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Showing posts from July, 2011

What's is that thing on Skinker and Forest Park Parkway?

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Okay, every day I walk to and from the Skinker Metrolink station and I have been watching the construction of the Preston M. Green Hall . Now, however, they are building something in front of the building by the street corner and it looks like quite a substantial structure, more than the smaller "Washington University in St. Louis" sign that used to be there but closer to the corner. I grabbed the latest image from the Claycorp webcam and cropped out the strange structure they are building there. I also decided to troll the Internet to find any architectural drawings of what they plan for the street corner and found this lovely picture here : It appears that the corner will be a large plot of concrete with some greenery behind it! Was that really the best plan they could devise? Where they are building the large granite covered structure looks like a bunch of greenery in the mocked up photo. Is that going to be a large planter of sorts with "Washington University&q

Mice are Nice... or are they?

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One of our fine faculty members recently received a shiny, new MacBook Air , and was looking for a nice mouse to use with it. He was curious about the Magic Mouse , and it seems pretty cool until you see the price -- $69. I had recently given him a very capable Kensington wired mouse we purchased from CDW-G for $6.47, which means for the same price as the Magic Mouse we could purchase ten Kensington mice and still have change left over. You may argue that the Magic Mouse is a Bluetooth device and hence more costly, so we also looked at other Bluetooth mice and found the Microsoft Bluetooth 5000 Mouse and the Logitech V470 , both for about $40 instead of $69. Now $40 is still quite a bit for a mouse, but it is a lot cheaper than $69. Searching on NewEgg.com , I did find some Bluetooth mice selling for $20 to $30 from some off name brands, but with shipping they were almost $40 anyway, so it seemed safer to stick with the Microsoft or Logitech (we get free shipping all the time from C