Hugh's Worthless Blog

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%. They