Hugh's Worthless Blog

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...