Hugh's Worthless Blog

Stock market drops, more unemployment claims, housing prices dropping - this "economic recovery" we are supposed to be having does not look like much of an economic recovery! One way our buddies in Washington have thought of helping the economy is to widen the HARP and HAMP programs to become more widespread so more people can use them (since not very many people did!) I know I recently received yet another letter in the mail from Quicken Loans saying that I might be eligible for the HARP program. But when I went through their program requirements   I did not meet the proper criteria for the special HARP program and would only qualify for a more standard loan refinancing. It seems like anyone with 5% equity in their home must go through a standard refinancing, and for us that is simply not worth the closing costs since our rate is already reasonably low (4.910%) and our loan amount is small (under $100K.) So now I am curious what particulars are in the latest Washington pl

I was happy to see that the original mock up photo of the corner of Skinker and Forest Park Parkway is not how they ended up designing the sidewalks leading from the new Preston Green Hall . Wash U actually did "cut the corners" of the sidewalks as they had been laid out before, with a sidewalk already in place right now in front of the massive new Washington University sign they erected on the corner. The original photo has little bits of greenery jutting out keeping people from cutting the corner, but as they probably know from the ugly pedestrian formed path cutting the corner from Forest Park Parkway to Hoyt Drive in front of Whitaker Hall (yes, it is visible from Google Maps! ) people will cut corners when then can: So now instead of their original plans pictured below (which I stole from Clayco's site ) , I have created a new image of the corner using the ever powerful and always open source image editor, GIMP . Original view: My update view: I think there migh