Hugh's Worthless Blog

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...