Hugh's Worthless Blog

I saw an article on stltoday.com yesterday about the new 4 year high school graduation rate formula that also linked to the graduation rates of all the St. Louis area school districts. I found some of the numbers on the big chart quite interesting. I thought I would take those numbers, sort them and then put them on a chart along with the median home sale prices in those districts (from blockshopper.com) to see how well that correlates. Note that I capped the home prices at $250K, although Clayton, Ladue and Rockwood all went over that median amount (at $530K, $414K and $280K, respectively.) At both the top and at the bottom the obvious districts are there, but some of the ones in the middle are interesting. Some of the "out of place" districts are obvious, like University City where there are a lot of expensive homes, but also a public high school known to not have the highest graduation rate. The two I found the most interesting, though were Parkway and Jennings,...

Today I received an e-mail message from my friends at TIAA-CREF who holds the bulk of my retirement assets. Included was an interesting webinar that talks about a retirement asset to salary ratio that can be used to see how well you are saving for retirement especially after stocks took the big hit in 2008/2009. When I saw that I knew it looked like an on-line calculator in the making to me, but TIAA-CREF did not have one on their site! So I knew I had to create one . First I interpolated their graph so you do not only have every 5 year increments on the retirement, but every year in between, and then I calculated the ratio for anyone who wants to enter their asset balance and salary (since dividing two numbers is so much work!) If you are going to make the 70% or 90% of salary goals I tell you, and if not I tell you now much more you need to get there. Hey, it sounded like a fun little calculator for me to write, so here it is . I also saw that Firefox 8 was just released ...

Back in August I never would have believed I would be posting about the Cardinals winning the World Series, but sure enough they won the whole thing in dramatic fashion. So now it is time to celebrate... by buying  Cardinals World Series 2011 Champions gear! But what is up with the official "authentic World Series" caps? Someone decided the winning cap should be this ugly black and white two-tone thing, when everybody knows any real St. Louis Cardinals cap should be solid red (or at least blue with a red bill and the red cardinal in front.) These black and white things are just not very appealing, especially when you look online and can find that red 2011 World Series caps have been designed. Unfortunately if you go to any retail store in St. Louis all you find are the ugly black and white things. We did get some T-shirts, but I am not spending $30 on a Cardinals cap with barely any red on it! Even checking the Sports Authority on-line, all the red World Series caps are...