Hugh's Worthless Blog

  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 tha

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