Hugh's Worthless Blog

My wife was again at the St. Louis County Library trying to find a book that would interest me. She found The Secret Life of Your Cat since I am always pestering our overweight grey tabby named Slinky. I started skimming it and came to a big table showing the equivalent ages of cats and humans. It seems that once they are two years old they are equivalent to a 24 year old person and afterwards they age an equivalent 4 years for each year we age. When I saw that I thought -- online calculator ! I looked around and there are already a couple of them out there (like here and here ), but I wanted to write my own version anyway. Since the ones out there are both JavaScript based, I thought I would write one using JavaScript too, but that would be a bit fancier! My cat age calculator has little buttons that let you increment and decrement the initial age by months and years, and of course lets you convert either way (feline to human, human to feline). My conclusion is that our overweig...

It looks like the people at Google have been very busy working on both Chrome / Chromium and GMail . First the good news. Since all the other browsers like Firefox 4 are working on speeding up their JavaScript engine so they can claim vast performance improvements, well the Chrome folks have done so too. Since I always just use the latest release of Chromium on my Ubuntu desktop, I checked my version I just updated to using apt-get today and see that I am now using Chromium 11.0.676.0 (75353) which I am guessing is using the updated JavaScript engine as used in Chrome 10 (still in beta ). Frankly, I cannot tell much difference since Chromium was already pretty darn fast. Perhaps at some point it just does not make any difference anymore. What concerns me more are the little pesky changes they do that annoy people. For example, last night my son demanded he had to use my laptop so he could more properly play Minecraft  since he was done with all his homework and his own laptop...

There was another mugging near campus last night, but this time two students chased their assailants in a car and were able to get at least one arrested (I bet the other one apprehended was a minor.) Two sophomores were walking on Melville towards the Loop when they were approached by four youths who demanded their money and phones and started beating one of the students. So the other student yelled for help and was able to get aid from a nearby friend in a car. They followed their assailants to Delmar where the police nabbed them. But the question is what effect their actions will have on the occurrence of these random crimes that keep hitting the area (and especially targeted at our students.) I hope more of our students do not start patrolling vigilante style and trying to apprehend these criminals, since some of them will be armed and someone could end up getting shot. I am definitely sick of all the criminals targeting our students and our campus, but I have to admit if I ...

I have always enjoyed reading Thomas J. Stanley 's books since he wrote the Millionaire Next Door over a decade ago. His latest book, Stop Acting Rich , came out in 2009 and I did not even realize it was out. He is another geeky numbers guy like me and I love all the numbers he gives in his books. I wrote up a wealth calculator years ago based on his equations form the first book, but now I have modified it to include the "wealth equation" from "Stop Acting Rich". He has since accumulated a lot more data which provided him with more specific threshold values for when someone becomes balance sheet affluent (BA) or income sheet affluent (IA). These are more specific than his earlier under accumulator of wealth (UAW), prodigious accumulator of wealth (PAW) designations he had in the past. In his earlier books his cutoffs were simply 1/2 the "expected wealth" and 2 times the "expected wealth" as cutoffs. Now with real data he has changed the cu...

I am very glad that the temperature has risen to above freezing finally so that some of the ice around here can melt. The most dangerous situation I have noticed is the sidewalk between the Richmond Heights Metrolink station and the Galleria Mall. That entire sidewalk is a giant pile of ice plowed off the street and everyone walking between the mall and the metrolink station has been walking on the road itself. In this cold weather I have been driving to the station and parking in the lot so I do not have to walk, but that means on my drive home I have to make sure I do not kill any pedestrians! Here is a photo I found online of the sidewalk in warmer weather. Now imagine it completely covered up with piles of plowed ice. You get the idea. The Galleria Parkway is now shared by both cars and pedestrians and that is a bad idea! Closer to Washington University, I am glad that the full sidewalk from the Skinker station to our building is finally cleared. On Monday and Tuesday the sidewal...

Okay, I will admit that I love searching for information on the Internet, but sometimes things can be too easy. I was on one of my favorite property sale sites, stlouis.blockshopper.com , and when I was doing a search on someone, it instead redirected me to another site called spokeo.com . Okay, I thought I could try that one out, but when I did I was amazed what all I found. Not only did I find the person I was looking for, I found out their age, their spouse, their children, and a nice picture of their home (along with its estimated value.) I realize much of this is public information, so I had to do a search on myself. Sure enough I could find our address, ages, marital status, phone number, home value, home picture, and even my children's names (I am guessing from Facebook relationship listings.) Luckily they have an easy to use privacy link which allows you to remove your own listing, so I did so for myself, my wife and my children so they no longer appear on a search. I will...

Sure, enough, now that I have started looking more into online backup and having promoted Mozy 's $4.99/mo unlimited plan to many folks, it sounds like that it is no longer available . They have now made it $5.99/mo for a 50 GB plan, which makes CrashPlan 's $49.95/year unlimited plan look even more appealing. Right now CrashPlan is even giving Mozy users an additional 15% discount. They may not have the big EMC name behind them, but I am not sure how much that helped Mozy (how many typical folks on the street know who EMC is?) If you want a bigger name than CrashPlan hosting your online backup, how about the anti-virus folks at Trend Micro ? They acquired humyo and now offer SafeSync as an unlimited backup plan for a special price of only $29.95/year. There are also BackBlaze and Carbonite who are also eager to acquire old Mozy users, but if a company like Trend is supporting an online backup costing less than these lesser brands, why not go with the more trusted name? ...

I just received this incredible mortgage refinancing offer in the mail from a local St. Louis lender that I had to share with the world. Since everyone's lending amounts are public records, this lender was able to find out that we originally had a $236K loan and then we later borrowed a $95K loan. What these geniuses did not understand is that the original $236K loan was an interest only loan which we borrowed until we could sell our first house, and once it was sold we took the proceeds and refinanced down to the $95K loan which is our current much more manageable amortized loan. So those two monthly loan payments they are offering us is for a loan amount of $331K which is equal to our original interest only loan PLUS our current refinanced loan, for two monthly payments that are both two or three times what we are currently paying on our principal and interest payment. In fact they are offering us a loan for an amount greater than the current value of our house! I do not even h...

Well, I am glad I no longer work at the Washington University School of Medicine today like I did several years ago! Due to the ice storm and impending snow storm behind it, Washington University has done the unthinkable. They have shut down the Danforth Campus and cancelled all classes and events for the whole day. However, if you work at the medical school, you are in no such luck! They decided those employees must be expendable or something, or are not as worthy at the ones on the undergraduate campus. I can understand the hospital staff personnel being necessary, but I would think all the research groups would not be so essential. I am sure in reality most of the thousands of employees there did not show up either, only the ones needed for hospital and patient care. On the Danforth campus, all those underpaid dining staff have to make it to campus so that students living there like my daughter can eat. Maybe they should let some of the students stuck there without class today ...