Hugh's Worthless Blog

Having worked here on the Washington University  Danforth Campus for years now, I have enjoyed using their webcams so I could see the condition of the parking lots and sidewalks from home on those nasty winter mornings before coming into campus. I always thought they had some pretty useful webcams. But now that my son will be attending a different local university next year, I noticed that other fine educational institution just put online some updated webcams of their own. Saint Louis University initially had a webcam up to monitor their clock tower during the "Occupy SLU" week when the Michael Brown protesters were camped out there, but now they have a full suite of webcams located around the SLU campus. My favorite is the one pointed at Grand and the Busch Student Center where you can see the traffic and the pedestrians as they take turns at that intersection. You can even full screen the webcam image, and it has a volume control too, but I do not think the audio ac...

This morning I was checking my email, when I noticed I received not one but two different messages notifying me that the previously taken domain, hughchou.com , was now available for purchase. One said it would reserve the domain for me for only $49 (alextro.com) and the other one said it would charge me just $69.95 for a one year registration (domainsreserved.com). What a great deal! Since I already had hughchou.org registered at GoDaddy , I thought I would see if I could just grab that name over there instead of using one of these high priced "domain resellers". What do you know, I can grab that same domain for one year for just $14.99 at GoDaddy and the second year is a whopping $2.99 more. So for a little over $18, I was able to grab www.hughchou.com  for two whole years! That domain just forwards to my other domains like hughcalc.org and hughchou.org as well as to my blogs like my St. Louis  restaurant blog , this general blog , and my wife's gluten-free reci...

I love technology and I love acronyms, but I hate it when they start reusing old acronyms. It was bad enough with "ATM" which we knew as "asynchronous transfer mode" in the broadband packet switching days of computer networking (especially here at Washington University ), or short for "atmospheres" or automated teller machines (or the dreaded Adobe Type Manager). But another acronym recently came out for some pretty neat technology: hydrid solid-state and magnetic hard drives. These drives pair a small amount of MLC NAND memory (usually 8GB) with a much higher capacity, more conventional magnetic drive to create a drive with SSD-like performance, yet a large amount of storage (where the magnetic media does not need to be accessed as often either as its most used data is cached to the memory.) So this is a great idea, but they decided to come up with the acronym of SSHD ( solid-state hybrid drive ) to name this technology. The problem with any Linux geek...

It is rather ironic that I have been currently reading a library book about Amazon.com called " The Everything Store " when I came home today on a hot, muggy day and smelled my dehumidier release an electronic death smell in our basement. I looked up when we bought our old Whirlpool dehumidifier, and it was in 2007 when we lived in our previous house and it was purchased at the now defunct "American" appliance stores for only $110. So I realized it was time to replace the unit with a new dehumidifier to last another 5 to 7 years. I let my lovely Acer Chromebook surf the Lowes and Home Depot sites to see what units are available for sale. Lowes.com only had Hisense, Soleus and Idylis units, but HomeDepot.com had Frigidaire and GE units which are companies I had actually heard about in my life. Home Depot had a well rated  50 pint Frigidaire unit for $229.00 plus over $20 in hefty Brentwood city and Missouri sales tax so the total would be over $250 if I drove...

We have been using AT&T DSL for several years, but we finally bit the bullet and switched to AT&T's U-Verse service for voice and internet access, primarily because we kept banging into the pitiful 150GB monthly data cap with DSL due to my son's addiction to huge video game downloads and my daughter's addiction to lengthy Skype and Netflix sessions. With the U-Verse " Promotion of the Day " the price differential was pretty small to move to U-Verse (and their unregulated 250GB data cap) so we did the switch. What I did not realize is what my favorite new part of the deal was - Voice Call Blocking! We always receive annoying telemarketing calls from charities soliciting for donations and from pollsters and survey people (i.e. who are not restricted by "Do Not Call" lists) but with our new U-Verse Voice we realized we now have Caller ID included and the ability to block certain numbers. You can even log onto http://att.com/myatt and look at w...

Happy New Year! It is now 2014 and in celebration I have started the transition to move my main site to a new host and provider, Hostgator , with the new shorter URL hughcalc.org which is the base URL for all my online calculators . This will keep my site active longer with increased bandwidth and stability, and offload traffic off our department server which should never have been hosting this site in the first place. I should add some new content for the new year. Let me know if there are any new calculators I should add to my new site, like any modifications to my cholesterol ratio or BMI/BMR calculations. I am enjoying using my new Asus Chromebook C7 I won from a raffle at  Novu.com  because I am a UnitedHealthcare member (so I do not need my "Affordable Care Act" calculator ). I can use my Google Chromebook for just about everything. Some people say they are not "real laptops" but I can use it for 95% of the things I do at home on my computer. I thi...