Hugh's Worthless Blog

Well, yesterday since the wintry weather closed school for both my children, I decided to stay home too and also miss the first day of the "new I-64" switchover which coincided with icy roads. That sounded like a bad combination to me: having people drive new routes they had never driven before in rush hour with ice on the roads. That's what those billion PTO days I have are for! So I was able to spend quality time with my kids, which meant badgering them about being productive and beating them in a game of Scrabble. The other fun activity we did yesterday was wait for the "early decision" results for my daughter's college application to my grad school alma mater and current employer, Washington University in St. Louis . It appears they like sending their acceptance "package" using UPS, and one girl from her high school received her package around noon, but we did not receive anything that early. Luckily, due to the wonders of the Internet, we wer...

Okay, I know everybody is hurting during this holiday season due to the depressed economy, but I am going to make an appeal for one of my favorite charitable organizations, and I do not mean myself! Even though we are not doing so wonderfully ourselves right now, we are able to stay ahead of our bills and maintain both our homes (until we are able to sell one of them next year!) My position at Washington University is at least reasonably secure even given the university's large drop in their endowment so we are grateful for not having to worry too much ourselves. The same cannot be said for many of the charitable organizations in the area which have seen huge losses of donations in the past several months. One of our favorites is Kingdom House here in South St. Louis city. They provide a lot of needed services to low income families in their St. Louis city neighborhood, from day care and youth services, to helping people find employment and helping take care of seniors. We have al...

It is exactly one week away from Free Shipping Day , Thursday December 18. On that day there are a bunch of online retailers who are offering free shipping on all purchases with guaranteed deilvery by December 25th. And it is not just little, rinky dink retailers either, but includes Dell, Apple, Circuit City, Sears and Target. Why drive to a mall or shopping center when you can shop online with free shipping?

Hey, I have not added a new online calculator to my site in a while, and since I saw this article on Yahoo! Finance , it seemed like time to add a new one . A recent study from the Journal of Financial Planning ran thousands of simluations to find the ideal retirement rates for different individuals of differing ages and income levels. It also takes into account how much the individuals already have in existing retirement savings. They came up with a large chart of figures for people to see how much they should be saving. I have taken this table and compiled it into a simple PHP calculator that anybody can use to see what their savings rate should be. Remember that the savings rate includes both what you contribute and whatever your employer might match. Try it out and see what I am talking about.

Okay, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are over now, so what next? I was curious what would happen to their websites after those specific days were over, and, of course, both sites are up and they both have special deals listed. And my e-mail inboxes continue to be bombdarded with holiday sales ads infinitum, including my favorites from Geeks.com and NewEgg.com . NewEgg now has a "Holiday Wish List Sweepstakes" so I went ahead and signed up for it, and I always have to check out Geeks.com's special deal of the day (rather like Woot.com) . I did notice one misleading item at Geeks.com where they advertised a 2GB four USB flash drive set for only $7.99 . I then had to click on it to realize it was for four 512MB drives for a total of 2GB, not four 2GB drives like I had thought. Frankly, although 512MB flash drives are pretty much obsolete now and getting harder to find, they are typically big enough for most people's uses. But with 1GB and 2GB drives for under $10, man...

Time to switch gears completely and talk about what happened this weekend in St. Louis football, from high school to college to professional. This was the weekend when we saw local high school teams excel, the state powerhouse football program have one half of a great game, and our highly compensated professional team fall flat on its embarrassing face. Let's start with High School football. For the past decade, St. Louis area high schools routinely make it to the state finals to get beaten by some team from the Kansas City area. But this was the year in a while for not just the St. Louis area, but for one area district to actually win two state championships! The Hazelwood School District is now the home to both the Missouri Class 6 and the Class 5 champions with the Hazelwood Central Hawks and the Hazelwood East Spartans. East won first on Friday night with a final second "Hail Mary" touchdown to win their championship over Raytown South, and then on Saturday Central w...

I have enjoyed listening to a number of great new Christian pop/rock albums this year, with my favorite one of 2008 still being Downhere's Ending is Beginning . The final album of the year I am awaiting is Jeremy Camp's Speaking Louder Than Before , which is released next week, on November 25. I already have my copy pre-ordered through FamilyChristian.com , and I have been listening to both the single "There Will Be A Day" and the title track "Speaking Louder Than Before", which was available as a free download when I pre-ordered. Anyone can listen to both of these tracks on Jeremy's MySpace site . I am still trying to figure out all the lyrics he is singing! This sounds like it will be a good album, probably better than "Beyond Measure" which I still liked. You can see a video preview of the album on Vimeo .

I read in my latest copy of PC World about a really neat financial application you can download and use (now for free) called Financial Fate . It runs under any Windows platform and analyzes all your accounts and expenses and projects how you will end up in a long term scenario. It is quite comprehensive and allows you to change numbers for various "what if" scenarios to project your net worth for years to come. The company used to sell it for $69.95 but now it is completely free. So now the only question is how this company will make any money from this very useful software.

There are a lot of great free sites and software out there, with many that everybody knows (sites like Google, Yahoo, etc and software like Firefox, iTunes and RealPlayer), but also a lot of more hidden jewels that most people do not know. One really important thing people need to do is backup their documents, and most people do not do much of it or else they use one of my very easy techniques, e-mailing documents as attachments between your GMail , Yahoo! mail and other assorted free mail services. That works but it really is not the most effective way of doing it. One mail service that I like that lets you also organize up to 5GB of storage space online is Inbox.com . They display your files in a very easy to follow hierarchy and you can upload and download everything very easily using a browser. Another free e-mail service that provides a similar storage is GMX , which actually has a snazzier interface, but I find a little more confusing to use. Plus it's storage limit is only...

Well, it has been two weeks now since the election, and I am glad the political ads are no longer filling the airwaves, the mail box and the voice mail (darn robo-calls!). Now the broadcast TV stations can go back to what they had been advertising non-stop for the past year - DTV transition messages. Now we get to have a daily countdown until the day that analog transmissions end. Is this exciting, or what? We already purchased out two converter boxes, but we are wondering if we can get two more $40 coupons since we have a new house and a new address where we could receive them. We actually could use them since we are a cable-free, satellite free household. The release of Ubuntu 8.10 arrived without much fanfare, and I have left all our systems at 8.04.1 since it is a long term release. I did not see any reason to upgrade when 8.04.1 seems so stable and will be supported for 3 years until 4/2011(whereas 8.10 will only be supported for 18 months until 4/2010.) We have more and more U...

Wow, it has been a while since my last post! Better put something up here for my huge readership base (yes, both of you!) We received both of our $40 rebate cards from the government a couple weeks ago and purchased our digital tuners for our old TV's from Wal-Mart . Anybody can get the rebate cards and Wal-Mart did accept them (although the cashier had never seen one before). We got the RCA version which seems to work just fine. It is amazing how crystal clear the picture can be on our old televisions! Since our net cost was about $10 each that is a pretty good deal, especially for the television which is really an old Viewsonic 17" monitor with a $40 analog video to VGA converter I bought at Geeks.com . They don't sell my older model but here is an equivalent TV tuner box . And speaking of Geeks.com they are again having their special $1.99 shipping deal on orders over $49.99. Just enter the code SHIP4LESS while the offer lasts! So if you have some old CRT monitors l...

I was looking online for a good place to purchase both " We Need Each Other " by Sanctus Real and " Never Going Back to OK " by The Afters and found the best deal at Family Christian Stores which is selling "We Need Other" at a reasonable $8.97, and "Never Going Back to OK" is amazingly only $5.00. Even having to pay tax and $2.99 discount shipping puts the total at $17.93 for both CD's. The After's CD comes with instant online access to the full album and I can listen to the new Sanctus Real album on New Release Tuesday so waiting on the slow discount shipping is no big deal. I had received an e-mailed promotion code from Independent Bands which would have saved me 10% on any order, and with The Afters costing $8.99 and Sanctus Real costing $8.59 that seemed like another good option. However, they did not have an option to let me pre-order " We Need Each Other " so I went with FamilyChristian instead. Plus ordering "Nev...

It's 2008, and I was quite happy to see both Missouri and West Virginia win their bowl games, although I was hoping they would both win their final games and face each other in the BCS bowl. Of course, if I had written that here in my blog days before that final weekend I would have jinxed them for sure. WVU had a decent chance against Pitt even close to the end since the game was fairly close, but they failed to finish any of their drives with a TD. Why did they look so much better against Oklahoma than Pitt? It's hard to imagine. But moving on to more geeky matters, the latest distro I have tried and now installed on one of the older systems in my office is the brand, spanking new PCLinuxOS "MiniMe" 2008 LiveCD. This is a 300MB download that runs as a LiveCD but also includes an installer for installing PCLinuxOS on your hard drive. There are not too many applications included, but since you have Synaptic and an internet connection, you can install whatever you lik...