Hugh's Worthless Blog

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...