More Overpriced Mid-County Homes! It Ain't 2005 No More!
A new house nearby
popped on the market in the last couple weeks and this one was of particular interest to me, since it stands on the lot where our old former house stood! The address now is
9125 Pine Avenue in Brentwood, but when we lived there it was 9121 Pine, a 1950's 1800 square foot 3 bedroom brick ranch, much like the one we live in now just a mile or so away in Richmond Heights. After we sold that house in the mid 1990's, it was purchased by a couple who then sold it several years later to
Kingbridge Homes who was building a
bunch of "teardowns" or "fill-ins" in western Brentwood in the early to mid 2000's. Our old house sat on a double lot in Parkridge, so when it sold they
demolished the house, split the lot in half and built two large blocky homes in its place. So when we drove by the other day and I saw a "For Sale" sign pop up in front of it, I had to see what they were asking for it. I was rather surprised to see it listed at $774,700 which seems rather high, but when I checked its sales record on the
County web site, I see it sold for $815K in January 2005 back at the peak of the housing bubble. They must not have checked the sale price on the Kingbridge built home on the corner of Lawn and High School (
9102 Lawn) that was
for sale forever. That one sold at an incredible
$921K in July 2005, and they had been listing it for sale forever the last couple years until it finally sold June 2011 for $560K. Its listing price went from $849K to $795K to $599K. If they can sell that house on Pine for over $600K I will truly be shocked. It is a nice, newer house in a fantastic Brentwood location and close to the very highly rated Brentwood schools, but there are some very nice
$300 to $400K homes nearby that would also put you in that same great location and school district. Or for
under $400K you can live in our neighborhood a mile north in the Ladue School district. Hey, I can find
two different homes in the $700K range in Ladue Schools in Richmond Heights selling for less than that house on Pine that I would rather have.
I also need to take a camera with me when we walk around our our abode to take a shot of the new teardown being slowly finished in our neighborhood. That is one weird looking house with some bizarre brickwork! All we need is another beautiful evening here in St. Louis now that the time has changed!
Labels: economy, housing, schools, stlouis, transportation, webstuff
Numbers Cannot Lie, But People Can!
On this past Saturday, I received two note cards in the mail about the Proposition 1 tax increase for the
Ladue School District. The first was from the district itself and spelled out the same old facts I had already heard. The second piece was much more interesting, a flyer from
Takebackladueschools.com that spelled out exactly how much my tax would increase for next year and then tried to convince me to vote NO for the proposition. I flipped over the card to read the arguments, and was surprised to see some which seemed to contradict the well known facts given the on the
district proposition site.
The first claim was pretty surprising -- declining enrollment. I knew as a fact the middle school had the largest enrollment in years while my son was just there, so I thought I would check the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education site which should know the facts. They had a nice synopsis of every school district in the state, including one for
Ladue. I have included a screen capture from the site as my first picture for this posting. In 2007 the district enrollment was 3522, then 3580, 3701, 3799 and then 3939 for 2011. That sure does not look like declining enrollment to me! That looks more like an 11.8% increase over 4 years. On the TakeBack website it claims that this year "enrollment actually declined unexpectantly". I am curious what this new enrollment number is and why the site did not give any sources. Somehow I doubt enrollment has gone down by the 400 more students than we had in 2007, but if it has, I sure wish the site would give a source. I would be willing to believe the site more if it would tell me where they found their numbers, since if I look at the official numbers from the DESE increasing enrollment sure looks like a problem to me.
I will skip the second argument and go to the third which is "failure to respond to the economic downturn." That one also seemed strange since I distinctly remember the
student outrage last year when
a bunch of teachers were let go and told so in the middle of the school day. Although that was definitely not the way to terminate employees, it does demonstrate that just last year the district cut the budget by over $5 million to try to respond to the economic downturn. I also saw
another article with an interesting graph in the news recently on StLToday. It shows all the county districts and shows how much their operating revenue per student has increased in the past 4 school years. Ladue is one of the ones near the bottom with a 1.55% increase over 4 years. It is hard to argue that the district is undergoing "financial mismanagement" and "compulsive spending of our money" when it is hardly increasing its per student expenditures at all, especially when other districts have increased theirs substantially.
Another interesting number I saw them spin on the TakeBack website was the $850K median home value for the city of Ladue, and then comparing that to the $150K "state average". They want to argue that even though our tax rate was significantly lower than the state average, since our valuation was so much higher we are still paying a lot more taxes per household. Whereas their argument sounds valid, the numbers are not, since the median home value across the whole district is much lower than $850K and we should really compare it more to similar suburban county districts (Clayton, Brentwood, Rockwood, etc) where the median home values are also much higher than the state average.
Here is an article which gives real numbers, whereas, yet again the TakeBack site gives no sources for its information. So here we can see that, yes, the median value in the Ladue district ($408K) may be substantially higher than in Parkway for example ($223.5K), but it is not 5 times as much as implied by their numbers ($850K vs $150K). I sure wish the site had given some real numbers instead of pulling numbers out of a hat. It makes the entire site seem unbelievable when it keeps just claiming things without any facts or sources. In fact I found the
ACTUAL median value for the
city of Ladue from the
U. S. Census Bureau and it is $773K not the $850K claimed. It took me 15 seconds to find the real number. Why can they not do this? Incidentally the median value for the state of Missouri is $137.7K which is even lower than the site stated and actually helps their weak argument here.
The simple knowledge that so many facts on this site are incorrect and gives no sources to back them up, makes their entire argument to vote NO very weak. I personally do not want to pay higher property taxes, but looking at the known facts and numbers from just about everywhere else, I cannot see how this TakeBack site can be believed at all. I would rather pay a few hundred dollars more per year to make sure our top school district remains among the top districts in the state, than to believe the unsupported claims on the TakeBack site and jeopardize the quality of our schools.
Labels: economy, housing, schools, stlouis, taxes, webstuff
My Geeky Whitney Houston Story
With Whitney Houston's untimely death this past week, it made me think back to the mid 80's when I first heard her amazing voice. At that time my sound system consisted of a component stereo system with a turntable, a cassette deck and a FM tuner connected to a Sony amplifier and with my old Synergistic speakers from high school. But by late 1985 I had heard a new technology was coming out, digitized music on optical disks where there was no pops, crackles or tape hiss to hear and incredible dynamic range (not like the compressed stuff on the radio.) So in 1986 my wife and I purchased our very first CD player, a standalone Teac deck we purchased at a now defunct appliance store near Crestwood Plaza back when people actually visited that mall. As a full-time grad student at the time, the CD deck was quite an extravagance, but as a audio geek, I just had to have one to try out the digital technology.
On the night we purchased the CD player, however, I knew I should purchase some music to listen on it, and I wanted to buy something fitting for this new technology. So I visited a record store in the mall and purchased one classical CD, (the New York Philharmonic playing a Beethoven Symphony, I believe) but then I also wanted to purchase a popular music CD. I mostly listened to typical pop/rock FM music back then (
Y98 FM St. Louis!) and the one voice I knew who could bring justice to this new technology was a young new singer who had a few incredible singles like "Saving All My Love for You" and "How Will I Know" which I had heard on the radio. So the first popular CD I ended up purchasing was
Whitney Houston's infamous debut album. Having heard her first few hits over the airwaves, I knew she sounded good, but hearing them on crystal clear, digital CD audio in our own Dogtown apartment was nothing short of spectacular. I am guessing she probably helped to sell CD players when they were first taking off in the 80's. I know I made a cassette copy of her CD for the car back then (and for playing on my original Sony cassette Walkman, remember those?) and once you heard the non-hissing, fully digitized CD version, my cassette copies just did not do justice to Whitney's incredibly powerful and dynamic voice.
You have to remember nobody had CD burners at home until the year 2000 at the earliest and MP3 players did not exist until around 2000 as well. These were back in the days before digital piracy, when if you did "pirate" a friend's record (yes, vinyl) it meant recording a hissing magnetic tape cassette, prone to physical problems and loss of sound quality over time. And if you wanted to copy someone's 45 minute album, it required a minimum of 45 minutes of your own time, as you had to put the album on your turntable and load your cassette deck and time things just right (don't forget the 5 second "leader" on the cassette!) We thought Dolby B noise reduction was great, and suddenly with the advent of compact discs there was no noise at all!
And now with Whitney Houston's passing in 2012, I can find all of her songs and music videos on
YouTube to watch and listen to whenever I so feel inclined, all in pure easy access digital format. Plus with utilities like
YouTube Downloader it is all too easy to just grab the media and save it and put it on a portable media player to take with you anywhere. I wonder how many people have watched and listened to her music in the past week without paying a dime or having to even get up off their behinds. Just reach into your pocket, pull out your phone or MP3 player and grab her music online. It does not seem the same as back in 1986 when had to I make my way to a record store to pick up her first CD and then take it home to play on my brand new CD player. The magic is gone in so many different ways.
Labels: freeware, geekstuff, stlouis
The Missouri Dept of Labor shows they are Technical Idiots
Yesterday the
Missouri Department of Labor sent me a 9 page long form I had to fill out, just to make sure the company I earned a whopping $850 from in 2010 does not need to pay unemployment tax. I started filling it out when I noticed it said I could e-mail the form to them instead. Great, that sounds easier! So I went to the site and found the
PDF form that I then downloaded, filled-in and saved as a PDF file on my hard drive. They also needed any 1099 forms I may have from the company, and since I received one from 2010 I scanned that to a PDF along with the front page of their form that I had signed. So I thought I was done and could send off the form and go on with more exciting things on a Saturday morning. Wrong! The message bounced since the Missouri MODES-4389 PDF at 300K and my scanned PDF at 4.1MB together were too large for their mail server. Fine, I thought I would rescan my 1099 and my signature in black and white and at 300 dpi instead of 600 dpi and then send it off. So I did and found my PDF shrink down to a lovely, smaller 560K. Both files together were now under 1MB combined. So I sent off this message and what do you think happened? That's right my message with 1MB in attachments bounced as being "too large". Okay, if The Missouri Department of Labor tells you that one of the options of sending this useless form to them is by using e-mail, they should have an e-mail server that will accept an attachment that is 1MB in size!! I know I get upset when people in
my department in the
university send 40MB attachments to 50 people within our own building, but 1MB attachments are fine by me. When we upgraded to our latest Ubuntu Linux mail server, I bumped up the maximum message size from the default 10MB (in Postfix) to 64MB as we had set on the previous sendmail server. I would think the IT folk at the State of Missouri would be smart enough to realize that if they expect anyone to e-mail in these forms they also must increase the maximum message size of their stupid Exchange server.
Labels: geekstuff, linux, taxes, webstuff, wustl
6 GB of RAM Without a Home and More Geeky Anecdotes
One of the
faculty members in
our department recently needed to purchase a
Mac Pro for his research work and he wanted one loaded with a bunch of memory. So we went to order it to see how much Apple wanted to load it up with 64GB of RAM. The base system started with 6GB of RAM, and to increase it to 64GB with our academic discount cost a staggering $3,200 more. Needless to say I knew that was ridiculous, and by checking first
Crucial.com (to find the exact memory we needed) and then
NewEgg I was able to order eight 8GB ECC DDR3 DIMM's for about $1,000 total. That saved over $2,000 off that NASA grant compared to if I had been lazy and just purchased it from Apple with the system (see, I'm saving US tax payers' money!) And after installing the memory, I realize I now have six 1GB ECC DDR3 DIMM's that I could put somewhere. But the problem is, I have nowhere to put them! Since they are ECC memory, they only fit in workstation or server class motherboards that support DDR3 ECC memory, and we only have so many of those systems new enough to support DDR3. Our fairly new
Dell PowerEdge T310 does take DDR3 ECC memory, but it already has 8GB installed as two 4GB DIMM's so it has 4 of its 6 slots empty. It almost seems a shame to put 1GB DIMM's in those slots, though, since filling up the 4 slots only pushes it from 8GB to 12GB. Our
PowerEdge T300 only has 2GB of RAM so it would make more sense there, but it is a DDR2 motherboard so we are out of luck there too. I guess I may have to resort to selling it on eBay or something!
On a somewhat related note I noticed I really should fsck the filesystems on a couple USB 2.0 mounted drives on the PowerEdge T300 system and I Googled for time estimates and could not find anything. So I thought I would report it took almost exactly 20 minutes to fsck two different 1TB ext2 filesystems on
Western Digital My Book Mirror 2TB drives connected to our PowerEdge T300 running
Ubuntu 10.04 (amd64). Both 2 disk enclosures are set up as a RAID 1 mirror by default and both filesystems are about 41% full. I was hoping it would not take too long and I am glad it did not.
My last geeky anecdote is over an old UPS I just noticed was no longer holding any charge. It is a
CyberPower CPS1500AVR and when I checked our sales receipts I realized the beast was 8 years old so of course the batteries were dead. It has a convenient front panel where you can replace the batteries, but trying to find the exact ones to purchase were a pain. The CyberPower web site has a
battery replacement guide, but all it calls them are "BB Battery - BP7-12" and it says it needs 4 of them. But they do not tell you where to buy them. If you Google "BP7-12 battery" you get a bunch of hits with prices ranging from $15 to $40. Which should I pick? I typically purchase for the university through
CDWG.com,
NewEgg.com or some times
Provantage.com. CDWG had a
Battery-Biz BP7-12 for about $37, but neither NewEgg nor Provantage had anything. Multiplying the $37 x 4 put me up to $148 in batteries for that 8 year old UPS, so instead I gave up and ended up just buying a brand spanking new APC Backup-UPS Pro 1500 (BR1500G) which NewEgg has with free shipping for
$193.99. For less than $50 more I bought a brand new APC unit, and you can always find batteries for those!
Labels: bargains, geekstuff, linux, webstuff, wustl
Payday Loan Calculator - A Ripoff Any Way You Look At It
I actually received an e-mail from the
Texas Senate Committee on Business & Commerce looking for a
simple payday loan calculator to post on a site they were developing. Being a fan on
on-line calculators, and not a fan of payday loans, that sounded like a fun little project to do. I took my old "
Find the Missing Value" calculator, and modified it a little so that now it is adapted more for the
common payday or auto title loans where you pay a flat fee to receive an advance on your paycheck for a certain number of days. Using a typical $17.50 per $100 loaned amount (from
Consumers Union) if this amount is over a 14 day bi-weekly work period, it would amount to an annual interest rate of 422.8%. In today's market with record low mortgage rates, that is a pretty staggering percentage. Obviously the Texas Senate Committee on Business & Commerce thinks so too!
Labels: calculators, mortgages, webstuff
Interesting Refinancing Proposal by Columbia University Economist
Since I took the week off, I am getting to catch up on my reading, and the latest book I have been reading is Bill Clinton's recent book, "
Back to Work". One interesting proposal he brought up was a mortgage refinancing proposal by
Glenn Hubbard and Chris Mayer of
Columbia University.
They propose that any current mortgage being held by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac should be allowed to refinance at current market rates for only a modest refinancing fee. Clinton mentions in his book the closing costs would be a flat 0.4% of the loan amount and I did finally find that amount buried in the very lengthy description of Hubbard's proposal. Their
Columbia University site has a whole ton of information and data available but it definitely took some wading through to get to the details.
Having learned about this, it was now time for me to, of course, compose
a simple calculator to see how this would compare to a more conventional refinancing where consumers often must pay 1 to 2% of the loan amount in total closing costs. This is the main reason that we personally have not refinanced in the past year or so, since even with record low mortgage rates, our loan is so small and our rate is already low enough, that it is very difficult to justify refinancing to lower our rate just a bit more and reduce our payment just slightly as well. However, if the upfront costs were lower, many more people like myself would refinance, which would give us more spending money every month to help purchase more or invest more, both of which would help the economy. There are many such people as ourselves who have fairly stable jobs and good credit, but for whom refinancing again (since we did so in 2009) does not make that much sense.
Labels: calculators, economy, housing, mortgages, webstuff
Latest Geeks.com Purchase: BLK-KY-07 MP3 Player
Some kind soul on the internet sent me $25 via PayPal for my
financial calculator website, and told me I should go buy something for myself. Normally I do not really purchase too much frivolous crap for myself, but I received my daily message from
Geeks.com and noticed they were offering
Free Shipping on almost everything, no minimum purchase! Included was their '
USB Sport MP3 Player' (BLK-KY-07) which sounded like a cool idea since I am one of those many people who go through ear buds all the time with my MP3 players, and this looked more durable. Since the MP3 player was only $14.49 with free shipping and I could also get a
2GB microSD card at Geeks.com for only $8.49 more, I thought, why not, I am worth it! For less than the $25 PayPal payment I received, I could purchase both items and have them shipped to my house for my personal enjoyment.
The package arrived yesterday at our house in an unusually large cardboard box. I was afraid they had my order wrong since I knew it was only a MP3 player and a microSD card, but the box was large enough to hold a couple pairs of shoes! Luckily the order was correct, and I also received a bunch of air pillows to pop for fun. I thought I should test out my new acquisition right away. So I put the microSD card in the headset, attached the included USB cable to it, and then plugged it in my computer. The very poorly written instruction card that came with it told me to wait 8 hours, but I was not going to do that! I knew the set must be getting power via the USB cable so I tried pushing the buttons and mounting the microSD card, but neither would work. Out of a whim, I thought I would try one of my own USB to mini USB cables, and sure enough, once I plugged it in using my own cable, a little red LED lit up and the 2GB flash card showed up on my computer. So anybody else who buys this thing should realize the included USB cable is a piece of junk! Just use one of your own. I will now also describe the proper usage of the BLK-KY-07 MP3 player.
While it is hooked up via USB to my computer it appears it will play the MP3 music with the ON/OFF in either position. However once you disconnect it from the USB cable, the switch must be set to the ON position to operate at which point the red LED turns on. When you depress the Play/Pause button the music starts and the LED flashes on and off to let you know it is playing. When you click Play/Pause again the music stops and the LED stays solid red. I noticed the Play/Pause button has a delay of a second or so in response which throws you off a little, but for $14.49 what do you expect? The other two buttons are Next and Previous buttons which also act as volume up and volume down. While the headset in on your head with the three buttons on top, the button on your right side is the Next/Volume Up button, and the button on the left side is the Previous/Volume Down button. You just have to hold down the buttons to change volumes, and just click them once to move forward and back between MP3 files. The sound quality is pretty mediocre, but since this is a $15 "sports" model I was not expecting audiophile quality. It does its job and was a good value. Since the shipping was free now is the time to try one out yourself. If you already have a microSD card all you need is the $15 headset. I found the
identical item on eBay for exactly the same price. I also noticed I could have purchased a 2GB microSD on eBay for
$3 to $4, but I was willing to spend the extra $5 to get the SD adapter and plus give Geeks.com my business. They send me an e-mail ad every day, and I always read it if just for the entertainment value. I love their e-mail ads and want them to stay in business!
Labels: bargains, calculators, geekstuff, webstuff
St. Louis County School District Tax Rates, Going Up Of Course
It was
just last year when I was mentioning I should not be complaining because our school taxes were going up by only 4%. Of course, I spoke too soon. I just received the latest
Ladue School District newsletter explaining how our school tax rate could be going up by $.49 per assessed $100 (if the proposition passes), which translated means an increase of 15.8% over what we paid in 2011. However, our district will still actually have the lowest tax rate in the county, but that is only because all the other districts with low rates have been jacking up their
tax rates as well. I thought I needed a
nifty online calculator to figure out the increase, so I wrote one, not only for Ladue, but for most of the other school districts in the area who increased their rates substantially last year. I also found the
median home values for all the districts to see how much a median home in each district would see as an increase. The actual increase for us personally will only be a few hundred dollars a year, and since my son is still in school there, I do not mind the extra cost to benefit his education. However, I can see that the tax increase may be a problem for some seniors in the district on fixed incomes. Not everybody who lives in the Ladue School district is filthy, stinking rich as many people like to believe. It will be interesting to see how everybody in the district votes in April. The district passed an increase for 2010, but that was only a 4% increase, not 15.8%.
Labels: calculators, housing, schools, stlouis, taxes, webstuff
My Son's MP3 Players: Then and Now
It is time to finish up Christmas shopping for the year, and like a good little geek I was doing it online. My parents sent us a check to purchase gifts for our children, and my high school age son decided his two year old iPod needed to be replaced. Actually it has lost its left channel on the headphone jack so it was time to spend my parents' money and buy their oldest grandson a new iPod media player. He wanted the 4th generation
32GB black iPod Touch so I had to do some quick surfing to see where to order it. I know the local
Galleria Apple Store, the
Brentwood Micro Center, Best Buy and Target are all selling them for $299.99, but we would also have to pay Missouri and city sales tax (both Brentwood and Richmond Heights have the same steep
total sales tax of 8.425%.) The total with tax would be $325.27 plus the fun of visiting a local retailer during this holiday season. So I looked online and, sure enough,
Amazon.com was selling them for $269.99 with free shipping and no sales tax, a savings of over $55. Plus I get to sit here at home and let the delivery people bring it to my front door. To calculate your own savings you can use my
shopping local versus online calculator that I wrote last year.
That means I can probably soon be using my son's older iPod Touch (with one working audio channel) since I always inherit his old technology. Not only am I using his old cell phone, and his old digital camera, but I have both of his older MP3 players, a
1GB Creative Zen V and a
256MB Creative Muvo N200. That N200 still works fine after six years, even after he dropped it in the toilet when he was in elementary school. It is hard to believe a 256MB MP3 player cost $60 back in 2005, but I found the NewEgg receipt in my GMail and that is what we paid for it. Frankly it plays music just as well as my son's new $300 iPod Touch will, and it is more portable too! And replacing the battery on it is so simple, since I just open it up and slide in a charged up a NiMH rechargeable AAA. I was just using it today to listen to some tunes while riding home on the MetroLink. For a 10 minute ride from the Wash U Danforth campus to the
Richmond Heights station parking lot, I really do not need 32GB of music, and 256MB is plenty big, even if the new iPod will have 128 times more space.
 |
| High tech media player, circa 2005 |
Labels: bargains, calculators, stlouis, taxes, transportation, webstuff, wustl
