Hugh's Worthless Blog

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...

One of my co-workers just received a lovely Dell Precision T3400 with an on-board Intel RAID controller (ICH9) so he bought two 750GB drives to run it as a RAID 1 mirror. So we activated the RAID in the BIOS setup screen and let it rip! Uh oh, Vista started up but then the ugly BSOD appeared and it rebooted again. Whenever we deactivated the RAID controller the PC was happy, but once we enabled it, Vista would start loading and then BSOD in just a few seconds. I tried the Dell Support site but it did not have anything useful, so it was time to use Google and see what people had found out. It did not take long to find my happy fix from Dr. Nathan which was a registry fix that worked like a charm. Why is it that you can find this information so easily with Google, but not on the manufacturer's support site? Dell's support site is usually much more friendly than many other manufacturers (can you say Sun or HP?), but it still did not have the answer. I know in the past Dell...