux, webstuff, wustl
Just four more weeks!
Some big news came out yesterday that should affect many people in the St. Louis area, especially in the mid-county area. The New
highway I-64 is going to open up almost a month early on Dec 7, 2009. Being a
Richmond Heights resident that lives very close to the highway and is affected quite a bit by the traffic flow in the area, I will be interested to see if the area roads do in fact get less congested. Just last weekend they opened up the infamous new "jug handle" intersection at Hanley and Eager/Dale which supposedly should ease congestion there. I have actually not driven over there yet to check it out, but that should make it easier now to exit left out of the Meridian
Metrolink garage to go westbound to Eager again. I know that when they closed off the Eager to Hanley intersection and forced all the Eager to Dale traffic on the little road in front of the garage it was quite a pain to turn westbound there. Since I park there for work whenever the weather is too bad to walk to the bus, that is of some concern to me!
And now shifting gears from local to national news, it sounds like the
first time homebuyer credit is being extended out to April of 2010. That is five more months for first time buyers to buy a home and receive an $8,000 tax credit. I am curious how many people left there are who can take advantage of it who have not already used the credit through 2009. The other new addition to it is a
$6,500 tax credit for current homeowners who purchase a home before April 2010. I am curious why they made that a lower number, when an existing homeowner would probably need a larger credit to make it more worth their while to purchase another home. I suppose it is an expensive program and they wanted to limit the costs. Whereas a first time buyer of a $160,000 would receive 5% back with the $8,000 credit, if a current homeowner bought a $320,000 with a $6,500 credit, that only amounts to a 2% discount off the home price. Is that really enough of an incentive to persuade someone to sell their existing home and buy a new one? Of course we cannot take advantage of the credit since we bought our house in Spring 2008. That is still better than those who just bought (say in summer 2009) and now realized they missed out on a free $6,500 for not waiting just another month or two. They could have made that law retroactive for home sales at least for some larger portion of 2009. And if they made it retroactive to cover all of 2008 I would not complain either!
Labels: housing, mortgages, stlouis, taxes, transportation
New SCC album and the New Lala.com
First off,
Steven Curtis Chapman just released his latest album,
Beauty Will Rise, and finally all those critics who say all his albums sound the same will have to stop saying that. This is not a radio friendly Christian pop rock production with predictable drum beats and layers of electric guitars. Frankly, it is not an "easy" listen at all, without any "sing-a-long" type hit singles like "Dive", "Live Out Loud" or "The Great Adventure". Instead there are 12 primarily acoustic tracks, without much added post-production and with nothing that "rocks" much at all. This is a deep, introspective album where Chapman deals with his own feelings and faith, and he does not sugar coat anything with cute cliches or catchy guitar riffs. My favorite tracks on the album are the title track "Beauty Will Rise", "Faithful" and "Just Have to Wait". I found it interesting that the titles of two of the tracks "Our God Is In Control" and "I Will Trust You" reminded me of another of my favorite Christian artists from the 80's and 90's,
Twila Paris, since she had her big hit "God Is In Control" and also a single "I Will Trust You". I find it interesting that whereas "God Is In Control" was Twila's most pop (almost rock?) single, Steven's "Our God Is In Control" sounds more like a more typical Twila Paris soft ballad!
And while I was waiting for the CD to show up in the mail, I noticed that
Rhapsody had
Beauty Will Rise online already so I could stream it and listen to it there. It is also available on
Lala.com which I had remembered as a CD bartering site like BarterBee.com, but now seems more like Rhapsody, Grooveshark or imeem. I, of course, was able to capture the streams into MP3 files to listen to later but anyone can actually do that with the right software. But I didn't even feel like it was illegal since I know my actual CD has been purchased and is simply in the mail from
christianbook.com. I definitely do not want to cheat Steven from a sale of his CD. I am also awaiting the new
Casting Crowns CD that we also pre-ordered and should be here in another two weeks. Their album should carry a more typical radio friendly, standard CCM pop-rock sound. The title track "Until The Whole World Hears" definitely has that same Christian pop sound that makes you say "Hey, that's Casting Crowns, oh, I mean MercyMe, oh, or is it Chris Tomlin now that he has amped up his music..." Luckily, I like that sound!
Labels: ccm, webstuff
Latest Local St. Louis Ramblings
Well, my last posting was when the Cardinals were only down one game to zero against the Dodgers, on the day of the second game. It was a much more hopeful time for the Redbirds. Alas, so much for their season, and now we get to wait until Spring and watch the Rams lose to every team in the NFL. I may have to follow Blues hockey more and cheer for the Mizzou Tigers instead, as well as the mighty
Wash U Bears (but, of course!)
One interesting tidbit I found on the Post-Dispatch site was a
salary database of every single employee of every public school district in the state of Missouri. Unfortunately
stltoday.com uses these massive URL's that are almost unreadable so I hope my link works. It is very informational, but it does seem to be an invasion of privacy of some sort. Not only can you find out how much anybody paid for their home in the
county or
city of St. Louis, but you can find the salary of any public employee? The database link at
http://www.stltoday.com/info has a ton of other very informative data there for your perusal. It is pretty cool but also pretty scary.
On another completely different topic, I actually received an invitation to
Google Voice so I signed up for the thing. I am not sure what to do with it though, since I really do not like using my cell phone very much, so I pointed it just to my work phone number and my
GMail account. I am also still awaiting to see how Wash U is going to implement the
Live@Edu program. They said I would be part of the beta group, but I am still awaiting more information. Since the school year is already 1/4 over, you would think they would have done something by now.
Labels: freeware, geekstuff, schools, stlouis, stlsports, webstuff, wustl
What a dreary, yucky day in St. Louis! Today it looks like rain all day so I skipped my usual walk to the bus stop and just drove to the Brentwood
Metrolink station instead. That sure is a quick little drive and a lot drier! Of course, today is also dreary because of the Cardinal's loss to the Dodgers last night. Let's see if Adam Wainwright can help tie up this series. At least the rain is supposed to let up this weekend for the playoff games here. The one bright spot of the Dodgers winning last night is that if the Cards win tonight it guarantees two games here in St. Louis.
So what else is new since I last posted a month ago? Now that it is October, I could talk about the approach of Windows 7, but I think Microsoft already gets enough free publicity.
Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) will be released just a week later on the 29th, and it is completely free! I have not tried it yet myself since I run the 8.04 LTS release Hardy Heron on most systems, but it is supposedly a much faster boot, uses the cleaner Gnome 2.28 and comes preinstalled with
Firefox 3.5.3 (Hardy still runs the 3.0.XX series Firefox by default). I have installed the 3.5.3 version on Hardy and it works great, but I did have to install it manually myself. Remember this is Linux so it is very difficult to do. I had to download one file, type one line in the command shell, and then take 10 seconds to change the Firefox button on my launch bar. Whew, that was tough!
In other local news, I heard the old Circuit City in
Brentwood Square was being replaced with a
Nordstrom's "Rack" clearance store. That should be interesting, and I hope it survives, as long as it doesn't create too much extra traffic (as if Brentwood/Eager/40 isn't crowded enough!). And with the
highway 64 construction supposedly ahead of schedule, the bottleneck there could hopefully clear out some in just a month or two. I know driving from the Brentwood Metrolink station to Eager west of Brentwood Blvd is a hassle trying to cross three lanes of traffic. And finally the
Computer Resale Store on Manchester in Rock Hill now has their own website to promote themselves. It sounds like in this rough economy they are doing okay so that is definitely a good sign (or is it a bad one that people have to buy older, less expensive computers?) And, no, their little Pentium 4 boxes will not run Vista or Windows 7 very well, but they run fine using XP or Ubuntu.
Labels: bargains, geekstuff, linux, stlouis, stlsports, transportation, webstuff
My Early Morning Bus Ride
Today I decided to take along my son's inexpensive camera he received a couple years ago from
Geeks.com. I think it only cost $39 two years ago or so, and it actually takes some pretty good photos. If you look at the lovely bus stop marker here you can see Landmark Place in the background. It is too bad you cannot even tell what buses stop here at this stop unless you already know since first the "Stop Eliminated" and then the "Temporarily Restored" signs render the bus stop sign pretty useless. If you blow up the picture you will see "59" on the lower left signifying Metrobus route #59 stopping here, but it does not mention the ever popular Metrobus #2 (Red Line) which does indeed pass there every hour.
My first shots here are from the corner of Brentwood and Rose at about 7:45am. Nobody else was there so I must have looked weird listening to my MP3 player (a Creative Zen V) and playing with the old digital camera at the side of the road. From here you can see the still defunct
Circuit City at
Brentwood Square which is still sitting vacant. It would be nice to see a new electronics or appliance retailer move into that large space, but with a
Best Buy just down the street on Eager, it may not be the most desirable spot. There sure are a lot of people on Brentwood who are sitting in their cars on their cell phones at 8 in the morning. You'd think having just left home they would not already need to be talking on the phone! I would take pictures of some of them, but that may seem a bit creepy!
Having made it to
Wash U on the bus I am also including a picture of the meeting of Whittaker Hall and the soon to be completed Brauer Hall in the
Engineering School. Why do I include this shot? Well, look at the lovely pink granite on these two expensive buildings. It does not match!! I would think after spending millions on designing these showcase buildings they would actually try to make the stonework match. It is not like Whittaker is very old of a building.
Labels: bargains, geekstuff, stlouis, transportation, wustl
Another Exciting Bus ride
Well. since I love talking about riding buses and trains, I thought I would mention another exciting bus ride I had today. No, not my morning ride on
Metrobus #2, although it was a beautiful morning to be riding down Clayton Road and up Skinker to the Wash U campus. Nor is it about my evening ride on Metrobus #58 from the Clayton
Metrolink station down Clayton Road where I stop and walk home.
No tonight was "Meet the Teacher" night at
Ladue Middle School where my son attends, and after meeting all his very wonderful and talented teachers at the middle school, I was privileged to ride a school bus back to the high school where they let us park for the event. The bus driver was very talkative and pleasant, asking us about the food at the school event, and somehow ending up talking about how there is no good television on late at night worth staying up to watch. It was upon leaving that I realized I was riding the exact same bus my son takes every morning, and was experiencing riding with "John, the Amazing School Bus Driver". I know my son enjoys riding his bus every morning and afternoon, and I can see why. Here is someone who truly enjoys his job, be it driving school children or their parents from place to place. I have noticed the Metrobus drivers vary in their enthusiasm, and all are at the least polite and efficient, but none are as fun as John, the Amazing School Bus Driver.
Labels: schools, stlouis, transportation, wustl
