Hugh's Worthless Blog

With only one more day in the financial markets for 2010 it looks like the S&P 500 will end 2010 with an annual gain of about 13% to close over 1250 after starting the year a little over 1100. Whereas the 13% gain is a good number, many will still lament over the peak in 2007 when the index was near 1550. Unfortunately that will likely never occur again so it is not productive trying to figure out what return is necessary to get us back to that point (unless you just want to calculate it for fun !). If you instead look at the S&P 500 index for the past 40 years (since 1970, you will see that our current level is really not too bad. If you track the linear increase from say 1982 to 1995, if you interpolate to the end of 2010, the line would likely end lower than it currently is right now. The massive peak in 1998 to 2000 and then in 2006/2007 has skewed people's perceptions of what long term growth should really look like. I love Google Finance 's ability to generate t...

Since I have to support the classes for our department  at the university, I have to deal with some folks who really like some very old software for their classes. One faculty member had a program written with the 1995 version of Macromedia Authorware that she distributes to her students to run every year. Unfortunately, that software is now over 15 years old and it does not run on 64 bit Windows 7 (and of course not on a Mac.) The solution? I built a small VirtualBox virtual disk (.VDI) file with 32 bit XP (Service Pack 1 even!) and the ancient Authorware presentation together on it that runs on just about anything that can run the VirtualBox application. I tested it on a 64 bit Windows 7 Dell Optiplex 780, my trusty iMac, and also my even trustier Ubuntu 10.04 Dell Precision. It runs like a champ on all platforms since that is the beauty of VirtualBox! And since VirtualBox is open source it is also free! The virtual disk file ended up being over 800MB, but over our fast gigab...

I really love the stlouis.blockshopper.com site since they write up little stories about recent home sales in the area. Unfortunately sometimes they make some errors. For example they reported on the sale of a brand new infill home in Brentwood , but list it with the details of the old house that stood there before it was demolished and rebuilt. They state the house is a 3 bedroom, 2 bath 1,400 square foot house built in 1961 when it is really a 3,500 square foot brand new Kingbridge home with 5 bedrooms, and 4 and 1/2 baths (new house pictured below). Did they really think a building materials executive would purchase a 50 year old 1,400 square foot home for $735,000? I did check both Google Maps and Bing Maps and both still have the old 2009 house sitting there, so I saved its old picture and added it to this post. Otherwise in a few years, people will forget the old house that used to sit there (much like our old house in Brentwood that was torn down by Kingbridge whose photo I...

Now that the holiday shopping season is in full swing it is time to make the world a better place by spending all sorts of money (hey, that's what the marketings pros and politicians want us to think!) This years there are definitely a lot of deals to be found both at online retailers and at local bricks and mortar stores in your area. The question is, where to buy ? I thought I would come up with a simple online calculator to help you decide the full costs of purchasing an item, since with an online purchase you often must pay for shipping and then you have to wait for your shipment to see what shows up (hopefully what you ordered and in good condition. With a local retailer you can actually select the actual item you get to take home and sometimes even try it out first. But then you must get to the store, deal with the crowds, pay sales tax, gas for your car (or haul your purchases on public transportation.) The hassle and time issues are hard to monetize, but the transportation...

Hey, it's the beginning of a new month which means I can look at the web statistics generated by webalizer for the department web sites and see how November 2010 went. Since we switched to using the main Arts & Sciences web server for our front end site , we have seen traffic on our departmental server drop by about half, from about 12,000 hits per day in fall 2009 to about 6,000 hits per day now. Now that the boring "administrative" type pages are all served by the centralized and standardized college server , all the content we are serving are the specific lab, personal and class pages created by the faculty, students and staff in our department. One thing I wanted to compare was how the browser has changed from November 2009 for both our departmental server, and for the meteorites site . From November 2009 to November 2010 the number of hits for the meteorites site has actually increased by about 50% from about 22,000 hits per day to about 33,000 hits per day. A...

It looks like time has run out for United Plaza LLC to come up with the $3 million escrow to continue with their redevelopment of the Hadley Township area in Richmond Heights . That is the area just north of the Maplewood Wal-Mart bordered by Hanley on the west, Laclede Station on the east, Dale on the north and Bruno on the south. An article on the KSDK site mentions something about Big Bend Blvd, but the affected area is actually quite a bit west of Big Bend. This whole area has been suspended in limbo for the past decade, and I wish something could be done to move it forward or to just let the residents alone. I wonder how many actual residents are still living in the homes there. This latest news reminds me of the book I read about eminent domain a year or so ago and the problems that can happen when cities decide they want to "change the character" of some neighborhoods. Now that the monster Wal-Mart/Sam's complex is there at Maplewood Commons along with the adja...

Being a typical tightwad, I was not planning on purchasing anything this past Thanksgiving shopping weekend, but unfortunately my home network decided otherwise for me. It was Friday afternoon and we were awaiting the arrival of some family friends, when my son and daughter notified me that the home network was down. This was indeed a major catastrophe since my son goes into massive withdrawals when his Xbox Live is down and my daughter must check the Facebook status of her 500 Facebook friends at all times. I just thought it was again time to reboot my old Belkin router (which always seems to crash whenever my daughter is back from college -- how curious...) However, I tried resetting the router a few times as well as the DSL modem, and the router could not dial into my DSL account on the modem. I tried dialing directly into the DSL modem using PPPoE from my laptop and then my son's Xbox 360, and both of those could log into the DSL modem fine, but the router no longer could no m...

Since I love numbers, I found this article at StlToday.com quite interesting. On Tuesday night it seemed like the Country Executive race between Dooley and Corrigan would be very close, and it was with Dooley winning by just over 3% of the vote (51.04% to 46.79%), but in reality if you look at the votes from township to township there are hardly any close races there at all. There are 28 townships in the county and out of all of these there were only three townships where the votes fell within a 5% range of each other (Northwest: 49.1% Dooley 47.9% Corrigan, Clayton: 46.9% Dooley, 51.7% Corrigan, and Jefferson: 49.8% Dooley, 48.6% Corrigan). In all the other townships there was at least a 5% gap and in most the gap was huge, from Normandy and Norwood at nearly 90% Dooley, to Chesterfield being over 70% for Corrigan. There is definitely a large split in the voting preferences of the county with North County being strongly Democratic and West and South County being strongly Republican. ...

Yesterday was election day, and thankfully now all the mailings and annoying TV ads can stop. There were some surprisingly close votes yesterday, including close calls for long time incumbents Russ Carnahan and Charlie Dooley, but the closest race I personally voted on was for the 24th district State Senate between Barbara Fraser and John Lamping. The  Post article  has Lamping winning by 239 votes, but at the St. Louis County  election site  they have added up some additional votes and his win dropped to just 172 votes from among 60,000 votes cast (30,384 versus 30,212) for a winning margin of 0.28%. There were also 74 write in votes who could almost have made the difference in this contest. So for anyone who thinks their vote did not matter you are wrong! If just a few hundred folks had decided not to vote the election could have gone the other way. As for the results, I was happy to see both hotel taxes (Clayton and Richmond Heights) were defeated, I was surprise...

Over the years I have written a ton of online financial calculators and in doing so have also doled out a lot of financial advice to people across the Internet. A lot of these people tell me I'm a lot better than the real "professionals" they have talked to and that I should go into business for myself. Well, I find it flattering, but I am not about to give up my day job at the university with one child in college and another going to be there in a few years. However, I have been doing a bit of on-line web consulting on the side, and thought why couldn't I expand that to include helping people out with simple financial advice? Since this is not my main source of income I can afford to answer the $10 question someone might have about their mortgage or their retirement plan. People will have to remember my training and experience is in system and software engineering and not finances, but I have self taught myself quite a bit about personal finances. In reality my degr...

As a resident of Richmond Heights, I get to vote for the hotel tax they want to impose to the visitors to their three hotels, the Cheshire Lodge , the Residence Inn  by the Galleria and the new Hilton Homewood Suites . The vote for this tax occurs on the same day that Clayton residences will be voting to impose a similar tax on their many more hotels. Both taxes are similar and will allow the cities to add up to a 5% tax on top of the already over 15% tax to bring the total hotel tax to over 20%. If every hotel in the metro area imposed this same tax would be one thing, but if the hotel taxes in Clayton and Richmond Heights are that much higher than other locales, I think some visitors would look to stay elsewhere.  For example their is a new Marriott Springhill Suites in Brentwood which would not be imposing this new tax located only a mile or so south of the Residence Inn and also located close to a Metrolink station. Frankly, I think the best thing that could happen for Ri...

In today's sensationalized media reports, you have to expect overblown claims in advertising, but I just love the e-mail I just received from Heartland America describing their  72 Hour Off-Lease Computer Blowout!   I have purchased electronics from them in the past, but not computers since their prices always seem quite a bit higher than places like Geeks.com , Micro Center or Intechra (the old Retrobox). Plus they put phrases like "Huge 40 GIG HD" on their ad, which may have been true several years ago, but sure is not true today. They are selling a Dell "Optiflex" (love the typo) with a 2GHz P4, 512MB of RAM and, yes, a "HUGE 40 GIG HD" for $184.99 . I also love the "Orig. MSR" of $499.00. Was that perhaps in 2003? In comparion, Geeks has an IBM ThinkCentre M52 with a 3GHz P4, 1GB of RAM and a 40GB drive (they do not claim it is huge) for only $114.99 and that includes free shipping.  Why past $70 more for a slower processor with half ...

Well, this Sunday was 10/10/10, and in celebration the Ubuntu folks at Canonical came out with their latest release, Ubuntu 10.10 the " Maverick Meerkat ". I love the goofy animal names, but then again I am a big Ubuntu geek as well. Local St. Louis folk can download a copy of the ISO images from my university archive at wubuntu.wustl.edu . With the new release out, I decided it was time to do some upgrades. No, not of my 10.04 system to 10.10, but to upgrade some of our 8.04 servers to 10.04 now that it has been out for six months. Since 10.04 was a long term support (LTS) release, I had planned on upgrading our very stable 8.04 systems to 10.04 over the summer, but I never got around to it. With 10.10 being out, that reminded me they needed updating. Since 10.04 is a LTS release, it will be supported for 3 years for everything and for 5 years for the server packages (i.e. the core kernel and service packages.) So if I update everything to 10.04, they should be supported u...

The press keeps announcing how low mortgage rates are getting and then they seem surprised that so few people are refinancing or buying homes. It almost sound like they are being paid by realtors and lenders to convince folks to go out and get a loan while rates are so low. Some articles have been addressing some of the reasons so few are taking advantage of these low rates, but one big reason people keep forgetting is that rates have been very low for a couple years and there are not that many people left to refinance who qualify for these low rates. It is one thing to drop your rate from 6% or 7% to 4%, but for someone like us who refinanced last year at 4.910%, the 4.00% rate we could receive on a new 15 year loan does not seem worth the $2,000 to refinance. You can calculate the break even point of refinancing on my latest refinance calculator  or using my older  loan comparison calculator . How low can these rates go? If 15 year rates continue to drop well under the 4% m...

Yesterday was a beautiful day for a dedication of a new building on the picturesque Washington University campus. Unfortunately, it wasn't for our still unnamed building yet! It was for Brauer Hall , the lovely new engineering building adjoining Whittaker Hall and the even newer Preston Green Hall which is progressing very rapidly. The dedication seemed to coincide with the start of an energy symposium on campus which brings another 500 on campus. What the people at the dedication did not realize is that all summer long, the doorway to the loading dock of that new LEED certified, energy efficient building was left open practically non-stop during the day allowing its HVAC system to pump cool air into the hot St. Louis summer. What a great way to save energy! As for the dedication, the people in our department were mad that the entire northeast parking lot was closed all day long for a dedication that started at 4:00pm. When I was leaving for the day and saw the people still s...

I received an e-mail message today from someone looking for an online financial calculator to see what kind of return he would need on an investment to get it back to where it was in the past, before the big market slide of the past few years. Some people think if your investments go down a fixed percentage, say 20%, to get them back to where they were before you only need a 20% return, but that is not the case. You need a substantially larger percentage to increase that smaller balance back up to the value where it used to be. A drastic example is if your investment falls 50%, say your retirement portfolio falls from $400,000 to $200,000. To get back to $400K from $200K you then would need a 100% return to double that amount back up to where it was in the past. That is a pretty grim task to try to meet. So that is where my new calculator comes into play. You can either enter your fixed percentage loss, or just put your old balance and your new balance and I will calculate the bad ne...

Yesterday I gave a coworker a USB flash drive from my stash, so I thought I might have to replenish the departmental supply. I looked at what I had spare in my office and I have four Kingston DataTraveler drives, one 1GB model, two 2GB models and one 16GB which I use for moving bigger stuff. Then it was time to go to our CDWG web store to check out the current prices on Kingston DataTraveler drives (for which we get a pretty hefty discount). I thought I would write up a table comparing today's prices and also the price per gigabyte since I love analyzing numbers. Here is a little table with my calculated costs: Capacity Price Price/GB 2GB $6.06 $3.03 4GB $8.36 $2.09 8GB $15.32 $1.91 16GB $30.07 $1.88 32GB $62.37 $1.95 64GB $155.92 $2.44 128GB $384.24 $3.00 256GB $779.62 $3.05 The first interesting thing I noticed is that it is hardly worth buying 2GB flash drives anymore since for only $2.30 more you can get a 4GB drive. That was timely since the only drives I now ha...

I receive regular e-mails on homes that have relisted at new prices, just because I am a big real estate nerd. One that caught my eye is on the corner of the block where we used to live in Brentwood , a 2005 teardown that is now for sale again. Anyone who drives up and down High School Drive knows what I'm talking about, it's this giant blob on the corner of High School and Lawn that listed near a million dollars back at the peak, selling for over $900K in 2005 . Now it is back on the market and they recently dropped the price from $849K to $795K. Now I love the Brentwood area and the stately brick homes in that neighborhood, but that house in particular was a bit extreme in cramming a 4,000 sq foot house with a pool and a 3 car garage onto a not so large lot. The driveway for the house comes off High School Drive and is barely a car length long. In my aerial photo here from Google Maps you can see in in the upper right hand corner. If you notice the two large teardowns in th...

Well, last month I said we would not refinance, but just to be sure I had to write up a new online calculator  to check things out! Because our current rate is a reasonably low 4.91% already, I had to call up our lender to see if there was any point in us refinancing, especially since our loan is also rather small, especially relative to any closing costs. Incidentally we used Schwab Bank who did a very good job and who I highly recommend, especially if you already have a brokerage account with them. They always gave us good rates and very quick responses via phone, e-mail or FAX. The very nice lady I talked to today was very informative and gave me today's rates on our smallish loan. Since it is under $100,000 the rate is actually a bit higher than the lowest available, 4.25% on a 15 year $90,000 loan and with closing costs she estimated at about $1,900, the closing costs would be over 2% of our loan value. They would also charge 0.25% of our loan to eliminate the escrow account ...

I recently received an e-mail from the nice folks at the Citizens for Modern Transit which spelled out the latest bus restorations that will occur at the end of this month, on August 30 . Honestly, though, I have to admit I hardly ride the buses anymore, now that the new train schedule works so nicely with my commute to Wash U. However, if I did take #2, I realized my old bus stop at Brentwood and Rose would no longer exist as they are rerouting Metrobus #2 to not loop around the Brentwood Industrial Court anymore. I know there were always 2 or 3 ladies who regularly exited the bus right there (at the White Building where the DD's Irish Pub and Karaoke Bar lives), so hopefully they will still be able to get to work. Instead the bus now continues north of the Walmart all the way to Big Bend, and then takes Big Bend all the way to the St. Louis Community College at Meramec Campus. That is definitely a nice route for people to get to Meramec, but that will take them a looonnnggg t...

Since today is the start of the month, I thought it was coincidental that I received an e-mail from Ziff-Davis with an interesting article saying how Windows 7 had surpassed Vista in usage as measured by checking website logs. I always check our monthly logs on the first day of the month, so I modified one of my handy, dandy Perl scripts to see how our local distribution compared to the numbers in the article. This is the last month I can easily check on our old departmental site since we are folding our main site into the boring, humdrum corporate look for the rest of the College of Arts and Sciences , hosted more centrally where the log files will not be as easy to obtain. Plus our new site is a drupal site running on an aging Solaris Sun, so it is incredibly slow compared to our old site of static pages running on an even older Solaris Sun. In any case the article was saying their numbers had Windows 7 at 14.5% versus Vista at 14.3% with XP holding a big lead at about 62%. T...

Yes, the only thing plunging faster this summer than the necklines of Hollywood's finest are the interest rates on new mortgages. Unfortunately, it appears that there are not too many people who qualify left to take advantage of these super low rates. It seems like the only people left who want those loans are those who are not qualified to receive them. New winners this year are people looking for jumbo mortgages who are finally seeing their rates drop close to the 5.5% level. People like ourselves who could qualify for those great rates already did so in the past few years. We refinanced last year after we sold our house and grabbed a good rate during the dip late last spring (April 2009). Sure, we could cut an extra 0.25% to 0.50% off our already low 4.910% rate, but that is hardly worth the closing costs on the loan for us. So no matter how low the rates go, I doubt we will take advantage of them. Yet other folks who could use those lower rates simply do not have the credit t...

Even though I do not own an Apple iPod , each of my two children own an iPod Touch since they have very generous relatives. However, my son is not too gentle with his charging cable so he needed a new one.  I know we could have made the very quick trip over to the Apple Store in the St. Louis Galleria and purchased one for $19 plus tax, but I knew there were cheaper options. First I checked my favorite local retailer in the world, and sure enough the Brentwood  Micro Center had something available for one fourth the price of the Apple product. It is a retractable Kensington USB cable with an iPod tip included for only $4.99. However, with my experience with retractable mice, phone cords and other such items, I know they tend to break, and the tip may be the most valuable piece included. So I thought I would look around to see what else existed. At Cyberguys you can get a product called the Bone Link II for $11.95 which looks like exactly what I would want, a solid ...

Yesterday to celebrate the Fourth, we decided to skip the fireworks and go to Sonic instead. Since they have their after 8:00pm 99 cent sundae special, we decided to go there and indulge in some inexpensive ice cream. It was starting to drizzle but the Sonic had an awning and it was not too hot to just park there and eat ice cream. We picked the closest one to us, the one on Manchester in Brentwood which we had not been to in two whole weeks (since Father's Day, when I decided it would be fun.) Once again I ordered a hot fudge sundae, but it appeared to be just a chocolate one. But I did not complain since it was only 99 cents! It appears the Sonic Blasts are also only 99 cents since my daughter bought one (a Reese's one). They skipped the whipped cream and cherry on our sundaes and gave us more ice cream instead, so again, I did not complain. It all tasted pretty good to me! I remember earlier in the Spring we had stopped by the Baskin-Robbins at McKnight and Manchester one ...

My wife has been researching type 2 diabetes and recently checked a book out of the library which included a body mass index (BMI) chart much like the one pictured here. Whereas it is fairly easy to follow, I, of course, think it must be converted to an online calculator! However, when I checked the Internet, there were already a billion of them so I had to make one that was different. So my lovely BMI BMR calculator accepts either inches or centimeters for your height and pounds or kilograms for your weight and calculates not only your BMI, but also your BMR (basal metabolic rate) which determines how many calories you should consume! So I made a spiffy "all in one" healthy body indicator calculator which not only determines how underweight or overweight you are, but also tells you how many calories you should consume to maintain or improve your ideal weight. 

Since it is now less than two weeks away from the change in times on the Metrobus routes and Metrolink trains (five trains an hour during rush hour, every 12 minutes), I have decided to create my own handy dandy condensed online schedule for just the Blue Line between Shrewsbury and Grand Station during the work week. My schedule lets you select any stop time for any station, and it will automatically show you the times for that run at the other stations. It sure works easier on the eyes than the massive PDF file from Metro. In reality I primarily only care about the schedule between Brentwood and Skinker, but since I am putting this online I thought I could at least include the Blue Line out to Grand for any other Wash U people who could use it. I could have taken it all the way to Fairview Heights, but then it wouldn't be all that condensed, now would it? I will have to admit I have never ridden the train into Illinois, and I have never actually ridden it past the Brentwood st...

Last week my wife went to the County library and tried to find some weird personal finance book to keep me busy for a while. What she brought back was a very interesting and fast read called The Fair Tax Solution by Ken Hoagland. The idea is to get rid of the current incredibly complicated federal tax system and replace it with a set federal retail sales tax that would also eliminate the FICA and Medicare taxes. The premise sounds much too easy to work, but the book was quite convincing. It is difficult to think of any big negatives of the plan besides the elimination of the complete "income tax" industry (tax accountants everywhere, H&R Block, Jackson Hewitt, TurboTax, etc.) and the very cumbersome transition from the huge current tax infrastructure in place to the simplified sales tax. I am surprised we have not heard more about this idea. It sounds like Mike Huckabee was a big supporter back before the 2008 election, but the idea died down back since the election. I ...