Hugh's Worthless Blog

During the presidential election there was a lot of discussion on helping the "middle class" while increasing taxes on the "upper class" to boost the economy. But how are these class differences defined? One interesting metric I heard about was that the middle class was defined as being two-thirds to twice the median household income. In 2010 that number was $59,127 which gave a middle class income range of $39,418 to $118,255 . However, this one number was being used to represent the whole country when we all know the median household incomes vary substantially throughout the country. Therefore, I decided someone needed to create an online " middle class income calculator " based on the median income data which is publicly available . My calculator lets you enter a household income amount (your own, or whatever number you would like to compare) to see which tier this income level would be in any metropolitan area or state in the country (based on 201...

The local weather folks had predicted a foggy morning, and boy were they right! I brought along the cheap little Sylvania video camera I received free from Swagbucks to record the very foggy weather here in St. Louis as I commuted to work on campus this morning. First off I parked at the Richmond Heights Metrolink station and started walking to the platform. I could not even see the platform area from my car! Once I was on the platform I had to pan around to look out at the fog covered nearby synagogue and also down the track. I was hoping to get the train as it appeared out of the fog, but I was not able to capture that. The other people on the platform must have thought I was an insane tourist or something. Finally I made it to the Skinker Station and started to walk towards the lovely Scott Rudolph Hall on the picturesque Washington University Danforth campus . I grabbed some footage across the parking lot towards the art school and then in front of me as I walked by Wh...

Today was Election Day which meant two things for my teenage son: 1) No School in his district and  2) Halo 4 was released! Combine those two facts and he thought it meant one thing for him - a full day at home playing Halo 4 with the millions of other young males celebrating democracy together on their Xbox 360's. However, he had made one fatal mistake. He pre-ordered his copy of Halo 4 at Amazon.com using their "release day shipping" option. If he had read the fine print , Amazon states that their shipping agent (namely UPS in this case) does not guarantee delivery at any specific time, only that it will arrive on that day before 7:00 pm. And when did his copy arrive? The UPS truck finally showed up at 5:45 pm which meant he only had 3 hours or so to immerse himself with Master Chief and company. And he had actually paid extra to receive it that late, when he could have paid less and just picked it up at GameStop  hours before, like the location less than a mile away...

Being a responsible citizen, I was all ready to vote for the St. Louis County Proposition L  in November to help update the county library system when I realized we cannot vote for it. Even though we are active County Library users, because we live in Richmond Heights and they have their own library, we are being taxed for the Richmond Heights Library . Therefore we do not pay any taxes on the county library system. Since we are not taxed for the county library system, the proposition will not be on our ballots when we vote on November 6. In reality we prefer visiting the County Library with its huge headquarters on Lindbergh (which we visit weekly) since it is still very close to us and almost as quick of a trip as the RH city library. Since we are still country residents we can use either library and we prefer the county system with its much larger selection of offerings. But just because I cannot vote for the proposition, does not mean I will not do my part to help pr...

I finally heard back from the Saint Louis County Board of Equalization to see if I would have my home assessment value reduced. Unfortunately they decided their assessment valuation was just fine and they would not budge on the number. I was hoping to at least get it down by 10% or so but they must not have liked my data that I supplied with my appeal request. I included my report from ValueAppeal.com which I spent $99 on back in May, along with the county's decision on my neighbor's house which is assessed almost $50,000 less than ours and the sales data for a larger house up the street which sold for almost $20,000 less than our assessment just last year. There is now another house for sale on our street which has a sales price only $15,000 over our assessed valuation, but which will never sell for that much. That house has a floor plan this is an almost identical mirror image to our own but the kitchen is still from 1950 and the basement layout leaves a lot to be desir...

Yesterday I was one of the select few citizens in the St Louis metropolitan area who was able to make a difference in their government; I was able to vote on a Monday! It was the special election between two incumbent Democratic state representatives who shared almost identical voting records, Stacey Newman and Susan Carlson. Since their one vote difference primary election in August was too close to call after some voting errors were discovered , the county decided to have a special re-election just for our district to allow for a definite winner to be cast. In the past few weeks I have been heavily bombarded with postal mailings, automated phone calls and then finally real human phone calls (one from the actual Stacey Newman herself) asking me to go and vote. So yesterday I did my civic duty and spent an extra 5 minutes while going home from work and voted. I was expecting that after such a close election before and so many mailings and calls the voter turnout would be much high...

Last evening my wife and I were taking a leisurely walk around our lovely tree lined suburban neighborhood, knowing full well that just a few weeks ago a woman was kidnapped and abducted just a mile away at Brentwood Square. And several days after that Megan Boken was murdered in the middle of the day in the heart of the Central West End, and several medical students robbed nearby , and  then some people robbed outside Busch Stadium. And now just yesterday we heard a woman was abducted right here on the Danforth Campus of Washington University at 9:30pm and another woman was attacked outside Saint Louis University. These assaults in unexpectedly "safe" places have a lot of people alarmed, and we were discussing what can be done about it. It is especially scary that the criminals seems to like to target young college aged women, who they probably think are good prey. With the semester just starting at Wash U and other colleges, it is again open season on and near campus....

Being the geeky sort of person that I am, I like to solve puzzles like the JUMBLE or Sudoku in the paper and also to play SCRABBLE. So for fun I had written a JUMBLE / SCRABBLE word solver / descrambler on my website and noticed it actually received a lot of hits. So I have updated it in various ways. First I created a new version that would highlight the actual dictionary words in RED on the versions that just prints out all the permutations (my original ones). This works for words up to 7 letters long. For words 8 letters and longer, printing out all the permutations gets pretty large and also makes for a large download, so I just print out all the dictionary words I find that match the letters that are given. I realized my online dictionary (which came from the latest Ubuntu wamerican , "American English" dictionary) included a lot of proper nouns, so in my latest descrambler I now flag all the proper nouns with an asterick (*). I also realized making a Spanish vers...

A federal report was released last week telling how the median US household has gone down in both income and net worth from 2001 to 2010. The median household is down from a net worth of $106,100 and an income of $48,900 in 2001 to a worth of $77,300 and an income of $45,800 in 2010. Net worth had actually been increasing well through 2007 ($126,400 median net worth then) primarily due to the increase in housing prices, but with the housing price bubble popping along with the decline in the financial markets net worth is down from that peak. What does this all mean? It means that it is time for a new online calculator ! I saw another nicely written article  on Scott Burn's AssetBuilder web site which included a nice table of percentiles, so I wrote up a new calculator so anyone can find your own percentile ranking in both 2001 and 2011. It uses linear interpolation to calculate all the percentiles between 0, 20, 40, 50, 60, 80 and 90 for income, and from 0, 25, 50, 75 and 90...

Several months ago I told of how I found such a great deal online for the Breathe Right strips I like to wear every night to sleep. However, recently as I have tried to find new ones, I noticed the eBay prices have increased substantially on the strips. Whereas I had previously been able to find large lots at first 24 cents, and then 17 cents a piece, now I am lucky to find anything under 30 cents per strip. I have noticed that a new, generic " Better Breath " strip has appeared for about 18 cents each, so I ordered some of those. They worked pretty good, but they do not stick quite as well to your nose as the original Breathe Right brand. I also tried the Breathe Right brand "Kid" strips which sell for about 8 cents each, but they are too small for our adult noses (but they do work for my son.) So the best deal I could currently find were two boxes of 30 for $16.99 which ends up being a little over 28 cents per strip. That is still much better than the over 3...

  The other day I received a very interesting piece of mail about a new service called ValueAppeal which has piqued my interest. The idea is a third party company that collates all the public sales and assessment data for an area and tries to find homes that are being overassessed, and hence pay too much on property tax. The assessment number they gave for our own home seemed a bit low, but I had always wondered why our assessment kept going up even when home prices were supposed to be going down. I went to their website to see how many of the homes on our street were flagged as being overassessed and I put in 14 of the homes. It decided that 8 of the 14 were overassessed and 6 were not. In their literature they say they only target 20 to 25% of properties, but on our street it looks like more than 50%. There is a large variety of home sizes on our street, however, with a lot of older, custom homes that have been modified over the years so no two are alike and some are much larger...

Last Friday was the long awaited naming and dedication of our building, Scott Rudolph Hall here on the Washington University campus, so now today, with the semester also winding down, I am feeling a bit nostalgic. We actually moved into the building about 8 years ago, and I have also now been working in the department for over 10 years. Wow, the years are really adding up! Another thing that woke me up was seeing some spam from Buy.com telling me I could buy a 16GB Kingston flash drive for $12.95 . I checked our discounted pricing on CDWG , and we can actually purchase a 16GB Kingston flash drive for $9.95 . Wow, I remember when I first started in this department in 2002, our then current departmental mail server was a cobbled together Sun Ultra 10 with 256MB of RAM and a total storage capacity of 13GB (one internal drive and three external SCSI drives). So everything on our entire departmental mail/file/web server could now fit on a single $10 flash drive I could carry in m...

I just received an e-mail from a fellow school parent who wanted to show my results numbers to some other folks, and that made me want to see if the St. Louis Board of Elections had updated their result numbers from two weeks ago. They did, but the numbers are not fully complete yet. I wanted to see the township breakdown for the Ladue School District Proposition 1 voting results and they have most of the votes tabulated by township , but not all of them. The results so far are pretty interesting, though. Since the election ended it looks like they have collected a few hundred more votes since the polls closed, so now the overall total is 4754 Yes, 4255 No, still a 500 vote decision. But if you break it down by township numbers you again see how the votes vary from location to location:   TOWNSHIP Yes No % Yes Diff Clayton 1375 1840 42.77% -465 Creve Coeur 2013 1472 57.76% 541 Missouri River 346 4...

After a surprisingly heated and divisive election, I was relieved to see the Ladue School District Propostion 1 pass 53% to 47% (4,580 to 4,074).  The mailer above was something sent to me and all other student families via e-mail from our parents group (not directly versus postal mail) about actual mailers sent out by the opposing group, Take Back Ladue Schools . I received plenty of the bright yellow mailers which always spelled out exactly how much my taxes were going up, but I never received that one since I do not live in the city of Ladue even if I am just a few blocks from the city border (they probably just sent those to residents within the 63124 zip code.) I wondered if these rather divisive mailers helped their cause or hurt them. Following the article in the Ladue-Frontenac Patch , I personally do not think the mailers were "hateful and mean spirited and has racial, ethnic and religious overtones" as the article said, but I do think the tone may have hurt the...

Back on January 6 of this year I ordered a 24 port Netgear Gigabit switch for our building which only cost $199 from NewEgg and also came with a $30 rebate which would be shipped as a $30 VISA debit card. Almost three months later the rebate card actually showed up last Monday so I thought I would try to spend it wisely for the department. Since my son was on Spring Break from his high school last week, he accompanied me to work last Wednesday and I appointed him the task of trying to maximizing the $30 debit card for "stuff" for the department without going over $30 (so we would not have to charge the rest to my university Pro-Card which would be a pain.) However, he looked at wireless mice (which I consider a waste for most cases here in the department) and other unneeded items since he considers supplies like wired mice, ethernet cables and blank CD's boring. In any case I wanted to see what I could find for a total of $30 to purchase for our department . I went t...

A new house nearby popped on the market in the last couple weeks and this one was of particular interest to me, since it stands on the lot where our old former house stood! The address now is 9125 Pine Avenue in Brentwood , but when we lived there it was 9121 Pine, a 1950's 1800 square foot 3 bedroom brick ranch, much like the one we live in now just a mile or so away in Richmond Heights. After we sold that house in the mid 1990's, it was purchased by a couple who then sold it several years later to Kingbridge Homes who was building a bunch of "teardowns" or "fill-ins" in western Brentwood in the early to mid 2000's. Our old house sat on a double lot in Parkridge, so when it sold they demolished the house , split the lot in half and built two large blocky homes in its place.  So when we drove by the other day and I saw a "For Sale" sign pop up in front of it, I had to see what they were asking for it. I was rather surprised to see it lis...

On this past Saturday, I received two note cards in the mail about the Proposition 1 tax increase for the Ladue School District . The first was from the district itself and spelled out the same old facts I had already heard. The second piece was much more interesting, a flyer from Takebackladueschools.com that spelled out exactly how much my tax would increase for next year and then tried to convince me to vote NO for the proposition. I flipped over the card to read the arguments, and was surprised to see some which seemed to contradict the well known facts given the on the district proposition site . The first claim was pretty surprising -- declining enrollment. I knew as a fact the middle school had the largest enrollment in years while my son was just there, so I thought I would check the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education site which should know the facts. They had a nice synopsis of every school district in the state, including one for Ladue. I have in...

With Whitney Houston's untimely death this past week, it made me think back to the mid 80's when I first heard her amazing voice. At that time my sound system consisted of a component stereo system with a turntable, a cassette deck and a FM tuner connected to a Sony amplifier and with my old Synergistic speakers from high school. But by late 1985 I had heard a new technology was coming out, digitized music on optical disks where there was no pops, crackles or tape hiss to hear and incredible dynamic range (not like the compressed stuff on the radio.) So in 1986 my wife and I purchased our very first CD player, a standalone Teac deck we purchased at a now defunct appliance store near Crestwood Plaza back when people actually visited that mall. As a full-time grad student at the time, the CD deck was quite an extravagance, but as a audio geek, I just had to have one to try out the digital technology. On the night we purchased the CD player, however, I knew I should purchase ...

Yesterday the Missouri Department of Labor sent me a 9 page long form I had to fill out, just to make sure the company I earned a whopping $850 from in 2010 does not need to pay unemployment tax. I started filling it out when I noticed it said I could e-mail the form to them instead. Great, that sounds easier! So I went to the site and found the PDF form that I then downloaded, filled-in and saved as a PDF file on my hard drive. They also needed any 1099 forms I may have from the company, and since I received one from 2010 I scanned that to a PDF along with the front page of their form that I had signed. So I thought I was done and could send off the form and go on with more exciting things on a Saturday morning. Wrong! The message bounced since the Missouri MODES-4389 PDF at 300K and my scanned PDF at 4.1MB together were too large for their mail server. Fine, I thought I would rescan my 1099 and my signature in black and white and at 300 dpi instead of 600 dpi and then send it off...

One of the faculty members in our department recently needed to purchase a Mac Pro for his research work and he wanted one loaded with a bunch of memory. So we went to order it to see how much Apple wanted to load it up with 64GB of RAM. The base system started with 6GB of RAM, and to increase it to 64GB with our academic discount cost a staggering $3,200 more. Needless to say I knew that was ridiculous, and by checking first Crucial.com (to find the exact memory we needed) and then NewEgg I was able to order eight 8GB ECC DDR3 DIMM's for about $1,000 total. That saved over $2,000 off that NASA grant compared to if I had been lazy and just purchased it from Apple with the system (see, I'm saving US tax payers' money!) And after installing the memory, I realize I now have six 1GB ECC DDR3 DIMM's that I could put somewhere. But the problem is, I have nowhere to put them! Since they are ECC memory, they only fit in workstation or server class motherboards that supp...