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...