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...