Hugh's Worthless Blog

We are receiving a historic winter storm here in St. Louis. Why historic? Because Washington University is actually closing early at 3:00pm and letting everybody go home! They never shut down the university! They even posted it on their emergency web site and they were able to use the WUSTLAlerts  system they have been testing for a couple years. I was just helping someone in a classroom with a class that ended at 3:30pm, so I wonder if he will be ending at 3:00pm or not. In reality just a trace of precipitation is falling from the sky here right now at 2:00pm and the radar looks pretty scattered for the next couple hours. But if the powers that be say I should go home, who am I to argue with them? I had better check to see when the appropriate MetroLink train will be leaving and I hope it isn't too crowded. Hey, I could use my handy, dandy web app with the Blue Line Metrolink schedule . Luckily I noticed the Med School campus is not closing down so I do not have to worry about...

Okay, it sounds like another winter storm is coming our way, but if you read the hourly timeline from weather.com is seems to very dependent exactly where in the St. Louis area you are and what temperature it will be. I first checked my own zip code of 63117 which pretty much means the middle of St. Louis County.  Above I have the weather.com hourly chart for us from 9:00am to 5:00pm. Below I have posted the same timeline for Hannibal , just an hour or so north of us If you believe these charts, we will be a few degrees warmer than Hannibal, so in the evening our precipitation should be mostly liquid whereas the precipitation there will be a messy mix. Of course, my evening commute will be just driving from the Brentwood Metrolink station to our home about a mile away, so I am not expecting any problems on my brief venture along Eager and McCutcheon. And now it appears what I expected to be the most dangerous part of my journey (the walk from my building across campus to the Me...

Our department at the university has started looking into doing remote backups for desktop users, and I, of course, had to look for the open source alternatives after pricing commercial products like Retrospect. The usual suspects showed up on my google search such as Amanda , Bacula and BackupPC . But since I was also looking at commercial online providers like Mozy , I ran into CrashPlan which sounded very intriguing. Whereas CrashPlan makes money like Mozy does providing online backup services , you can actually use their software completely for free so every computer where you install the software becomes either a client or a server or both. They have downloads for Windows, Mac and Linux (and Solaris if anyone cares anymore), so I tested it by installing the Windows software on one XP system and putting the Linux version on two Ubuntu systems. It appears to run as a Java service in Ubuntu, and I bet it does the same for Mac OSX and Solaris. On Windows it runs as two processe...

Okay, today's short drive to the Brentwood Metrolink station was pretty uneventful, but getting to my building on campus from the Meridian parking garage was another matter! First off, two weeks ago I complimented Metro on what a great job they did clearing the sidewalk of snow from the garage down to the platform. Today, however, was another matter. That long ramp heading down to the platform was a solid sheet of ice with salt scattered on it more like a seasoning than a substance to melt anything. The lady in front of me was holding the rail and moving at about 1 mph, and I was afraid I would miss the train if I did not try to pass her and risk slipping and falling in the process. Luckily I made the 7:45 train and made it to the Skinker station. The station there was in good shape, with the stairway well salted and I could make it up to the sidewalk just fine. Here again, however, Washington University made me not so proud by once again leaving the sidewalks as a solid sheet ...

My wife recently began substitute teaching to help her network to find a full-time teaching position in the future, and the school district where she subs just switched to the online substitute system called Aesop  from Frontline Placement. To try to get a substitute job you must login via a web browser to their site and then repeatedly refresh your page for hours until a job finally shows up (unless you pay extra yourself to get their own customized software called Jobulator .) That sure does not seem like a fair way for them to set up their system. It definitely gives preferential treatment to people who pay them for the supposed "extra" software. However, I googled for Jobulator alternatives and noticed many substitutes who used Aesop were using Firefox and an extension called Check4Change to do essentially the same thing as Jobulator. The Check4Change plug-in allows you to set Firefox to periodically refresh a page and then check a section to see if it changes. If ther...

Well, last night and earlier this morning there was a snow storm that left a good 3 inches of snow on the ground. It closed all the public schools in the St. Louis area which meant my son could stay home from middle school, my wife did not have to substitute teach and my daughter could continue sleeping in until noon (since she is a college student on winter break). Unfortunately I had a meeting scheduled at 10:00am today, so although I could take my time getting to work, I had to be there by 10. Luckily that really just meant making my way the less than one mile down Eager Road to the Brentwood Metrolink station and then walking from the station to our building. By 9:00am while I was driving, Eager Road was in excellent shape from McCutcheon to the Metrolink station and all went well. The Metro folks kept the sidewalks at the Brentwood station clear and it looked like the heaters were turned on again. All was going smoothly until after climbing the stairs from Skinker station I tu...

This morning due to the forecasted snow this afternoon I decided to park over at the Brentwood Metrolink station instead of the Richmond Heights one so I wouldn't have to worry so much about having a snow covered car this afternoon. But as I approached the platform, I noticed all the passengers were clustered near the middle of the platform and that area seemed unnaturally sunny and bright. It was as that point that I realized that the recently installed overhead heaters  were in use there at the station. I had noticed them installed at the Richmond Heights station in the past, but I had never seen them actually turned on. So I was curious what was the criteria they used to decide whether to turn them on or not. As we passed the Richmond Heights station I did not notice them on (i.e. no extra sunny spot on a gloomy Monday morning), but they were definitely on at the Clayton station. It is actually in the mid 20's this morning, and I know it has been colder before at the Ric...

Well, I woke up this morning to start a normal day, but when I picked up my eyeglasses from the nightstand the left lens fell out and I could not find the microscopic screw that held it in place. It was hard enough trying to do it with one eye, and it doesn't help that the screw is even smaller than any screw I have ever seen inside a computer. When I picked up the lens that fell out I realized how ridiculously small the current style of eyeglasses have the lens these days. I am currently wearing my "old" pair of glasses which are about 3 years old now and slightly out of focus, but I noticed their lenses are a good 30-40% larger than the lens of my current glasses. Frankly, I prefer the slightly larger lenses, but it is hard to find them anymore and they are not considered as "fashionable".  And since the frames are thinner to go with the smaller lenses, the screws they use on them are smaller too. Would the screws to any of my old glasses work with my new glas...

Now that it is 2011 is everybody really excited about the new estate tax laws? What, you didn't realize they have changed the estate tax laws? Sure enough, one of the many changes that happened when they passed the Tax Relief Act of 2010 to extended unemployment benefits was a change of the estate tax. What happened is that for two years and two years only, the estate tax exclusion limit shifts to $5 million for every individual with an estate tax rate of 35%. This means for 2011 and 2012, if you die in those years your estate will be taxed at 35% for any amount over $5 million. This, of course, has caused me to change my online estate tax calculator  to reflect the new changes, but then I had to guess what would happen after 2012. For now I am leaving the $5 million exclusion and 35% rate in place, but most likely the exclusion limit will go down and the rate will go back up. The government really needs the extra revenue and the large exclusion are rate are counterproductive to i...