Hugh's Worthless Blog

With the recent release of albums by both Steven Curtis Chapma n and Casting Crowns , it was time to update my bible verse search engine with the referenced verses from their CD liner notes. Steven's new album, " Beauty Will Rise " is very acoustic and the songs there should be easily performed with just acoustic guitar and piano. Many of the songs would work well for Lenten services building up to Easter (lots of "upcoming hope", "new birth" themes, as well as many songs referenced by Job). " Until the Whole World Hears " is much more generic, and Casting Crowns has put a lot more piano ballads on this album. They may well have set the record for the most verses listed per album too. Whew! That was a lot of verses to write up. We use this tool to help select songs for our contemporary worship service at our church , and hope other people will find it useful too. Note that my tool also searches all the songs by Aaron Shust as well, includi...

We made it to last night's final performance of the Drummer Boy at Grace Church and it was indeed an event. We were first stuck in traffic on northbound McKelvey for a while and did not make it into the building until barely before 8:00pm for the 9:00pm performance. We went with a group of ten and when we looked around in the main sanctuary we could not find any spaces that would accommodate our large group. We even went up to the balcony and looked there, but it was pretty full too, and it was pretty warm as well. The place was packed! We ended up going into their "chapel" which appeared to be an auditorium that would seat about 300, slightly larger then the main sanctuary at our own church. Plus they had very comfortable cushioned seats, similar to the ones at the Faith Fellowship in Alton where we watched Downhere perform. It has also designed in a similar fashion in that it was not very deep, but wide instead, allowing even people in the "back" of the c...

People may say the economy is still in a recession, but you sure could not tell from the crowds you see around here in St. Louis. Last weekend we went to the County Library on Lindbergh and thought we would afterwards cross Lindbergh to Plaza Frontenac to see if they had the gingerbread house display there. We thought "it's Plaza Frontenac -- nobody really SHOPS there!" But we went over last Saturday afternoon and the entire lot was jam packed. The garage underneath had a "Lot Full" sign on it, and we had to wait for a spot in the back lot. When we went in we were saddened to see the gingerbread house display was already gone, but the mall was actually quite busy and patrons were actually carrying filled shopping bags. There was a long line for children to take their pictures with Santa, and even a piano recital in progress. Plaza Frontenac was a popular place! Who is buying anything there? On Monday and Tuesday of this week I walked through the outside St...

A couple interesting news tidbits were announced today. The first is that Firefox 3.5 is now the most used browser on the Internet according to StatCounter , but that is only because they are breaking up all the browsers by version. If you look at the chart, Firefox 3.5 just barely tops IE7 which is dropping quickly as most IE users are switching to IE8. I bet most Vista users are using IE8, and all Win7 users should be using IE8 as well, helping to boost its numbers since any new PC should be running IE8 now. If you add up IE6, IE7 and IE8 they still add up to about 55% where all the Firefox versions add up to about 30%. Safari has slowly increased to about 5% and the "Other" category climbing to nearly 10%, probably fueled by Chrome/Chromium which are not listed specifically. I checked the latest stats on our own very popular Washington University Meteorites site, and on that very scientifically oriented site, over 35% of our users use Firefox and about 57% use IE 6, 7 ...

Yesterday there was an assortment of interesting news regarding the St. Louis area. First off was the St. Louis County Council 's approval to put a new transit bill on the April election to help fund Metro. Unfortunately, the press reports this news more as a threat from Metro to cut services, than a positive initiative to improve and maintain mass transit in the area. I do not know who is in charge of publicity for the initiative, but I hope they realize that people hate threats, and they should accentuate the positives of supporting mass transit as opposed to "give us more money or we'll hurt you". I am definitely going to vote FOR the tax increase myself, but I sure wish they would publicize it differently. Today I even celebrated mass transit by skipping my drive to the Metrolink station and just walking since it was not very cold this morning. I find it very liberating to be able to walk from my house to public transportation to commute to and from work here ...

I know it is not easy to predict the weather here in the midwest, but you must love how the TV news stations like KSDK love to play up the slight possibility that we might be getting snow at some point in the near future. Early last week I remember Cindy Preszler saying it did not look like we would be having a white Christmas, but then by the weekend they had changed their prediction to a possibility of a snow storm on Wednesday the 23rd or perhaps Christmas Eve. Now it looks like it will most likely be all rain for us in St. Louis on both days. They are just trying to drive up viewer numbers for their news programs, but do they really need to even attempt to predict the weather over a week in advance when we all know their odds of getting it correct is pretty slim? As I state in the title, it seems we are as likely to see the Rams win a game this season as we are to see a snow storm in St. Louis in the next few weeks. The Rams actually had a shot this past weekend against Houst...

U PDATE 2023: Jolicloud no longer exists, try something like Chrome OS Flex instead. After looking into the Chromium OS Cherry yesterday, I saw some articles touting another Ubuntu based netbook distro which is more general purpose called Jolicloud. This looks a lot like the Ubuntu Netbook remix and comes in a JolicloudExpress.exe format that will let you install it on your system along with Windows, but being the Linux geek that I am I chose to just download the pre-beta ISO image instead so I could boot the system directly from CD or a USB drive. Then I just used dd to copy the image to a spare 2GB flash drive and boot up my Latitude D630 using it. It did take a little longer to boot than Chromium Cherry since it does load a bit more into memory at boot. But still overall it took less than 40 seconds to come up to the desktop. It auto-detected my wired Ethernet fine, but like Chromium Cherry it also had a little trouble with the Broadcom wifi card in my laptop. However, it has a ...

Yesterday was the last day of finals here at the university , and with most things wrapping up I was reading the latest IT news. Being a big Google and Chrome / Chromium fan, I have been following the Chrome OS news and saw an article saying a copy was available to anyone who signed up at GDGT . So I went there and signed up and downloaded both their VMWare and their USB versions of Chrome OS. Unfortunately I tried writing the USB image files to a flash drive and realized my 2GB flash drive would not work -- it needed a 4GB flash drive which I did not have. Why does Google Chrome need 4GB of space just to boot into a browser? I thought it was supposed to be small and light! So it was time to do some Google searches and see what people said about this predicament. It appears that some fellow with the moniker " Hexxeh " has taken the Chromium OS project and compiled it to fit on a 1GB flash drive, calling it " ChromiumOS Cherry ". I downloaded his image, copied it t...

Yesterday, both Adobe and Mozilla announced they had realized that there are gaping security holes in their products, Adobe in the Acrobat Reader versions 9.2 and earlier and Mozilla in its Firefox browser 3.5.5. Mozilla quickly patched the holes and released version 3.5.6 by the end of the day yesterday. I noticed my PC and Mac both had automatically updated to 3.5.6 when I first started them up and they were patched and ready to go. Adobe's response is not so impressive. They say they will have a patch released by January 12, 2010, and in the meanwhile users should manually disable JavaScript in the Acrobat products. My advice to them would be to ditch Adobe's huge PDF reader and use something lighter and safer like Foxit Reader on Windows, Apple's built-in Preview on a Mac or Evince on a Linux box. Last night was the third installment of NBC's " Sing Off " and we watched it even though we do not watch that much prime time television. We were expecting...

Well, the Ladue Police have been having some good news of late. Besides solving the "non-rape" on McKnight, they tracked and arrested the robbers of the Heartland Bank on Clayton near Warson (near my son's middle school too, where it caused quite a stir!) It seems the bank slipped a tracking device of some sort into the bag with the cash, so it was easy for police forces to track the vehicle and the cash to the culprits. The GPS tracking devices now are small enough to slip into a stack of bills so the criminals do not even know it is there. I think that is pretty cool technology and hopefully will deter these criminals from trying such foolish robberies. It seems in yesterday's case they arrested three people and the actual robbers who entered the bank were women. It seems to be an equal opportunity crime now. As for the small GPS tracking devices, they are also used in "bait cars" that police forces are using to catch auto burglars. I noticed a sign a...

The biggest neighborhood news last week besides the reopening of the highway , was the discovery that the reported rape and burglary along McKnight in Ladue was a complete fabrication . The pictured woman, Virginia Burns, was not even in the area on that evening and made the whole story up. The Ladue Police report they spent about 300 hours investigating the crime, so if use a conservative $50/hr rate that would be $15,000 of police time spent looking into this supposed crime when they could have doing other work. It is hard to imagine what would make someone decide to make up such a story, including pretending to be disabled, and then claiming both a rape and a burglary along a street where very few people even walk during the day, let alone at night. North of the highway there are no sidewalks on McKnight Road. The 400 block where she claimed she was attacked is curved and quite wooded and not pedestrian friendly at all. I would personally only walk along McKnight down by Tilles ...

Today I was back on Metrobus #2 this morning, but it really had not been my plan. As I was leaving the Meridian garage to walk to the Brentwood Metrolink platform, I was suprised to see an Eastbound train sitting there at 7:40, a good nine minutes before it was supposed to arrive (or a good 6 minutes late for the previous train). Before I had to ask the security guard what was up, all the passengers from the train then exited and headed up the ramp towards the bus loop. I had never seen a whole Metrolink train empty, and there must have been 100 people coming out of that train. One of the passengers told me the train was out of service and we would have to take a bus to another station. Luckily, Metrobus #2 was sitting there ready to take off on its regular rounds, so a good 30 or 40 Metrolink passengers crammed onto the bus, still leaving the vast majority standing there waiting. The primary passengers were bound for Wash U , but many were medical campus employees who were hoping to...

They were saying it would be windy today, and unfortunately the weather forecasters were actually correct today. It did not seem all that cold when the wind was not blowing, but when it blew it felt very arctic indeed. At the Brentwood Metrolink platform , I noticed that neither the clear panels nor the concrete columns blocked the wind at all, and everyone there seemed quite cold. You would think having constructed a rain structure to stop precipitation, they could have situated the included clear panels there to better block the wind. Later, while I was walking into our department's lovely building with Chris , one of our fine graduate students and FarmVille expert, I mentioned that it felt like "Chicago without the good pizza" (unless you want to shell out the big bucks and wait in long lines at Pi ). And he, being from Minnesota, heartily agreed that he was not impressed with St. Louis style pizza. My biggest complaint with St. Louis style ( such as Imo's ) ...

Well, the fine folks at Google released the Linux and Mac beta versions of Chrome to the public, so, I, of course, had to go grab a copy for my Ubuntu box. I noticed the version of Chrome that I just installed is 4.0.249.30 whereas the latest Chromium (from ppa.launchpad.net ) on my Ubuntu box is 4.0.367.0 so they are definitely being conservative with the beta release. I can not tell any difference as a user between Chome and Chromium (as there should not be much difference!) so I am not sure which one to use all the time. The version 4 now supports extensions, but I am not sure if I really want to install any, since if I want to load a browser with a bunch of extensions I'll just use Firefox. I prefer to keep Chrome/Chromium as my stripped down, fast commuter browser. And speaking of commuting, it was great that the new highway 64 (aka highway 40) has opened this early in December. I do not even drive the highway to work, but I could tell that Forest Park Parkway looked les...

On last Friday's edition of Student Life , Washington University's student paper they put a big article and graph stating the median household income of the student body is $180,000. Unfortunately, their own graph does not reflect this number, as one other commentor "Bryan" already stated. First off, an incredible 27.39% of the 520 respondents did not know their family's annual household income. But come to think of it, I am not sure how accurately my daughter knows ours either! So only 72.61% of the respondents gave an answer. In the chart they list percentages so that they all add up to this 72.61% when they really should have recalculated them to reflect a full 100% of "survey takers who specified a household income amount". So for their sake I am recomputing the numbers for them: Income Bracket Survey % % of respondents $29,999 or less 4.67% 6.43% $30,000-49,999 3.61% 4.97% $50,000-69,999 7.22% 9.91% $70,000-89,999 6.79% 9.35% $90,000-99,999 7.01...

We have two Dell R900 servers in the seismology research group in our department of the university that were purchased from federal stimulus money . The purpose of this $50,000 of your tax money is to analyze the seismic data of the world and these two servers, with four 6 core processors and 128GB of RAM each can help our seismic researchers do this research. But first we had to recompile their old FORTRAN code to use some type of MPI library so that the code could efficiently be run on all 24 cores of each server. I checked the yum repositories for Red Hat Enterprise 5.3 and installed openmpi, mvapich and mvapich2 thinking one of those libraries would be good enough for our graduate students to use. But no, they wanted to use MPICH2 (luckily open source, of course). Okay, instead of just running a couple yum lines, I would have to grab external RPM files and see if that worked. We found the necessary Red Hat 5 RPM files at koji.fedoraproject.org , and grabbed the mpich2, mpich2-do...

Since this is the Friday before the new highway I-64 reopens, I thought I would publish a transportation related post on the unusual event in the Brentwood Metrolink station I experienced. It was just the end of a normal day and the westbound train stopped at the Brentwood stop as usual and the group of people exited and all walked up towards the Meridian parking garage . As we waited for the daily elevator roulette game ("which one will it be?") it appeared the winner for the day was the far left elevator. When the door opened someone got out but was looking down when they said "watch your step" and slowly walked out of the elevator. This piqued everybody's curiosity as one patron said something like "oh, that's disgusting". We all looked inside to see one very large human or canine fecal deposit resting peacefully and proudly in the middle of the elevator. One patron said something like "I don't think I can deal with that", and s...

Since our praise band 's Advent concert featuring Andrew Peterson's " Behold the Lamb of God " is now over, we now must heavily promote the upcoming children's Christmas play at our church, Mt. Zion United Methodist in unincorporated West County near Creve Coeur and Maryland Heights. My wife actually wrote the script and plays the piano accompaniments, which I actually recorded on my laptop using Audacity and a Logitech USB microphone (I had to have some techno-geeky content in here!) So we have decided to post the three church plays she has written on their very own Google web site: http://sites.google.com/site/freechurchplays/ So even if we don't have a full house, perhaps some other churches somewhere can use and modify her material to help perform their own productions. The site includes the MP3 files of the piano accompaniments she played from the Methodist hymnal which should be public domain, but we could not include the Mariah Carey or Josh Groban so...

The daily builds of the open source Chromium browser (upon which Google Chrome is based) has a PPA (Personal Package Archive) for anyone to use to try out Chromium on an Ubuntu Linux desktop. The instructions for installing it can be found here . I am running version 4.0.260.0 (Ubuntu build 33244) on a Hardy Heron (8.04.2) desktop and it seems to run very smoothly, especially using Google apps like GMail and Google docs. It does not seem to like my Flash plugin and keeps crashing on it, but that may be more of a benefit than a problem! I know the KSDK.com and StlToday.com sites are always overrun with extremely annoying Flash ads these days and I am happy for them not to run. I will run Flash apps on my Firefox browser on my laptop where I do my most mission critical Flash-based tasks like maintaining my Farmville and Farm Town farms on Facebook . I also just received a Google Wave account and some invites today and now I have to figure out how it is actually useful. It's ni...

Since I am never one to pass up a free deal, I recently received a mailing at work for a free 4GB USB flash drive or SDHC card from a place called " Micro Center " which just opened up in the Brentwood Promenade. I was then not too surprised to receive a similar (but not exactly the same) mailing from the same place at home. This sounded too good to be true, especially since it is located directly on my way home from the Brentwood Metrolink station to our house. So I thought I would stop by yesterday and use my first free coupon to check the place out. I was not sure how big it was going to be, if it was going to be smallish like the old "InkStop" places that just closed down, or more like a Radio Shack/Apple Store or what. I was surprised to see that it was over half the size of a Best Buy type "big box" store, and half the store seemed to be filled with accessories, cables and computer parts -- items of which Best Buy usually carries only a small selec...

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 Precis...

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 ...

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 ...

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 t...

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 fa...

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 y...

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 experiencin...

I finally did it and turned in my Yellow Washington University parking permit and am now completely mass transit dependent. Now that my daughter is enrolled here as a student and no longer working at our library , I had no reason to drive as we had been doing all summer (since she was not eligible for a free U-Pass as a temporary summer employee) . We will now save $40 a month on parking, take one more car off the mid-county roads during rush hour, and save a spot in the university's parking lots and garages for other folks. Previously this past Spring I had been driving to the Metrolink garage in Brentwood, but now I am even stopping that and just walking to the bus and either taking #58 to the the Clayton Metrolink, or taking #2 from Brentwood all the way to campus. If we want to keep the buses rolling we should all try to use them! I do not understand why the Metro buses always seem so empty, and yet the Metrolink trains are always crowded (primarily with Wash U/BJC folks). I ...

Well, previously I had posted I could get CAT6 cables cheaper at Provantage , but since we need a bunch more for the start of a new school year, I went to Provantage and they have raised the price of their cheapest 7' CAT6 cables to $3.59 each. That is a good price but not as low as they had before. I know we get free shipping at CDWG but their cheapest 7' CAT6 cable was a Tripp-Lite cable at $5.68! So I found some BYTECC cables for $1.99 each at NewEgg.com (with a quantity discount). Even with almost $20 in shipping, since I was buying 30 of them it was a lot cheaper than the $5.68 with free shipping I would get at CDWG or the $3.59 plus about $9 shipping form Provantage. Hey, I'm saving the university money, and they need it so they build more multi-million dollar buildings covered in pink granite! On another bargain note, my buddies at Geeks.com are again having a free shipping sale. This time they have Xbox 360 bundles which looks cheaper than the deal my son got f...

Last night we took the whole family up to the Faith Fellowship just north of Alton, Illinois, for a great concert by the Canadian band, downhere . Our church youth group was planning on going to Rock The River the weekend before down at the arch, and my son in particular was excited to attend. However, when I checked it out on-line it seemed they did not even have a lineup schedule ready and the whole event lasted for seven hours (2:30 to 9:30pm). Even though they had an impressive sounding lineup (Flyleaf, Skillet, Hawk Nelson, Red), seven hours outside at the arch with many thousands of other folks is not my idea of a fun Sunday, so I was open to an alternative. Once I found out downhere was playing in Alton the following week, I thought that was a better idea, just 2-3 hours inside with one band I knew was extremely talented and should put on a great show. And at only $10 per person (purchased on-line from itickets.com ), it was not too bad of a deal either! Although the drive was...