Hugh's Worthless Blog

The Missouri Dept of Labor shows they are Technical Idiots

2012-01-21T10:58:00.000-06:00

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. So I did and found my PDF shrink down to a lovely, smaller 560K. Both files together were now under 1MB combined. So I sent off this message and what do you think happened? That's right my message with 1MB in attachments bounced as being "too large". Okay, if The Missouri Department of Labor tells you that one of the options of sending this useless form to them is by using e-mail, they should have an e-mail server that will accept an attachment that is 1MB in size!! I know I get upset when people in my department in the university send 40MB attachments to 50 people within our own building, but 1MB attachments are fine by me. When we upgraded to our latest Ubuntu Linux mail server, I bumped up the maximum message size from the default 10MB (in Postfix) to 64MB as we had set on the previous sendmail server. I would think the IT folk at the State of Missouri would be smart enough to realize that if they expect anyone to e-mail in these forms they also must increase the maximum message size of their stupid Exchange server.

6 GB of RAM Without a Home and More Geeky Anecdotes

2012-01-12T20:53:00.000-06:00

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 support DDR3 ECC memory, and we only have so many of those systems new enough to support DDR3. Our fairly new Dell PowerEdge T310 does take DDR3 ECC memory, but it already has 8GB installed as two 4GB DIMM's so it has 4 of its 6 slots empty. It almost seems a shame to put 1GB DIMM's in those slots, though, since filling up the 4 slots only pushes it from 8GB to 12GB. Our PowerEdge T300 only has 2GB of RAM so it would make more sense there, but it is a DDR2 motherboard so we are out of luck there too. I guess I may have to resort to selling it on eBay or something!

On a somewhat related note I noticed I really should fsck the filesystems on a couple USB 2.0 mounted drives on the PowerEdge T300 system and I Googled for time estimates and could not find anything. So I thought I would report it took almost exactly 20 minutes to fsck two different 1TB ext2 filesystems on Western Digital My Book Mirror 2TB drives connected to our PowerEdge T300 running Ubuntu 10.04 (amd64). Both 2 disk enclosures are set up as a RAID 1 mirror by default and both filesystems are about 41% full. I was hoping it would not take too long and I am glad it did not.

My last geeky anecdote is over an old UPS I just noticed was no longer holding any charge. It is a CyberPower CPS1500AVR and when I checked our sales receipts I realized the beast was 8 years old so of course the batteries were dead. It has a convenient front panel where you can replace the batteries, but trying to find the exact ones to purchase were a pain. The CyberPower web site has a battery replacement guide, but all it calls them are "BB Battery - BP7-12" and it says it needs 4 of them. But they do not tell you where to buy them. If you Google "BP7-12 battery" you get a bunch of hits with prices ranging from $15 to $40. Which should I pick? I typically purchase for the university through CDWG.com, NewEgg.com or some times Provantage.com. CDWG had a Battery-Biz BP7-12 for about $37, but neither NewEgg nor Provantage had anything. Multiplying the $37 x 4 put me up to $148 in batteries for that 8 year old UPS, so instead I gave up and ended up just buying a brand spanking new APC Backup-UPS Pro 1500 (BR1500G) which NewEgg has with free shipping for $193.99. For less than $50 more I bought a brand new APC unit, and you can always find batteries for those!

Payday Loan Calculator - A Ripoff Any Way You Look At It

2012-01-04T11:24:00.000-06:00

I actually received an e-mail from the Texas Senate Committee on Business & Commerce looking for a simple payday loan calculator to post on a site they were developing. Being a fan on on-line calculators, and not a fan of payday loans, that sounded like a fun little project to do. I took my old "Find the Missing Value" calculator, and modified it a little so that now it is adapted more for the common payday or auto title loans where you pay a flat fee to receive an advance on your paycheck for a certain number of days. Using a typical $17.50 per $100 loaned amount (from Consumers Union) if this amount is over a 14 day bi-weekly work period, it would amount to an annual interest rate of 422.8%. In today's market with record low mortgage rates, that is a pretty staggering percentage. Obviously the Texas Senate Committee on Business & Commerce thinks so too!

Interesting Refinancing Proposal by Columbia University Economist

2011-12-27T10:00:00.003-06:00

Since I took the week off, I am getting to catch up on my reading, and the latest book I have been reading is Bill Clinton's recent book, "Back to Work". One interesting proposal he brought up was a mortgage refinancing proposal by Glenn Hubbard and Chris Mayer of Columbia University. They propose that any current mortgage being held by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac should be allowed to refinance at current market rates for only a modest refinancing fee. Clinton mentions in his book the closing costs would be a flat 0.4% of the loan amount and I did finally find that amount buried in the very lengthy description of Hubbard's proposal. Their Columbia University site has a whole ton of information and data available but it definitely took some wading through to get to the details.

Having learned about this, it was now time for me to, of course, compose a simple calculator to see how this would compare to a more conventional refinancing where consumers often must pay 1 to 2% of the loan amount in total closing costs. This is the main reason that we personally have not refinanced in the past year or so, since even with record low mortgage rates, our loan is so small and our rate is already low enough, that it is very difficult to justify refinancing to lower our rate just a bit more and reduce our payment just slightly as well. However, if the upfront costs were lower, many more people like myself would refinance, which would give us more spending money every month to help purchase more or invest more, both of which would help the economy. There are many such people as ourselves who have fairly stable jobs and good credit, but for whom refinancing again (since we did so in 2009) does not make that much sense.

Latest Geeks.com Purchase: BLK-KY-07 MP3 Player

2011-12-24T00:36:00.000-06:00

Some kind soul on the internet sent me $25 via PayPal for my financial calculator website, and told me I should go buy something for myself. Normally I do not really purchase too much frivolous crap for myself, but I received my daily message from Geeks.com and noticed they were offering Free Shipping on almost everything, no minimum purchase! Included was their 'USB Sport MP3 Player' (BLK-KY-07) which sounded like a cool idea since I am one of those many people who go through ear buds all the time with my MP3 players, and this looked more durable. Since the MP3 player was only $14.49 with free shipping and I could also get a 2GB microSD card at Geeks.com for only $8.49 more, I thought, why not, I am worth it! For less than the $25 PayPal payment I received, I could purchase both items and have them shipped to my house for my personal enjoyment.

The package arrived yesterday at our house in an unusually large cardboard box. I was afraid they had my order wrong since I knew it was only a MP3 player and a microSD card, but the box was large enough to hold a couple pairs of shoes! Luckily the order was correct, and I also received a bunch of air pillows to pop for fun. I thought I should test out my new acquisition right away. So I put the microSD card in the headset, attached the included USB cable to it, and then plugged it in my computer. The very poorly written instruction card that came with it told me to wait 8 hours, but I was not going to do that! I knew the set must be getting power via the USB cable so I tried pushing the buttons and mounting the microSD card, but neither would work. Out of a whim, I thought I would try one of my own USB to mini USB cables, and sure enough, once I plugged it in using my own cable, a little red LED lit up and the 2GB flash card showed up on my computer. So anybody else who buys this thing should realize the included USB cable is a piece of junk! Just use one of your own. I will now also describe the proper usage of the BLK-KY-07 MP3 player.

While it is hooked up via USB to my computer it appears it will play the MP3 music with the ON/OFF in either position. However once you disconnect it from the USB cable, the switch must be set to the ON position to operate at which point the red LED turns on. When you depress the Play/Pause button the music starts and the LED flashes on and off to let you know it is playing. When you click Play/Pause again the music stops and the LED stays solid red. I noticed the Play/Pause button has a delay of a second or so in response which throws you off a little, but for $14.49 what do you expect? The other two buttons are Next and Previous buttons which also act as volume up and volume down. While the headset in on your head with the three buttons on top, the button on your right side is the Next/Volume Up button, and the button on the left side is the Previous/Volume Down button. You just have to hold down the buttons to change volumes, and just click them once to move forward and back between MP3 files. The sound quality is pretty mediocre, but since this is a $15 "sports" model I was not expecting audiophile quality. It does its job and was a good value. Since the shipping was free now is the time to try one out yourself. If you already have a microSD card all you need is the $15 headset. I found the identical item on eBay for exactly the same price. I also noticed I could have purchased a 2GB microSD on eBay for $3 to $4, but I was willing to spend the extra $5 to get the SD adapter and plus give Geeks.com my business. They send me an e-mail ad every day, and I always read it if just for the entertainment value. I love their e-mail ads and want them to stay in business!

St. Louis County School District Tax Rates, Going Up Of Course

2011-12-19T21:25:00.000-06:00

It was just last year when I was mentioning I should not be complaining because our school taxes were going up by only 4%. Of course, I spoke too soon. I just received the latest Ladue School District newsletter explaining how our school tax rate could be going up by $.49 per assessed $100 (if the proposition passes), which translated means an increase of 15.8% over what we paid in 2011. However, our district will still actually have the lowest tax rate in the county, but that is only because all the other districts with low rates have been jacking up their tax rates as well. I thought I needed a nifty online calculator to figure out the increase, so I wrote one, not only for Ladue, but for most of the other school districts in the area who increased their rates substantially last year. I also found the median home values for all the districts to see how much a median home in each district would see as an increase. The actual increase for us personally will only be a few hundred dollars a year, and since my son is still in school there, I do not mind the extra cost to benefit his education. However, I can see that the tax increase may be a problem for some seniors in the district on fixed incomes. Not everybody who lives in the Ladue School district is filthy, stinking rich as many people like to believe. It will be interesting to see how everybody in the district votes in April. The district passed an increase for 2010, but that was only a 4% increase, not 15.8%.

My Son's MP3 Players: Then and Now

2011-12-08T18:39:00.001-06:00

It is time to finish up Christmas shopping for the year, and like a good little geek I was doing it online. My parents sent us a check to purchase gifts for our children, and my high school age son decided his two year old iPod needed to be replaced. Actually it has lost its left channel on the headphone jack so it was time to spend my parents' money and buy their oldest grandson a new iPod media player. He wanted the 4th generation 32GB black iPod Touch so I had to do some quick surfing to see where to order it. I know the local Galleria Apple Store, the Brentwood Micro Center, Best Buy and Target are all selling them for $299.99, but we would also have to pay Missouri and city sales tax (both Brentwood and Richmond Heights have the same steep total sales tax of 8.425%.) The total with tax would be $325.27 plus the fun of visiting a local retailer during this holiday season. So I looked online and, sure enough, Amazon.com was selling them for $269.99 with free shipping and no sales tax, a savings of over $55. Plus I get to sit here at home and let the delivery people bring it to my front door. To calculate your own savings you can use my shopping local versus online calculator that I wrote last year.

That means I can probably soon be using my son's older iPod Touch (with one working audio channel) since I always inherit his old technology. Not only am I using his old cell phone, and his old digital camera, but I have both of his older MP3 players, a 1GB Creative Zen V and a 256MB Creative Muvo N200. That N200 still works fine after six years, even after he dropped it in the toilet when he was in elementary school. It is hard to believe a 256MB MP3 player cost $60 back in 2005, but I found the NewEgg receipt in my GMail and that is what we paid for it. Frankly it plays music just as well as my son's new $300 iPod Touch will, and it is more portable too! And replacing the battery on it is so simple, since I just open it up and slide in a charged up a NiMH rechargeable AAA. I was just using it today to listen to some tunes while riding home on the MetroLink. For a 10 minute ride from the Wash U Danforth campus to the Richmond Heights station parking lot, I really do not need 32GB of music, and 256MB is plenty big, even if the new iPod will have 128 times more space.

High tech media player, circa 2005

Post-Dispatch Article About City to County Student Transfers

2011-12-02T13:04:00.001-06:00

I read an interesting article yesterday on StLToday.com about what would happen if city residents were allowed to send their children to any county school they wanted. The Clayton School district did a survey amongst many city residents to see what the effects would be on their district. The answer is probably what they expected, nearly a quarter of the city respondents (22.7%) would want to send their children to Clayton Schools. That would result in about 3,600 city children who would want to attend the small Clayton district which currently has 2,500 students. That is obviously not very practical. Ideally if some sort of transfer program did take place they would have to allocate more students to go to the large districts further out that may actually be able to accommodate the vast numbers of students.

If we look at the current VICC student breakdown, (as I found in their latest board meeting highlights from June 17, 2011) there are 5,600 VICC students in Fall 2011 and their 2010 enrollment by district was as follows:

Right now Rockwood has the most VICC students at 32.4% which means about 1,800 students. Wow, I did not realize that many city students were willing to make that long drive out to Rockwood. Rockwood and Parkway together make up more than 50% of the current VICC enrollment, but even if all the "Other District" survey category was for Parkway (11.1%), that added to the 11.2% that picked Rockwood would only add up to 22.3% of survey respondents picking those two districts. Somehow they would have to limit how many people can actually pick closer districts like Clayton and require others to pick the larger, further out districts like Rockwood and Parkway. For Brentwood, who had the lowest survey percentage of 7.3%, that seemingly small percentage would translate to over 1,000 city students which is substantially more than the 800 or so total students that currently attend there. You can compare that to the 2.1% of the VICC enrollment currently at Brentwood which amounts to a little over 100 students. Already about 1 out of 8 students at Brentwood schools are city students.

I noticed in the VICC numbers that Pattonville and Ladue are still on the list of schools with VICC students, but their current numbers have dwindled to almost nothing since neither accepts new VICC applicants. I remember when my daughter was an early elementary student there were still a few city students in her class, but now (when she is in college) the total percentage in Pattonville is a whopping 0.4% which means about 25 students in the whole district. Ladue must just have a handful remaining which leaves them on the list but at 0.0%. Therefore my son has never had any city students in any of his classes. But if they allow city students to start transferring to his high school that might change. The Ladue district is already experiencing overcrowded conditions, so more students would only make it worse. And what would happen to home prices if suddenly you can buy a house in the city and then send your children to Clayton or Ladue schools? I already consider my property taxes to include "tuition" to send my son to Ladue schools. I doubt the homes in our area would have seen home assessments actually go up last year during this soft housing market if it were not for the school district and the demand for homes in the area. Just today there is a new article about Ladue Schools putting a tax increase on the April ballot. Talk about great timing, increase taxes to run our overcrowded district and then have more students possibly attending from the city.

I do feel for the city residents who want to send their children to better public schools. But I am not sure allowing them to send their children to any country public school they choose is a realistic option.

St. Louis Area Graduation Rate versus Housing Costs

2011-11-22T11:43:00.001-06:00

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, both in the middle of the pack with a graduation rate of about 85%. I would have expected Parkway to be closer to the 90+% pack and to place above schools like Maplewood and Bayless. I expected Jennings to be down with the under 75% crowd where the homes cost much less, but they actually have a higher graduation rate than Fort Zumwalt, Pattonville or St. Charles where homes cost significantly more.

What is actually more interesting to view than the graduation rates are the percentage of students who do NOT graduate in 4 years (i.e. 100% - the graduation rate). Here Clayton's 98.5% graduation rate means only 1.5% of Clayton students do not graduate, only a third of the 4.5% of Ladue students who do not graduate (the second lowest number). They are the only two districts with less than 5% not graduating, and if you increase the limit to 10% not graduating you gain Kirkwood, Mehlville, Valley Park, Webster, Brentwood and Rockwood. All the districts except for two have less than 30% not graduating, the only exceptions being Normandy and the St. Louis City public schools. It is actually pretty scary to see how high that number is for many school districts. It is hard to imagine that about 1 out of every 7 students in Parkway does not graduate in 4 years.

Retirement Asset to Salary Ratio Calculator and More!

2011-11-09T08:46:00.001-06:00

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 and when I was checking to see what new updates were added I found an article that mentioned that Firefox and Chrome are just about tied in usage and Chrome should pass up Firefox soon. I thought I would check out our log files on our rather popular website here at the university, meteorites.wustl.edu, where you can learn everything you want to know about meteorites! That site had over a million hits in October which should be a pretty good sampling of hits and more than twice as many as my own www.hughchou.org (about 400K hits in October). Checking the meteorites site, however, I realized that neither Chrome for Firefox was the #2 browser there, it was Safari:
1) Internet Explorer: 46.1%
2) Safari: 21.0 %
3) Firefox: 19.3%
4) Chrome: 10.7%
So I thought I would check hughchou.org's logs to see if the same profile existed since the audience there is a bit different, but the numbers were rather similar:
1) Internet Explorer: 44.1%
2) Safari: 22.3%
3) Firefox: 14.8%
4) Chrome: 9.7%
Perhaps both my sites are more popular among folks with Apple products than the typical sites, especially being more "academically" minded, but I found it interesting that Safari was so popular on both sites. I did break down the Safari usage to find out that 51% of those hits are from a Mac of some sort, 37% are from Safari on Windows machines, and about 12% are from iPhones and iPods. I never realized Safari was so popular!

Congrats to the Cardinals, but what is up with these boring caps?

2011-11-01T08:11:00.000-05:00

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 on back-order, both the fitted one and the adjustable one. I also found them on cardinals.fanatics.com, but I am not sure how long they will take to ship. I keep calling the Brentwood Sports Authority to see if they have any and they keep saying they do not. From the way they answer the phone I am guessing they are receiving a lot of the same calls ("Which caps are you looking for? We have plenty of the black and white ones.") I am guessing the black and while caps are all they received and there must be plenty other Cardinals fans not so keen on wearing around a cap that looks more like some promotional corporate cap than a sporting cap.

Income Percentile Calculator 1979 to 2007 Shows Growing Disparity

2011-10-28T08:27:00.000-05:00

With all the "Occupy Wall Street" protests complaining about how the Top 1% are prospering at the expense of the other 99%, it was interesting to hear this week's news from the Congressional Budget Office which pretty much agrees with their argument. It is rare to see a government branch agreeing with a grassroots movement this far from elections! It seems that in the 27 years from 1979 to 2007, the top 1% of Americans saw their incomes increase by 275% while the bottom fifth of Americans saw their incomes increase by 18%. But what about all the incomes in between? I pulled the full PDF file from the CBO and pulled all the data for now only 1979 and 2007 but 3 other intermediary years (1986, 1993 and 2000) to build my very own income percentile calculator for anybody to use! You simply enter any income amount and it interpolates the percentile that income would be for each of the five years for which I pulled data (1979,1986,1993,2000,2007). It shows how over the years the percentage of the population that the income is greater than as well as what "top percentage" you are. It maxes out at being in the "Top 1%" for income since that is as high as the data goes. For example $40,000 a year used to put you in the top 35% (65 percentile) back in 1979, but by 2007 that only put you a little better than the middle (53.7 percentile.) Likewise $70K used to put you in the 90th percentile in 1979, but by 2007 it put you barely at 80th.

Underwater Mortgages and Possible Changes to HARP

2011-10-24T22:30:00.001-05:00

I have been helping a company develop a couple underwater mortgage calculators and in discussion with them they mentioned that nearly 1/4 of all homeowners currently hold an underwater mortgage. I found that difficult to believe but he assured me it was true, and today in the news I read an article that confirmed it. However, that statistic is misleading since most of the underwater loans are in just a few states, like California, Florida, Nevada, Arizona and Michigan. In those states the percentage of people with negative equity is staggering, about 60% in Nevada, nearly 50% in Arizona and over a third in Michigan and Florida. I found this cool graph to figure out where Missouri stood and it is much more typical, where about 15% of homeowners are underwater (about 1 in 6.) That is still not great news, but nothing like the numbers from the hardest hit states.

The federal refinancing plan set up to help people with their problematic loans has been far from a success, with less than 900,000 homeowners using the Home Affordable Refinancing Program (HARP) where they were hoping to help millions. So now they want to change the program, removing the maximum 125% LTV limit on qualifying loans and lowering the cost to refinance. (Once anything is approved I am modifying my online calculator!) That is a great thing to try to help those with underwater loans, but what about the 85% of us in most of the other states who have loans well under the value of our homes? It is great they are making refinancing cheaper for those people most in trouble, but why not lower refinancing fees for everybody? I had someone e-mail me a question about a loan modification and he mentioned his total closing costs to modify and refinance his loan would be about $800, where I know it would cost me nearly $2,000 to refinance my tiny loan which does not qualify to be "modified" since it is well under the value of our home and our monthly payment is well within our means. In any case I hope they make some changes to the program so that more people can use it, or what was the point of it at all?

Interest rates have taken a slight uptick in the past couple of weeks so anyone thinking about refinancing will have to decide whether to wait to see if any of these modifications to the plan get approved or try to do something now before rates get any higher. For many folks the rates do not make a difference since they are so far underwater they do not qualify for anything, so they desperately need the 125% LTV criteria to be lifted. Let's see what Washington can do to try to help out the underwater mortgage situation.

Yes, a Home's Location Can Be Too Good!

2011-10-19T13:59:00.001-05:00

They always say in real estate that what sells is "Location, Location, Location", but in reality sometimes the location can be too good. Case in point is a house I travel by nearly every day which is located in a prime Ladue location, directly on Clayton Road near the Immacolata church and the Galleria Mall (and on the #58 Metro bus route!). Every time when I am stopped at the red light northbound on McCutcheon I am forced to stare at it and wonder who would ever buy it. At only $375,000 in Ladue schools and close to everything it would be a steal if it were not directly on Clayton and across from an incoming street with a street light located right in front of it! On all the online photos they make sure they do not show the unsightly street light in front, but it is definitely right there:

When the house sold in the fall of 2009, I was waiting to see the wrecking crew knock the whole thing down to see how they would rebuild a new McMansion somewhere on that property, but that did not happen. They simply fixed up the existing home so it looks pretty nice inside now. I thought they would remove it and build further back in the lot. If you look at the lot layout from gis.stlouisco.com, the lot is triangular shaped and you could wedge a nice two story house back in the far corner with a garage up front.

I was guessing they would do a teardown and build a circular drive up front to separate the home more from Clayton Road like:

I wish them luck in selling the house though, since from the pictures it looks like they did quite a bit of renovation on the inside. That is just not a very great location for a house, especially with that stop light.

I actually visited an open house in the neighborhood since it was of another house that is a bit of an anomaly. I was disappointed the first time they had an open house since I had to miss it that Sunday, but they had a second one just a couple weeks ago. That house is a fairly recent rebuild, and simply gorgeous inside. It is indeed enormous, much larger than it appears from the street. But being priced over four times as high as another house for sale just two lots over, it seems vastly overpriced and out of place in our neighborhood. It would actually make a good home for someone who wants to live with older parents since it is basically a large ranch with two main floor master bedroom suites and two more bedrooms and a full bath on an upper level over the giant four car garage. But priced at $1.575 million puts it out of most people's budgets. I wonder where they came up with that price too. Why not $1.475M so people looking under $1.5M would find it, or frankly how about $975K since I can not imagine most people looking over the $1M mark will be that interested. For considerably less (under $1.2M) , you can buy this nice two story home just a couple hundred yards east of us:

The county assessor appraised the 2 story house at $1.038M and the ranch on our street for $883.8K for 2011. I do not know why he thinks he can actually get anything close to $1.575M for that house. Incidentally, for this posting I used realtor.com listings since some of the ones on cbgundaker.com no longer have any pictures. I actually still prefer using the hermannlondon.com site, but to search there you need to register and give them an e-mail address. I have all these houses saved as "Favorites" on my HermannLondon account!

No, We Didn't Sign Up For Your Stinkin' Card!

2011-10-18T12:54:00.001-05:00

Yesterday, our shiny new Bank of America Power Rewards VISA card showed up in the mail - a credit card we never applied for in the first place! We had been happy users of our old Schwab Bank VISA card for years, but they no longer wanted to be in the credit card business so they transferred us first to FIA card services (whoever they are) and now completely over to Bank of America, an institution I never held with the highest regards. (The same crooks charging folks $5/month for a debit card.) But since we did need a backup credit card I activated it yesterday with the toll-free 800 number on the sticker, and pocketed my shiny new card. I did find it humorous the card said "customer since 2005" when we really only had the card for an hour or so, but I did not realize at the time I would own that card for less than a full day. I had not even had time to sign up to manage the card on-line.

Today we received a call from the fraud department of Bank of America and someone there told us some crook tried to charge over $1,000 on our brand new card on NewEgg.com (one of my favorite places to shop -- but it wasn't me this time!). So they told us to destroy our cards and they would send us new ones. Wow, less than one day and someone already tried to fraudulently use our card. Is someone in the Richmond Heights Post Office trying to steal credit card numbers or something? At least it is good to know all the crooks aren't in the banks and in politics! We may end up just canceling the Bank of America credit card since the rewards program there is not even all that great. Why would anyone actually choose to use one of these monolithic national banks? We will continue to do most of our banking at our favorite local credit union, First Community. I did check to see if it was one of those new "Blink" enabled cards that may pose a security risk, but that seems to only be on Chase cards (Bank of America must be too far behind the times.)

No More Green Hall Live Webcam Action!

2011-10-15T09:05:00.000-05:00

I was very sad to see that Clayco has stopped updating the Wash U Green Hall webcam that has been running non-stop since April 2010. It seems to have ended as of last Friday, October 7, so now I must grab some of the images before they take it down altogether. I can no longer catch myself or other people on the sidewalk as they walk to and from the Skinker Metrolink. How sad! In memorial I have captured some photos from Wednesday. October 5, which I like to call "instant lawn day", the day that the green grass amazingly appeared on the corner of Skinker and Forest Park Parkway, all captured by the now deceased Green Hall webcam. At 9:53am that morning the corner was still as I saw it Tuesday evening, all dirt except for the two strips of grass by the sidewalk. But then the transformation begins:

9:53am

10:52am

11:52am

In two hours the corner is transformed into a sea of beautiful grass, thanks to a large crew of ground workers and Washington University's large piles of money. I remember walking down the sidewalk that evening and enjoying the lovely scene. Alas, I will never again get to capture the step by step changes to the corner. I will have to wait for Wash U to build yet another building and set up another webcam!

They Photoshop Celebrities, Why Not University Buildings too?

2011-09-24T10:09:00.001-05:00

This morning I was reading the latest news on the KSDK.com site when I saw they mentioned our lovely new engineering building, Green Hall, that was dedicated yesterday. So I took a look at the article and noticed something odd. The photo that was included of the building had a lot more luxurious, green grass than that same building that I walked by late yesterday afternoon on my way to the Metrolink station! The article stated the photo was "Courtesy of Washington University" which means someone in our media department has been very busy with Photoshop! They added extra grass that is actually just brown dirt right now. Checking the ClayCo webcam confirms that they did not rush out and lay sod last night after I left, and there is still only those two strips of sod right next to the sidewalk. I have yet to be able to walk down the sidewalk but I plan on doing so soon!

Breathe Right, the eBay way!

2011-09-15T18:47:00.000-05:00

I have eternal allergies which require me to spray weird prescription stuff up my nose every night so I can breath a little better. However, one thing I discovered that helps me out a lot are those little Breathe Right strips. I put one of those things on my nose and it really helps me sleep through the night and it reduces my snoring too. One problem with the strips, however, is that they are fairly expensive if you use them every day. At my local Walgreens a pack of 30 costs $11.99 plus tax which means over 40 cents a night to strap the thing on my nose. Even Walmart is only $1 cheaper at $10.99 (when they have them in stock) so they are expensive everywhere. I tried some of the cheap store brands and they do not stick as well and sometimes leave a sticky residue. No thanks!

So it was time to go to the Internet and the world's favorite on-line flea market, eBay. Back in March I found I could buy six boxes of 30 strips (180 total) for $43.99 which I thought was a deal (24 cents each.) That is less than 60% of the Walgreens price and included free shipping and no tax. But since that supply was running low it was time to look again, and I found 360 strips for the incredible price of only $59.99 (less than 17 cents a strip!) That is less than half the price of retail. The desciption on eBay said for that price with free shipping they were going to remove them all from the boxes, but when they showed up in the mail they were still in their boxes. So I received thirty boxes of 12 strips which arrived at my front door -- a full year of nose strips for only $5 a month instead of almost $13 (sales tax at my local Brentwood Walgreens is high!) Thank you millerthepeachface on eBay. I noticed my seller has lowered the price a couple dollars more to $56.99, but I am not complaining. If they can make a few bucks selling these things on-line more power to them!

The National Mortgage Refinancing Dilemna

2011-08-27T10:42:00.000-05:00

Stock market drops, more unemployment claims, housing prices dropping - this "economic recovery" we are supposed to be having does not look like much of an economic recovery! One way our buddies in Washington have thought of helping the economy is to widen the HARP and HAMP programs to become more widespread so more people can use them (since not very many people did!) I know I recently received yet another letter in the mail from Quicken Loans saying that I might be eligible for the HARP program. But when I went through their program requirements I did not meet the proper criteria for the special HARP program and would only qualify for a more standard loan refinancing. It seems like anyone with 5% equity in their home must go through a standard refinancing, and for us that is simply not worth the closing costs since our rate is already reasonably low (4.910%) and our loan amount is small (under $100K.) So now I am curious what particulars are in the latest Washington plans to expand the HARP program to reach more homeowners. In the past Congress only seemed to want to help the people that the lenders do not want to lend to, and that is part of the reason the participation rate is so low. Congress set the program up to help those people "over their heads" in debts and payments and that is exactly who the lenders do not want as borrowers. An article in Time magazine sums it up nicely, saying "all parties involved have to play". If Congress sets up a plan too difficult and complicated for homeowners to understand with unfavorable terms and conditions for the lenders involved, why would anyone want to use it? I would really like to see the details for the new plan so I can modify my online calculator so that it can reflect the new plan (hopefully one that will work better for both homeowners and for lenders.)

Hurray! Wash U Can Cut Corners!!

2011-08-03T16:05:00.002-05:00

I was happy to see that the original mock up photo of the corner of Skinker and Forest Park Parkway is not how they ended up designing the sidewalks leading from the new Preston Green Hall. Wash U actually did "cut the corners" of the sidewalks as they had been laid out before, with a sidewalk already in place right now in front of the massive new Washington University sign they erected on the corner. The original photo has little bits of greenery jutting out keeping people from cutting the corner, but as they probably know from the ugly pedestrian formed path cutting the corner from Forest Park Parkway to Hoyt Drive in front of Whitaker Hall (yes, it is visible from Google Maps!) people will cut corners when then can:

So now instead of their original plans pictured below (which I stole from Clayco's site) , I have created a new image of the corner using the ever powerful and always open source image editor, GIMP. Original view:

My update view:

I think there might be enough of a concrete pad on that corner to build a tennis court or something. It is huge!

What's is that thing on Skinker and Forest Park Parkway?

2011-07-27T12:45:00.000-05:00

Okay, every day I walk to and from the Skinker Metrolink station and I have been watching the construction of the Preston M. Green Hall. Now, however, they are building something in front of the building by the street corner and it looks like quite a substantial structure, more than the smaller "Washington University in St. Louis" sign that used to be there but closer to the corner. I grabbed the latest image from the Claycorp webcam and cropped out the strange structure they are building there. I also decided to troll the Internet to find any architectural drawings of what they plan for the street corner and found this lovely picture here:

It appears that the corner will be a large plot of concrete with some greenery behind it! Was that really the best plan they could devise? Where they are building the large granite covered structure looks like a bunch of greenery in the mocked up photo. Is that going to be a large planter of sorts with "Washington University" written on it? They have been laying out some large expanses of concrete there on the corner in the last couple days which is not what I had been expecting until I saw the mock up. Why do they need so much concreted space there?

The other thing I realized is that once Green Hall is completed, the Metrolink to building "outdoor sprint path" is not reduced as much as you would think by having a new building added onto the end of Brauer Hall. Here I have grabbed an image of the corner from Google Maps and added in green my current bad weather "sprint path" from the Brauer Hall loading dock, and the shortened "sprint path" in blue that will be necessary from Green Hall when it is completed in a few months:

I think the addition of Green Hall may reduce the outdoor walking distance by maybe 40%, but I do not think it will reduce it by half. The pathway from Green Hall archway to the corner sidewalk is a good 150 to 200 feet and there is no easy way to cut the corner to the Metrolink entrance with the way everything has been made. I like to think it would have been cool if they had built the basement of Green Hall so it would have a tunnel that leads right to the Metrolink station, but that might be a security problem:

The new plan also does not allow you to "cut the corner" like we could in the past when the old sign was there and you could walk the sidewalk behind it and save quite a few steps:

I will be anxious to see the construction completed to see what the corner is like with everything done. This morning there was even a large concrete truck sitting there blocking the sidewalk so we had to walk out in the street! Luckily nobody was hit by a car!!

Mice are Nice... or are they?

2011-07-15T12:17:00.000-05:00

One of our fine faculty members recently received a shiny, new MacBook Air, and was looking for a nice mouse to use with it. He was curious about the Magic Mouse, and it seems pretty cool until you see the price -- $69. I had recently given him a very capable Kensington wired mouse we purchased from CDW-G for $6.47, which means for the same price as the Magic Mouse we could purchase ten Kensington mice and still have change left over. You may argue that the Magic Mouse is a Bluetooth device and hence more costly, so we also looked at other Bluetooth mice and found the Microsoft Bluetooth 5000 Mouse and the Logitech V470, both for about $40 instead of $69. Now $40 is still quite a bit for a mouse, but it is a lot cheaper than $69. Searching on NewEgg.com, I did find some Bluetooth mice selling for $20 to $30 from some off name brands, but with shipping they were almost $40 anyway, so it seemed safer to stick with the Microsoft or Logitech (we get free shipping all the time from CDW-G!) What is really so horrible about having a wired mouse anyway? I think our $6 Kensington mice work just great!

And speaking of mice, I must relate a story about our car. This past summer we noticed when we turned our air conditioner blower up to position 3 or 4 it would make a horrible noise, and even at 2 it would make a little more noise than even last winter, so we took it into the Hyundai dealer for a look. What they had found was that some rodent (a mouse? squirrel?) had gnawed through our air filter cover and filled our blower compartment with acorns! So that horrible noise we heard were the acorns rattling around in our blower. They cleaned it out and put a new filter cover in place so now our A/C blows with gusto again and with hardly a noise. If only our overweight and lazy, gray cat would go out into the garage and hunt down whatever did this to our car. But alas he is just a big, fat lazy blob of a cat.

Firefox 5 and my Latest eBay Bargain

2011-06-21T12:48:00.001-05:00

I was not expecting it, but I received an unsolicited e-mail from mozilla.org today telling me that the latest version of Firefox was out, not just an update to 4.0.1, but the fully updated and just released version 5.0. Although I have been quite happy with version 4 (especially over the bloated version 3), I felt compelled to try out the latest version. The big test -- Frontierville on Facebook! I play Frontierville as well as Farmville and Cityville on Facebook, and Frontierville must be the slowest Zynga game there is to play, especially with my overcrowded frontier with its many buildings, animals, trees and everything else. When Firefox 4.0 first came out, I was pleasantly surprised how much better it seemed to run Frontierville than Chrome did at the time, but now even Firefox 4.0 seems to run it slowly, even with our very fast Internet connection at the university (it is painfully slow at home over DSL.) So now I am trying Frontierville on Firefox 5 during lunchtime St. Louis time (probably a peak Frontierville usage time) and the pages seem to be loading faster than it had before with the Flash responding quite smoothly. I know Chrome seemed to lock up before on Frontierville and Firefox 5 seems to be letting me move around the frontier with ease right now. I know this is not even close to being a scientific test, but at least it is a fun way to test it out! I am hoping Firefox version 5.0 is pushed to the Ubuntu repositories soon so I can update my Linux desktop too to try it out there.

On completely unrelated matters, my daughter has a lovely LG Rumor 2 which she uses with Virgin Mobile's $25 Beyond Talk plan (unlimited texting, browsing and 300 minutes of voice per month). If I were a text messaging maniac like she is I would get one too and use that plan, but since I try to use my cell phone as little as possible, I am on Virgin Mobile's uber cheapo, basic payLo plan ($15 every 90 days when auto-charged to a credit card). However, since she is a texting machine she has worn out the battery on her year and a half old phone, so now we had to order a new battery for her. I checked both the Virgin Mobile and the Sprint websites and they wanted $44.99 for a new LGIP-340N battery which is only $20 less than the special $64.99 price they are offering on the Rumor 2 itself! I wonder how many people would actually buy the battery from Virgin Mobile or Sprint for that crazy price instead of trying to find a cheaper one some other place? I know I sure would not! I went directly to eBay and found a highly rated seller who sold brand new OEM LG batteries for $3.49 with free shipping. That is quite a price difference to say the least. Even if that battery only lasts a year or so, for $3.49, I think we can deal with it.

Crazy Offers in the Mail This Weekend

2011-06-20T12:41:00.002-05:00

Over the weekend I had some free time to sift through my junk mail, so I thought I would complain about the ridiculous offers I receive via our wonderful postal service. I first noticed that I had received a lovely letter from American Express congratulating me on being approved for a gold card:

"Congratulations are in order. You've earned an important distinction - a Card that reflects your achievements and complements your life. A Card designed to reward you and bring you the extra service and privileges you require."

"It's the American Express Gold Card, and you've been selected for Card membership with the annual fee waived your first year (a $125 value)."

Wow, a $125 annual fee that is being waived for a year. What an honor! Does anybody really want that? That means in a year I get to pay them $125 per year for a credit card I do not need when all my other credit cards I own charge me no annual fee at all. They promise me 25,000 membership points worth $250 which would hopefully cover the annual fees for two years (if I can receive the bonuses back in cash like two of my current no annual fee cards give me.) The two cards we use primarily right now are the Chase Freedom MasterCard and our Charles Schwab Bank VISA card. Both these cards charge us no annual fees and pay us back 1% on all purchases which we can receive back as actual cash checks we must periodically redeem. We put all our day to day purchases on the Chase Freedom card, and all our unusual on-line or phone charges on our Schwab card. We do not need another card, so I think the American Express offer can find its way into the recycle bin.

The other item I received in the mail is our complementary issue of the Ladue News, even though we do not even live in Ladue! I guess they decided that we live close enough and therefore we want to spend ridiculous amounts of money on stuff like private schools and cosmetic surgery. Boy do they have us pegged incorrectly! The big offer they listed on the back cover was from our friends at Charter Communications, the same folks that send me a mailing at least once every week since I am not a current customer. On the back cover they promised internet service for only $19.99/month, but it was only for an introductory 3 month period. When I checked on the Charter web site for our area, is seems we would have to agree to a 2 year term where the rate would increase to $34.99 for the following 21 months. They will also lease me a cable modem for $7/month which adds up to $84/year, a pretty crazy cost for an item you can buy on eBay for $30. No thanks on that ripoff. They also wanted to charge us $5/month for "Wire Maintenance" which is even more ridiculous. If I just stick with their "special deal" of $19.99/month, over 2 years I would pay 3 x 19.99 + 21 x 34.99 or $794.76 over the two year period. If I subtract out the "free $25 gas card" it would cost me $769.76. My current AT&T DSL is costing us $30/month so over that same 24 month period it would cost $720 (assuming AT&T does not keep jacking up their prices). This means I do not save anything switching to Charter unless AT&T become even bigger crooks and jack up my total charges at least $50 over the next two years. It is difficult when you must pick between two different crooks!

I also received a mailer from Quicken Loans saying that I may be eligible for a 125% LTV loan from them. Now, I definitely do not want or need a 125% LTV loan from anybody, but I was curious why Quicken Loans thought I should think about getting one when our current LTV is under 50%. I was also curious if Quicken Loans was affiliated in anyway to the real Quicken folks at Intuit who make TurboTax and such. I checked their listing on WikiPedia, and was surprised to see they are the largest online mortgage lender and the #5 retail lender overall in the US. It appears in 1999 Intuit did purchase them, but in 2002 their original owners bought them back but kept the Quicken name. They seemed legitimate enough so I used their tool to see what rate I would get, and it appears I could qualify for a 3.875% 15 year loan for $80,000, but I would have to pay 1.625 points. Ouch! I checked Schwab Bank where we have our current loan and they offered a 3.830% 15 year loan with 1.0 points. Not much of a choice there!

St. Louis Mid-County Neighborhood Real Estate Report -- June 2011

2011-06-11T08:58:00.000-05:00

A week ago Friday we saw a "For Sale" pop up on our street and now a second one has emerged, so it must be the summer house selling time in our neighborhood again. Ironically both these home were also for sale last spring but neither of them sold then, but this year they have both lowered the price a little bit, and with the improved economy hopefully one of them will sell. I will do my part by listing both of them here on my blog. The first one to pop up for sale is being sold by a tiny realty firm called "Consort Realty" (tied to Consort Homes builders) and is listed at $469,900 after starting last year at $514K and being lowered later to $499K. This is definitely a better starting point since I see the house already has a offer, but unfortunately it is a contingency contract as listed on the CBGundaker site as "Contingent No Kickout". I have posted a photo above that I clipped out of Google Streetview for the house, since I like that better than the professional house photo on the listing.

The second house that just popped up for sale is a house that goes on sale every year it seems, but it is at its lowest price yet, $357,000 (it was $362K last year.) Every year since we have moved here the lady there puts her house up for sale, but is has never sold. I wonder what she would do if she actually received a good offer? I also noticed on the Gundaker site once you get your list and click on a listing, if you click on the the "Back to Results" link you get a nice URL you can save forever to be a search link, like this one for my neighborhood. I wonder what the people looking at these homes think of the the fenced off giant hole in the ground on the corner. That does not add much curb appeal to the street. I know the overpriced white elephant on the street has not helped from that eyesore being there so close to it.

YouTube to DVD Conversion Process

2011-05-27T13:12:00.000-05:00

Someone in our department wanted a couple YouTube videos burned to DVD so I figured out how to do it without any new purchased software, so I thought I would document how I did it so I can always remember in the future. This first step is just to grab the YouTube videos to a computer, and my favorite way to do this is using the YouTube Downloader from BienneSoft. This is terrific, free software that downloads the Flash FLV files from YouTube so they are sitting on your hard drive. If you have a copy of VLC Media Player that is really all you need to watch YouTube videos offline, but if you want to watch them on a standard DVD player you must go a bit further. I took the files off my Windows PC and moved them to my iMac for the next step.

Since I have an iMac in my office and I was familiar with iDVD, all I needed was something to convert the Flash FLV files into a format that iDVD could read. The easiest solution was to convert them to QuckTime MOV files, so I used FLV Crunch which I downloaded from CNET.com. It is a nice little utility that does all sorts of conversions on the Mac platform. So I thought I was all ready to put the converted QuickTime movies into iDVD and burn them, when I realized one of the movies was too long to fit and it would be better if I could split it into two pieces. All I needed for that was QTCoffee from 3AM Coffee Software which includes a lot more than just a movie splitter. I was them able to split up the one long movie into two shorter ones and master a couple DVD's that showed the YouTube movie clips just fine. Then I burned it all to a couple cheap DVD-R media and I was done. It is great that there are so many neat videos on-line, but sometimes you want to take them with you!

Wow, New Lady Gaga Album on Amazon for 99 cents

2011-05-23T11:23:00.000-05:00

Personally, I am not a huge Lady Gaga fan, but I know she is extremely popular right now, so I found it incredible that Amazon.com is selling her brand new full album, "Born This Way", for only 99 cents as a digital MP3 download (less than most single songs cost). At that price it is not even worth stealing it using P2P software or getting someone else's poor quality rip they share via sites like RapidShare or MediaFire. If you buy the album at iTunes, it costs $11.99 and you have to deal with using the iTunes software, so I cannot imagine why people would prefer going the ITunes route unless they want the iTunes exclusive "Bonus Edition" for $15.99. I much prefer buying music downloads at Amazon over iTunes, although in reality I prefer purchasing real, physical CD media because I am just an old geezer that way! I also find Amazon's Cloud Drive Player as an interesting concept, although currently the only thing I am storing in my cloud drive are some MP3 files of my son playing piano and with his middle school orchestra. One annoyance is that if Amazon cannot identify the artist and album it sets it as "Unknown Album" and "Unknown Album". You have to set those properties in the MP3 file before you upload them. I know it is hard to believe that Amazon's software cannot identify an 8th grade orchestra when it hears it!

Two Loan Offers in One Day!

2011-05-14T09:05:00.000-05:00

Yesterday must have been my lucky day since I actually received two new loan offers in the mail. One was yet another "Personal and Confidential" notice with "Official Documents Enclosed" from Golden Oak Lending like I received in February. I love the fake check for $48,500 that comes attached to it that says THIS IS NOT A BANK CHECK. I also enjoy the fold and tear away edges on the envelope which I always like to fold and tear away since it is so fun. Then I recycle the crap in our recycled paper bag for pickup every week. I know I will never use these people, yet they keep sending me their ridiculous offers!

The second notice was a bit more interesting as it was from a more reputable firm, ING Direct, and it was for some new plan they called the "Easy Orange Mortgage." They make it sound appealing until you realize it is not much more than a adjustable 5 or 10 year mortgage that you repay on a bi-weekly schedule. They keep saying you get a "fixed rate" which makes it sound like a fixed rate mortgage until you read the part that says the rate is fixed for 5 or 10 years and then you can renew it (i.e. its an adjustable rate mortgage!) They also say you'll enjoy "super low closing costs" but they don't specify what these super low costs might be. Instead I had to go through their "Solutions Finder" calculator and enter the particulars for our current loan, home value and income to see what deals we would get. The rates they offered were indeed pretty good, but I decided to compare them to the exact same thing from the local St. Louis credit union we use, First Community, and also our current lender, Schwab Mortgage. On their special "Easy Orange" mortgage ING offered rates of 2.99% and 4.25% on their 5 and 10 year products and on conventional monthly paid ARM's they offered 3.125% on a 5/1 and 3.625% on a 7/1 ARM. First Community's 5/1 ARM had a rate of 5.00% so ING rates are definitely lower, but I also noticed their estimated "low" closing costs were $2161 versus about $1130 from our credit union (for the same $79,000 loan). The rates at Schwab were almost identical to ING's rates for the 5/1 and 7/1 and their closing cost estimate came in at $1872. So ING's "low closing costs" were actually estimated as higher than both my local credit union and our current mortgage holder. I suppose ING is able to offer the lower rates on the "Easy Orange" loan than on a conventional ARM because they know the borrower is accelerating their payment with a biweekly schedule so the loan is at lower risk.

In all fairness using the "Easy Orange" mortgage would have reduced our monthly payment soemwhat, but for the $2,000 in closing costs, and with our rate only about 1% higher than what they are offering, it does not make much sense for us on our smallish loan with a decent rate. For folks like us with current loan balances under $100K and a rate already under 5% these special "deals" are not worth it when we could just use the $2,000 in closing costs and reduce our loan balance instead for free with one electronic transaction. That is a lot more effective that using a bi-weekly schedule where you are permanently locked in to their particular acceleration schedule.

House Demolition - One Day Later!

2011-05-10T08:35:00.001-05:00

Of course, one day after I posted that lovely video of the house down the street sitting idly half demolished, they came by and knocked down the walls and put a orange fence around the whole thing! At least that gave me an excuse to walk the streets with my family and take more photos and a new video to post on YouTube! I am now interested to see what the new house will look like that they build there.

I also took my own picture of the house on the street they are trying to sell for over $1.5 million. I cannot imagine anyone spending that much for that house. It does not even have a sign in its yard, but it is easy to spot amongst the other homes. I wonder if the new house on the corner will look like this one or not.

Non tornado related house destruction in prime St. Louis neighborhood

2011-05-09T08:30:00.001-05:00

From the state of the house in this photo you would think this is tornado related damage here in the St. Louis area, especially after the terrible destruction we saw on Good Friday last month. But this house is located in a neighborhood that was not even touched by the tornado, a prime location in the Ladue School District surrounded by $300K-$500K homes. In fact one house just four houses down the street from it is currently on sale for over $1.5M. We were just walking the neighborhood on Mother's Day and my son had his digital camera so he took photos and this exclusive video of this eyesore in our rather upscale neighborhood. If progress were being made on the house I would not be complaining, but it has been standing idle now for a number of months with no change in activity.

Plus I wanted to post something new to YouTube, and it was just so easy! I did not realize the videos could now be up to 2GB in size, so the 100MB file from my son's camera was not a problem at all, and using the university's Internet connection it uploaded in no time. You have to love YouTube!

Ubuntu 11.04 - the Natty Narwhal Now Available!

2011-04-28T15:50:00.000-05:00

A new Ubuntu Linux version only shows up every six months, and this one will prove to be a more significant one with the appearance of version 11.04, the Natty Narwhal. Canonical has dropped Gnome as the default window manager to use a customized version of Unity instead, and I have had it installed on my laptop while still running 10.04 (the latest LTS version.) I still use gnome as my default desktop, but I set Unity as the default for my son's account as well as for another account which I aptly named "hughnity". I will have to admit to having used Gnome now for years I am accustomed to it and find unity a bit confining. However, Unity seems to be easy enough for a 13 year old middle school boy to navigate (a Mac zealot at that), so it can't be too bad. I have him learning to program Java on my laptop using Judo, so perhaps he is not your typical middle school child since he is comfortable navigating on Windows, Mac and Linux platforms. His goal is to learn to program in Java so that he can hack the Minecraft server code, so maybe he is not that typical. I mean, he is my son and I may not be that normal! Of course, my daughter is a student here at Washington University majoring in computer science too, so maybe it is just my family as a whole.

Skipping to a completely different subject, I noticed the sign on the house on Lawn and High School says it is finally SOLD! Checking the cbgundaker site shows that it is really "contingent no kickout" which means it may still fall through, but hopefully it has finally found a buyer. I will have to check the revenue.stlouisco.com site in a few months to see the final sales price on that house. Incidentally, if you are looking for a even better St. Louis MLS search site than the cbgundaker.com site, try search.hermannlondon.com. The site is for Hermann London, a small realty firm located in Maplewood, and they seem to have a very modern and sophisticated MLS search system. To get full access you need to give them an e-mail address but I gave them one and they do not spam me much at all. Of course, the address I gave them was a Yahoo! Mail account, so I cannot check it anyway since Yahoo! Mail appears to be down right now. And why does Yahoo! Mail not like Firefox 4.0? What is their problem over there at Yahoo?

With the rash of tornadoes that have hit the St. Louis area, you would think the local housing market might actually tighten since owners of any totally destroyed homes should be buying hew homes with the proceeds of their insurance settlements. Plus in the meantime they will likely rent a home while looking, as would anyone who merely had a damaged home who must wait for major repairs to be completed before they can move back in. I am curious how quickly their insurance companies can pay them since it would be a major pain and hassle. We in St. Louis should definitely feel lucky, however, compared to the tornadoes that just hit the South yesterday where over 250 people perished. To think that nearly 3,000 homes were damaged here in the St. Louis area and nobody was seriously injured is just amazing.

Hard Drive Resurrection - An Easter Story

2011-04-14T12:13:00.000-05:00

Today one of the faculty members in our department had a hard drive failure on a PC in his lab so I had to go check it out. He had purchased two Dell Studio desktop systems a little over a year ago, and the first one had a hard drive failure a few weeks ago, and now the second one did as well. I find it amazing how often these drives die just a few months after their warranties expire. Sure enough, the PC BIOS did not even recognize the drive was there, so I yanked it out (a Western Digital WD5000AAKS from November 2009) to check it with my trusty $12 USB SATA/IDE hard drive adapter I had purchased from Geeks.com. The WD drive gave three little spinning noises (no clicks) and then just sat there. My Ubuntu Linux system created a drive device in /dev but nothing for any partitions (i.e. /dev/sde but no /dev/sde1 or /dev/sde2.) I tried running fdisk on /dev/sde and it did not find anything and decided the 500 GB drive was really a 2GB drive. That is the same problem the drive on the first system had, but it had not made the three spinning noises.

Since I still had the older dead drive lying around, I was curious if perhaps I could swap the PCB's on the two drives and possibly get one working drive out of the two. So I put the PCB from the drive that died a few weeks ago on the drive that just died and reattached it to my Linux system via my USB adapter. It was not detected. Then I put the PCB from the recent death on the older dead drive and what do you know... it worked! Just for kicks I put the original PCB back on the drive that died a few weeks ago, and that worked as well. So the drive that had died a few weeks ago (and had not been recognized as a SATA device on the PC back then) was now detectable on my USB/SATA adapter. I put that drive back in the PC in the lab and it booted up in Windows 7 just fine. Since both those systems were identical Dell Studio desktops the drivers all worked and it was as happy as a clam. So that is my geeky Easter resurrection story, a story of rebirth and tech happiness from despair and destruction. Since that drive had died a few weeks ago, the lab members also learned about the power of backups and both those systems had been backed up so no data was lost either (I had purchased some external USB drives for them for backup after the first failure!) So all is well with the computers in that lab...

Neighborhood Real Estate Posting of Spring 2011

2011-04-06T12:13:00.000-05:00

Since it has been a while since I commented on the real estate situation in mid St. Louis County, I thought it was time to chime in with my latest thoughts. I notice the house on Lawn and High School in Brentwood is still for sale, and they have dropped the price all the way down to $599K. That may still seem like a lot for a house in that section of Brentwood, (our favorite agent, Mary Cella, has a house for sale for $269K just a couple hundred feet away), but this is a recent teardown that originally sold for over $900K back at the market peak in 2005 before the economy tanked. That is less than 2/3 of what they originally paid for it. Ouch!

In our own neighborhood on the other side of the highway, there are not any interesting homes for sale, but I have been watching the slow deconstruction of a home that sold last year. It was a nice looking painted brick ranch which they have been tearing down in slow pieces, keeping the large, mature trees in place. As of right now the roof is gone, the garage is gone, the hardwood floor is gone and the back wall is gone, but the front and side brick walls are still standing. I am very curious what they are doing and why they did not just knock the whole thing down. In any case I had to grab the Google Street View and Bing Bird's Eye views of the old house that used to stand there, just for posterity (much as I did for our own old house before it was knocked down.) Another older mid-county ranch bites the dust!

New Firefox 4 means it's time to check my Browser Statistics!

2011-03-23T18:33:00.000-05:00

I was pretty excited that Firefox 4 was released yesterday since I had been testing it out quite a bit during pre-release, and I have found that it runs the Zynga games on Facebook (Farmville, Frontierville, Cityville) much faster than Chrome 10 had on the 2.8GHz Pentium 4 Dell desktop I was using. That alone should make it worth switching! But since it was released I decided to see how many hits we had received using Firefox 4 on our university's very popular meteorites website (meteorites.wustl.edu), so I thought I would get some general statistics on browser usage there.

I broke the statistics down by the browsers and their versions since I was curious on the version breakdown, especially of the just released (Chrome 10, Firefox 4) and beta versions (IE 9) of browsers.

Chrome 8	0.19%
Chrome 9	4.29%
Chrome 10	2.68%	7.16%
Firefox 2.X	0.19%
Firefox 3.0	0.59%
Firefox 3.5	1.28%
Firefox 3.6	17.44%
Firefox 4.0	0.47%	19.96%
Safari	16.61%
MSIE 6	5.08%
MSIE 7	12.20%
MSIE 8	38.30%
MSIE 9	0.69%	56.26%

The above table shows that Internet Explorer still commands 56% of our traffic with version 8 being the browser king. Firefox commands about 20% of our traffic and Safari is close behind with 16.6%. Note that Safari includes people on iPhones, iPads and iPods as well as Mac and PC users running Safari on their computers. If I compare these numbers to what I posted in December of 2010, Chrome has gone up from 5.94% to 7.16%, IE has just barely gone down from 58.79% to 56.26%, Firefox has dipped slightly from 21.33% to 19.96% and Safari is the big winner -- increasing from 12.96% to 16.61%. So I thought I would break down the percentage a bit more and I discovered that 69% of the Apple hits to our servers are coming from Macs (MacBooks, iMacs etc), but 31% are not. They are broken down as 15.8% iPhone, 11.5% iPad and 3.9% iPad. So about 5% of our total web hits are not even coming from computers!

LibreOffice and SSD Netbooks

2011-03-15T15:41:00.000-05:00

I haven't written up a more techie relating posting in a while so I thought I would speak what has been on my mind lately. I was reading in eWeek and online about how Oracle has been stalling further development of OpenOffice.org and how Linux distributions like Ubuntu are therefore switching to the fully open LibreOffice variation of the free office suite (Ubuntu 11.04, the "Natty Narwal", will ship with LibreOffice 3.3.1). Therefore I decided to uninstall OpenOffice.org from my Ubuntu desktop and switch over to LibreOffice since it was a pretty easy procedure to do using apt-get. I have used both Writer and Calc and it pretty much feels the same to me as OpenOffice.org. They have posted the latest fixes and features in version 3.3.1 which sound nice but I have never really needed to use them. It is more about future enhancements and support by an open source community as opposed to the current differences between the two projects. If Red Hat, Canonical and Novell are all going that same path as preferring LibreOffice over OpenOffice.org (as well as that tiny little company known as Google), I am not sure who will still be using OpenOffice.org in a few years.

On a completely unrelated technical matter, I was looking for a netbook for one of our faculty members to take on trips, and I noticed that none of them seem to ship with solid state drives anymore, with all of them using standard spinning magnetic hard disks. I thought SSD's were the way of the future and would be used more and more in laptops and netbooks as they became larger and less expensive. But now I cannot find any netbooks with SSD's installed unlike just a year or so ago. When did this happen? It you look at NewEgg.com they must have about 120 different netbooks, and none of them have a hard drive smaller than 120GB. The vast majority (104 of 120) have a 250GB or larger hard drive which seems much more than you really need for a netbook. Our faculty member just wanted a small netbook for checking e-mail, web browsing, typing up letters and working on papers. She does not need a 250GB hard drive for that! What happened to the old ASUS eee PC models that always used to ship with an 8GB or 16GB SSD? Now all the eee PC models seem to have magnetic hard drives. I must have missed the memo on why they got rid of all the SSD models.

Cat Age versus Human Age Calculator

2011-02-23T12:54:00.001-06:00

My wife was again at the St. Louis County Library trying to find a book that would interest me. She found The Secret Life of Your Cat since I am always pestering our overweight grey tabby named Slinky. I started skimming it and came to a big table showing the equivalent ages of cats and humans. It seems that once they are two years old they are equivalent to a 24 year old person and afterwards they age an equivalent 4 years for each year we age. When I saw that I thought -- online calculator! I looked around and there are already a couple of them out there (like here and here), but I wanted to write my own version anyway. Since the ones out there are both JavaScript based, I thought I would write one using JavaScript too, but that would be a bit fancier! My cat age calculator has little buttons that let you increment and decrement the initial age by months and years, and of course lets you convert either way (feline to human, human to feline). My conclusion is that our overweight kitty still has much too long to live even if he is already middle aged. He looked so cute and lively when we first got him from the APA in Brentwood! Now he is just a large, lazy behemoth.

Faster Chrome/Chromium JavaScript and the Crazy GMail Signout Link!

2011-02-18T12:33:00.000-06:00

It looks like the people at Google have been very busy working on both Chrome/Chromium and GMail. First the good news. Since all the other browsers like Firefox 4 are working on speeding up their JavaScript engine so they can claim vast performance improvements, well the Chrome folks have done so too. Since I always just use the latest release of Chromium on my Ubuntu desktop, I checked my version I just updated to using apt-get today and see that I am now using Chromium 11.0.676.0 (75353) which I am guessing is using the updated JavaScript engine as used in Chrome 10 (still in beta). Frankly, I cannot tell much difference since Chromium was already pretty darn fast. Perhaps at some point it just does not make any difference anymore.

What concerns me more are the little pesky changes they do that annoy people. For example, last night my son demanded he had to use my laptop so he could more properly play Minecraft since he was done with all his homework and his own laptop was too slow. So I decided I would be nice and let him use my laptop and I would log out of GMail and log out of my account (since I would never trust him logged into my account.) So I looked in the upper right hand corner for the "sign out" link and noticed it had disappeared. Instead I had to click on my name to get a drop down menu with a single option to "sign out". What a pain! I then proceeded to sit in a comfy chair and finish reading "Stop Acting Rich" by Thomas J. Stanley while my wife was checking her GMail nearby on her own laptop (hey, we are a geeky family.) Several minutes later I heard her say "Hey, where is the sign out link?" It seems like everybody has noticed it has moved and nobody is very happy with it! Why did Google do this to us? Someone must have thought it was a good idea so they could later add other items to the drop down menu. In any case it was a bit annoying, but I suppose I will get used to it. Too bad I had not discovered this on a free Cr-48 netbook Google never sent me which I had requested. I am sure mine was lost in the mail or something.

Wash U Students Fight Back! Is it Good News or Not?

2011-02-14T22:39:00.001-06:00

There was another mugging near campus last night, but this time two students chased their assailants in a car and were able to get at least one arrested (I bet the other one apprehended was a minor.) Two sophomores were walking on Melville towards the Loop when they were approached by four youths who demanded their money and phones and started beating one of the students. So the other student yelled for help and was able to get aid from a nearby friend in a car. They followed their assailants to Delmar where the police nabbed them. But the question is what effect their actions will have on the occurrence of these random crimes that keep hitting the area (and especially targeted at our students.) I hope more of our students do not start patrolling vigilante style and trying to apprehend these criminals, since some of them will be armed and someone could end up getting shot.

I am definitely sick of all the criminals targeting our students and our campus, but I have to admit if I were a career street mugger, I cannot think of a better group of people to target than Washington University students. The popular student rental areas near the Delmar Loop are a close walk from their home in the "hood" and all you have to do is wait until dark to mug the students, maybe punch them or kick them, grab their stuff and run. Then you head over to Delmar and hide in one of the stores or bars until things settle down. Once the coast is clear you can shuffle down to the hood and pawn off the phone, take the cash and try to use the credit cards as quickly as possible. You don't even need a car, or take any public transportation, just do it all on foot. Frankly, that is even easier than wandering into our buildings and trying to steal laptops, iPods, purses or phones from unlocked, unoccupied offices (which also seems to be becoming a popular criminal activity.) It is truly frightening that so many people these days can see mugging and stealing as an acceptable full-time career.

My Modified Wealth Calculator after Reading "Stop Acting Rich"

2011-02-12T10:44:00.000-06:00

I have always enjoyed reading Thomas J. Stanley's books since he wrote the Millionaire Next Door over a decade ago. His latest book, Stop Acting Rich, came out in 2009 and I did not even realize it was out. He is another geeky numbers guy like me and I love all the numbers he gives in his books. I wrote up a wealth calculator years ago based on his equations form the first book, but now I have modified it to include the "wealth equation" from "Stop Acting Rich". He has since accumulated a lot more data which provided him with more specific threshold values for when someone becomes balance sheet affluent (BA) or income sheet affluent (IA). These are more specific than his earlier under accumulator of wealth (UAW), prodigious accumulator of wealth (PAW) designations he had in the past. In his earlier books his cutoffs were simply 1/2 the "expected wealth" and 2 times the "expected wealth" as cutoffs. Now with real data he has changed the cutoffs to be anyone under 0.88 of expected net worth to be income sheet affluent and over 1.84 to be balance sheet affluent. I had also created another calculator his his book specifically for women, Millionaire Women Next Door, which calculates the related "Return on Net Worth" and "Economic Productivity Index". This guy can come up with new indices and ratios for just about anything, but I love them all! I will calculate anything he can make up.

Hurray, the ice is melting!

2011-02-11T16:19:00.000-06:00

I am very glad that the temperature has risen to above freezing finally so that some of the ice around here can melt. The most dangerous situation I have noticed is the sidewalk between the Richmond Heights Metrolink station and the Galleria Mall. That entire sidewalk is a giant pile of ice plowed off the street and everyone walking between the mall and the metrolink station has been walking on the road itself. In this cold weather I have been driving to the station and parking in the lot so I do not have to walk, but that means on my drive home I have to make sure I do not kill any pedestrians! Here is a photo I found online of the sidewalk in warmer weather. Now imagine it completely covered up with piles of plowed ice. You get the idea. The Galleria Parkway is now shared by both cars and pedestrians and that is a bad idea!

Closer to Washington University, I am glad that the full sidewalk from the Skinker station to our building is finally cleared. On Monday and Tuesday the sidewalks were 95% cleared -- but for insane reason they left about 30 feet of icy sidewalks between the corner and the rest of the cleared sidewalk. If you look at the snapshot from Monday around noon below (from the Clayco webcam, of course!) you can see what I mean. The sidewalk was fine from the stairs to the corner, but then you had to cross about 30 feet of ice before getting to the cleared section of the sidewalk (where someone can be seen walking). Whose bright idea was it to stop right there and not just finish the last several yards? Luckily by Wednesday afternoon that was clear, but it really would not have taken much effort to clear the rest of it.

Online Web Sleuthing Should Not Be This Easy!

2011-02-10T16:12:00.000-06:00

Okay, I will admit that I love searching for information on the Internet, but sometimes things can be too easy. I was on one of my favorite property sale sites, stlouis.blockshopper.com, and when I was doing a search on someone, it instead redirected me to another site called spokeo.com. Okay, I thought I could try that one out, but when I did I was amazed what all I found. Not only did I find the person I was looking for, I found out their age, their spouse, their children, and a nice picture of their home (along with its estimated value.) I realize much of this is public information, so I had to do a search on myself. Sure enough I could find our address, ages, marital status, phone number, home value, home picture, and even my children's names (I am guessing from Facebook relationship listings.) Luckily they have an easy to use privacy link which allows you to remove your own listing, so I did so for myself, my wife and my children so they no longer appear on a search. I will have to admit their interface works extremely well and makes searching for people very easy. Putting all the real estate transactions on-line like on the blockshopper.com sites is one thing, putting your age, marital status and children's name on-line is another. Plus you do not even have to know what state you want to search, it will look at all of them and it is pretty easy to go through all the results state by state, and city by city until you find the best fit for that special "Bob Smith" you want.

Another nice site I found that works really well is 4shared.com. It combines a generous 10GB of free on-line storage with easy to send SendSpace or YouSendIt type URL's so you can easily share individual files with people without having to send huge attachments. Why mail that 50MB PowerPoint or PDF file to a dozen people when you can just store the file in your 4shared account and e-mail people the URL to access it? Plus the speed to both upload and download the files was very fast. ADrive.com may have 5 times the storage (50GB free!), but its Java based file management system seems primitive compared to the slick interface at 4shared.

Mozy Unlimited No more!

2011-02-08T12:37:00.000-06:00

Sure, enough, now that I have started looking more into online backup and having promoted Mozy's $4.99/mo unlimited plan to many folks, it sounds like that it is no longer available. They have now made it $5.99/mo for a 50 GB plan, which makes CrashPlan's $49.95/year unlimited plan look even more appealing. Right now CrashPlan is even giving Mozy users an additional 15% discount. They may not have the big EMC name behind them, but I am not sure how much that helped Mozy (how many typical folks on the street know who EMC is?) If you want a bigger name than CrashPlan hosting your online backup, how about the anti-virus folks at Trend Micro? They acquired humyo and now offer SafeSync as an unlimited backup plan for a special price of only $29.95/year. There are also BackBlaze and Carbonite who are also eager to acquire old Mozy users, but if a company like Trend is supporting an online backup costing less than these lesser brands, why not go with the more trusted name? Of course, that is what Mozy users thought with EMC!

Since this post is sticking with geeky topics, I thought I would mention that I have been using Firefox 4 Beta (Minefield) on my Ubuntu desktop and it seems to be working very well. I had been preferring to use Chrome or Chromium all the time, but I have noticed when I start either of them up now (both on XP or Ubuntu) it seems to take a little while until I can enter a URL into the location and get the browser to respond. Firefox 4 seems much more responsive and also seems quicker on certain "important" sites. (Facebook, YouTube) You can grab the latest nightly build and try it out for yourself. Ubuntu users can add it to your apt repositories by following these simple instructions.

An Amazing Refinancing Offer I Could Definitely Refuse!

2011-02-03T20:23:00.005-06:00

I just received this incredible mortgage refinancing offer in the mail from a local St. Louis lender that I had to share with the world. Since everyone's lending amounts are public records, this lender was able to find out that we originally had a $236K loan and then we later borrowed a $95K loan. What these geniuses did not understand is that the original $236K loan was an interest only loan which we borrowed until we could sell our first house, and once it was sold we took the proceeds and refinanced down to the $95K loan which is our current much more manageable amortized loan. So those two monthly loan payments they are offering us is for a loan amount of $331K which is equal to our original interest only loan PLUS our current refinanced loan, for two monthly payments that are both two or three times what we are currently paying on our principal and interest payment. In fact they are offering us a loan for an amount greater than the current value of our house! I do not even have to use a loan comparison calculator to know that is a crazy deal. That is definitely much more loan than we can afford! They obviously have never seen my wonderful mortgage calculator web site. What a great offer they are giving us! Sometimes you just have to laugh at these lenders...

Snowpocalypse 2011: Sorry, Washington University Medical School Employees

2011-02-01T10:38:00.003-06:00

Well, I am glad I no longer work at the Washington University School of Medicine today like I did several years ago! Due to the ice storm and impending snow storm behind it, Washington University has done the unthinkable. They have shut down the Danforth Campus and cancelled all classes and events for the whole day. However, if you work at the medical school, you are in no such luck! They decided those employees must be expendable or something, or are not as worthy at the ones on the undergraduate campus. I can understand the hospital staff personnel being necessary, but I would think all the research groups would not be so essential. I am sure in reality most of the thousands of employees there did not show up either, only the ones needed for hospital and patient care. On the Danforth campus, all those underpaid dining staff have to make it to campus so that students living there like my daughter can eat. Maybe they should let some of the students stuck there without class today pitch in and help prepare the food and clear the sidewalks to the dining areas.The dining service workers are not even university employees, but are instead Bon Appetit employees with much less benefits and lower pay. I hope the few that made it there could make it safely to campus.

When I first woke up earlier this morning it did not seem that bad when I looked outside, but it sounds like from the Metro twitter account and their Rider Alerts that the Metrolink trains are not running west past Clayton. They have "bus shuttles" to take you from Clayton Station to Brentwood or Shrewsbury stations but that's it. It will be interesting to see if they have full service tomorrow. It looks like I may be spending another day at home tomorrow again unless the weather prediction does not come true.

Truly a Historic Winter Storm!

2011-01-31T14:09:00.001-06:00

We are receiving a historic winter storm here in St. Louis. Why historic? Because Washington University is actually closing early at 3:00pm and letting everybody go home! They never shut down the university! They even posted it on their emergency web site and they were able to use the WUSTLAlerts system they have been testing for a couple years. I was just helping someone in a classroom with a class that ended at 3:30pm, so I wonder if he will be ending at 3:00pm or not. In reality just a trace of precipitation is falling from the sky here right now at 2:00pm and the radar looks pretty scattered for the next couple hours. But if the powers that be say I should go home, who am I to argue with them? I had better check to see when the appropriate MetroLink train will be leaving and I hope it isn't too crowded. Hey, I could use my handy, dandy web app with the Blue Line Metrolink schedule. Luckily I noticed the Med School campus is not closing down so I do not have to worry about all those folks hopping on the Blue line trains to go home.

Yet Another Overhyped Winter Storm in St. Louis

2011-01-31T09:14:00.002-06:00

Okay, it sounds like another winter storm is coming our way, but if you read the hourly timeline from weather.com is seems to very dependent exactly where in the St. Louis area you are and what temperature it will be. I first checked my own zip code of 63117 which pretty much means the middle of St. Louis County. Above I have the weather.com hourly chart for us from 9:00am to 5:00pm. Below I have posted the same timeline for Hannibal, just an hour or so north of us

If you believe these charts, we will be a few degrees warmer than Hannibal, so in the evening our precipitation should be mostly liquid whereas the precipitation there will be a messy mix. Of course, my evening commute will be just driving from the Brentwood Metrolink station to our home about a mile away, so I am not expecting any problems on my brief venture along Eager and McCutcheon. And now it appears what I expected to be the most dangerous part of my journey (the walk from my building across campus to the Metrolink station) will at the worst be a little damp.

So today should not be much of a big deal. Tomorrow and Wednesday may be a different story.

CrashPlan for backups and color laser printers

2011-01-27T09:13:00.001-06:00

Our department at the university has started looking into doing remote backups for desktop users, and I, of course, had to look for the open source alternatives after pricing commercial products like Retrospect. The usual suspects showed up on my google search such as Amanda, Bacula and BackupPC. But since I was also looking at commercial online providers like Mozy, I ran into CrashPlan which sounded very intriguing. Whereas CrashPlan makes money like Mozy does providing online backup services, you can actually use their software completely for free so every computer where you install the software becomes either a client or a server or both. They have downloads for Windows, Mac and Linux (and Solaris if anyone cares anymore), so I tested it by installing the Windows software on one XP system and putting the Linux version on two Ubuntu systems. It appears to run as a Java service in Ubuntu, and I bet it does the same for Mac OSX and Solaris. On Windows it runs as two processes, the small Tray interface (CrashPlanTray.exe) which is only eating up 3MB on my old Pentium 4 XP box, and the service (CrashPlanService.exe) which is using about 44MB, not too bad by today's standards. It has been running for a week now with both the PC and my Ubuntu desktop backing up to an Ubuntu system running elsewhere in the building and it was both trivially easy to set up and barely noticeable on any of the systems. The backup Ubuntu server involved runs various web servers, a squid proxy server and a file server, and I believe the CrashPlan Java service taxes the system less than the other services. On my own Ubuntu desktop, I had forgotten it was even installed until I noticed the little Icon on the system tray on my XP box and checked the app on my Ubuntu box by running CrashPlanDesktop. Sure enough, by checking the history I can see when and what it backed up on both systems, and it even e-mailed me a log as well each week. This is a very slick package for a "free" system, and since we have lots of machines with lots of extra disk space this can make backups for us very easy and inexpensive. Thank you, CrashPlan!

Speaking of inexpensive things, I was perusing my new PROVANTAGE catalog I received in the mail and came to the color laser printers and noticed there were offerings by both HP and Brother in the $200 range. They were not only compact looking color lasers but they both had wired and wireless networking built into them. I remember just a few years ago when we spent $200 just on a single color cartridge for our Color LaserJet 4600 when it first came out! Of course the printer companies are willing to sell these printers themselves for basically nothing since they want to get you on the cartridges long term. I checked over at NewEgg.com and noticed they had the Samsung Wireless CLP-315W color laser printer for an amazing $149.99 with free shipping. Yes, that is with wireless and wired networking capabilities built in and most likely some teeny, tiny starter cartridges. It takes 4 cartridges and you can get a "value pack" of all four of them for, you guessed it, about $140 which is rated to print 1,000 color pages . The math is easy on that one, it is about 14 cents a page. So the printer is dirt cheap and you are paying through the nose for each page. By comparison our current 3.5 year-old Brother HL-2040 at home takes one TN350 for $30+$3 S/H that is rated to print 2500 pages which is about 1.3 cents or less than one tenth of the cost (until the drum dies, but that is rated at 12,000 pages). I think I can deal with just black and white at home for now. Plus my son would just abuse a color printer if we had one. It also helps that to print he has to carry his laptop to the printer and physically plug in a USB cable. If the printer were actually on our home network he would print as much as some of our graduate students here do. (i.e. way too much!) I tell my son if he needs color prints that badly for school to put the document on a flash drive and I'll take him to Kinko's where he can pay for them out of his allowance.

Ice Capades 2011 - Walking to and from Metrolink to Campus

2011-01-24T12:03:00.001-06:00

Okay, today's short drive to the Brentwood Metrolink station was pretty uneventful, but getting to my building on campus from the Meridian parking garage was another matter! First off, two weeks ago I complimented Metro on what a great job they did clearing the sidewalk of snow from the garage down to the platform. Today, however, was another matter. That long ramp heading down to the platform was a solid sheet of ice with salt scattered on it more like a seasoning than a substance to melt anything. The lady in front of me was holding the rail and moving at about 1 mph, and I was afraid I would miss the train if I did not try to pass her and risk slipping and falling in the process. Luckily I made the 7:45 train and made it to the Skinker station. The station there was in good shape, with the stairway well salted and I could make it up to the sidewalk just fine. Here again, however, Washington University made me not so proud by once again leaving the sidewalks as a solid sheet of ice. How nice for them to announce their tuition increase to over $40,000 last week, and then to demonstrate their stinginess by not clearing the sidewalk from the Metrolink station to the buildings on campus. If you look at today's webcam shot of the sidewalk, it looks like it is clear of snow (as it was) but it was still a pretty solid sheet of ice. Luckily I safely made it to the back door of Brauer Hall where I could sneak in and walk through to get to our own lovely building. That again allowed me to gaze upon their top of the line, high tech energy saving device they installed on the loading dock door. It is a hand written piece of paper taped to the door saying "close door behind u" (translation: please close the door behind you). I bet the Office of Sustainability did not come up with that one, but it probably saves more energy than most of the other LEED certified devices in the building.

Web Browsing for Substitute Teaching Jobs

2011-01-12T14:01:00.001-06:00

My wife recently began substitute teaching to help her network to find a full-time teaching position in the future, and the school district where she subs just switched to the online substitute system called Aesop from Frontline Placement. To try to get a substitute job you must login via a web browser to their site and then repeatedly refresh your page for hours until a job finally shows up (unless you pay extra yourself to get their own customized software called Jobulator.) That sure does not seem like a fair way for them to set up their system. It definitely gives preferential treatment to people who pay them for the supposed "extra" software. However, I googled for Jobulator alternatives and noticed many substitutes who used Aesop were using Firefox and an extension called Check4Change to do essentially the same thing as Jobulator. The Check4Change plug-in allows you to set Firefox to periodically refresh a page and then check a section to see if it changes. If there is a change it will sound off a clip of David Bowie's 1972 classic "Changes" to let you know something has changed. Then you can disable Check4Change temporarily and accept the job and be on your merry way. My wife had it up and running this morning, and while we were sitting at the kitchen table we heard David Bowie start singing. Unfortunately, by the time she made it to her laptop the job had already been taken. I guess there are a lot of potential substitutes doing the same thing! She had been thinking about switching to Chrome, so I looked for something like Check4Free for Google Chrome, and I found Page Monitor which seems to work similarly, without David Bowie (they use either a chime or a cuckoo clock sound as an alarm.) I tested it out on the Google Finance page and it seemed to work there, but my wife will have to test it on Aesop later. And now I have that 40 year old song stuck in my head!

Not A Snow Day for Me!

2011-01-11T14:07:00.000-06:00

Well, last night and earlier this morning there was a snow storm that left a good 3 inches of snow on the ground. It closed all the public schools in the St. Louis area which meant my son could stay home from middle school, my wife did not have to substitute teach and my daughter could continue sleeping in until noon (since she is a college student on winter break). Unfortunately I had a meeting scheduled at 10:00am today, so although I could take my time getting to work, I had to be there by 10. Luckily that really just meant making my way the less than one mile down Eager Road to the Brentwood Metrolink station and then walking from the station to our building. By 9:00am while I was driving, Eager Road was in excellent shape from McCutcheon to the Metrolink station and all went well. The Metro folks kept the sidewalks at the Brentwood station clear and it looked like the heaters were turned on again. All was going smoothly until after climbing the stairs from Skinker station I turned the corner on the sidewalk along Forest Park Parkway to walk towards my building. Here it was after 9:00am and the sidewalk was not cleared at all. I would think if the university expected us to show up today and keep promoting public transportation, they would have the sidewalks cleared for those of us who walk down it every day. Luckily, due to the power of technology, I can document the fact that the sidewalks were not cleared at 9:00am. The wonderful Claycorp webcam pointed at Green Hall comes to the the rescue again. I have the 9:00am photo up on top which shows several folks walked over the snow covered sidewalk on their way to campus. Below I have the latest 12:26pm photo where you can see a path has been melted into the sidewalk, but it was never cleared.

In fact on my walk back from my meeting (where almost everyone who was expected to be there showed up) the main sidewalk leading from the North Brookings parking lot through the north side of campus was not cleared either.

That is a pretty sad display by our multi-billion dollar university! Luckily for Christmas I received some wonderful L.L.Bean Storm Chaser boots who simply laugh at the snow. I felt like Nanook of the North trudging through the snow covered sidewalks across campus! Unfortunately I cannot find the mens version of the lace-up Storm Chaser boots on the L.L.Bean site right now (only the slip-on version). Where could my lovely boots be?

Interestingly if I google for them they show up as item TA258401, and if I do a search on that item tag on the L.L.Bean site it shows right up. At $89.00 with no tax and free shipping they are a pretty good deal too. That's my deal of the day!

Bright Sunny Morning at Brentwood Metrolink Station

2011-01-10T08:58:00.000-06:00

This morning due to the forecasted snow this afternoon I decided to park over at the Brentwood Metrolink station instead of the Richmond Heights one so I wouldn't have to worry so much about having a snow covered car this afternoon. But as I approached the platform, I noticed all the passengers were clustered near the middle of the platform and that area seemed unnaturally sunny and bright. It was as that point that I realized that the recently installed overhead heaters were in use there at the station. I had noticed them installed at the Richmond Heights station in the past, but I had never seen them actually turned on. So I was curious what was the criteria they used to decide whether to turn them on or not. As we passed the Richmond Heights station I did not notice them on (i.e. no extra sunny spot on a gloomy Monday morning), but they were definitely on at the Clayton station. It is actually in the mid 20's this morning, and I know it has been colder before at the Richmond Heights station but they were never on there while I waited on some very cold mornings. Once I googled "metrolink brentwood heaters" I found this informative article at NextStopSTL and I realized that I was supposed to push the button to turn them on myself. So I could have been using them at the RH station all along if only I had known! In reality Richmond Heights needs them more than Brentwood since the Brentwood platform is in a "ditch" that helps block the wind whereas the RH platform is much more out in the open and the wind blows right through it. I also found it amusing how they only installed two of these little "heat lamps" for all the patrons. With over a dozen or so folks for the 7:45am eastbound Brentwood train there were quite a few of us trying to get warmed by the two small heaters. It almost seemed like a bunch of moths flying around a couple light bulbs in the summer. It might be useful to have more than two in a more popular commuting station like Brentwood and perhaps install some instructions so patrons will know they can use them! Better yet would be to rearrange the plexiglass panels to create more windblocked ("semi-enclosed") areas that the heaters could better heat up. It seems much of the heat of the heaters as they are installed aims straight at the plexiglass divider and much of it is wasted.

My Rant of the Day: Screw Today's Eyeglasses, Literally!

2011-01-07T09:06:00.001-06:00

Well, I woke up this morning to start a normal day, but when I picked up my eyeglasses from the nightstand the left lens fell out and I could not find the microscopic screw that held it in place. It was hard enough trying to do it with one eye, and it doesn't help that the screw is even smaller than any screw I have ever seen inside a computer. When I picked up the lens that fell out I realized how ridiculously small the current style of eyeglasses have the lens these days. I am currently wearing my "old" pair of glasses which are about 3 years old now and slightly out of focus, but I noticed their lenses are a good 30-40% larger than the lens of my current glasses. Frankly, I prefer the slightly larger lenses, but it is hard to find them anymore and they are not considered as "fashionable". And since the frames are thinner to go with the smaller lenses, the screws they use on them are smaller too. Would the screws to any of my old glasses work with my new glasses? Of course not! They had to be smaller and more special and completely different. I checked the 10 million spare screws I had here at my office and all of them are too big too.

Another thing I noticed when I purchased my latest pair in early 2010 is they have become even more ridiculously expensive because of their small size. "You see", the optician explained, "to put your prescription on this small of a lens requires the highest index glass or the lenses would be really thick, so we have to charge you an extra $175." What a racket! They make the small lenses "fashionable" so you'll want to buy them, but then to get your prescription to work with them you need higher index glass so they can charge you even more.

When I purchased my glasses last year I was shocked at the final price. You sure pay a lot for some tiny glasses. They cost more than our 40" LCD HDTV ($650 for the HDTV, almost $700 for the glasses)! I remember 18 years ago when our new 27" Toshiba tube TV cost more than twice as much as my eyeglasses back then ($450 versus ~$200). Now I can purchase a TV that is twice as large for less than the price of my eyeglasses! Is that progress?

One final rant. I was going to go back to the optician that sold me my overpriced glasses last year to have them put in a proper screw in my glasses. They close at 3:30pm on Fridays and are closed on the weekends. I guess they do not need to be open very often since they stiff their customers so much. I'm never using them again.

The Crazy New Estate Tax Laws

2011-01-05T15:59:00.000-06:00

Now that it is 2011 is everybody really excited about the new estate tax laws? What, you didn't realize they have changed the estate tax laws? Sure enough, one of the many changes that happened when they passed the Tax Relief Act of 2010 to extended unemployment benefits was a change of the estate tax. What happened is that for two years and two years only, the estate tax exclusion limit shifts to $5 million for every individual with an estate tax rate of 35%. This means for 2011 and 2012, if you die in those years your estate will be taxed at 35% for any amount over $5 million. This, of course, has caused me to change my online estate tax calculator to reflect the new changes, but then I had to guess what would happen after 2012. For now I am leaving the $5 million exclusion and 35% rate in place, but most likely the exclusion limit will go down and the rate will go back up. The government really needs the extra revenue and the large exclusion are rate are counterproductive to increasing tax revenue (i.e. 2011 and 2012 are good years to die if you are wealthy.) How did this law change actually help the economy? The truth is, this very much depends on two key factors: 1) How the economy is doing by late 2012 and 2) who is elected President and to Congress in 2012. In reality the estate tax affects only a small percentage of US households, and the new increased exclusion limit means it will affect even less people. Extending unemployment benefits makes sense in helping the economy; helping wealthy people pay less estate tax does not. Statistics show that with the $5 million exclusion the tax will now hit only 0.25% of all US estates instead of the 2% of all estates it would hit if the limit were $1 million. At least those folks with estates between $1 and $5 million can now die happier.

Not too bad 2010 and here's to a better 2011!

2010-12-29T10:23:00.001-06:00

With only one more day in the financial markets for 2010 it looks like the S&P 500 will end 2010 with an annual gain of about 13% to close over 1250 after starting the year a little over 1100. Whereas the 13% gain is a good number, many will still lament over the peak in 2007 when the index was near 1550. Unfortunately that will likely never occur again so it is not productive trying to figure out what return is necessary to get us back to that point (unless you just want to calculate it for fun!). If you instead look at the S&P 500 index for the past 40 years (since 1970, you will see that our current level is really not too bad. If you track the linear increase from say 1982 to 1995, if you interpolate to the end of 2010, the line would likely end lower than it currently is right now. The massive peak in 1998 to 2000 and then in 2006/2007 has skewed people's perceptions of what long term growth should really look like. I love Google Finance's ability to generate these long term trends to remind oneself how real stock growth trends. The only problem occurs if you bought in like crazy during the two big market peaks. Long term regular investors should have faired okay if they started before the huge surge in the late 90's. In fact there are only about 4 1/2 years over the past 20 when the S&P 500 was tracking above our current level around 1250 (1999, 2000, 2006, 2007 and the first half of 2008). So with dollar cost averaging since 2000 most people should not have lost very much if anything. If you kept buying stocks in 2002 and 2003 (as I did) when the S&P dropped well under 1000 you should be looking pretty good now! Buying into the index then was a bargain compared to how it looks now. Hopefully the market will continue to improve in 2011 with the big question being job creation. With all this new capital in the markets, I would hope employers will start thinking about increasing their human capital as well.

The Wonders of VirtualBox for old software

2010-12-08T20:15:00.000-06:00

Since I have to support the classes for our department at the university, I have to deal with some folks who really like some very old software for their classes. One faculty member had a program written with the 1995 version of Macromedia Authorware that she distributes to her students to run every year. Unfortunately, that software is now over 15 years old and it does not run on 64 bit Windows 7 (and of course not on a Mac.) The solution? I built a small VirtualBox virtual disk (.VDI) file with 32 bit XP (Service Pack 1 even!) and the ancient Authorware presentation together on it that runs on just about anything that can run the VirtualBox application. I tested it on a 64 bit Windows 7 Dell Optiplex 780, my trusty iMac, and also my even trustier Ubuntu 10.04 Dell Precision. It runs like a champ on all platforms since that is the beauty of VirtualBox! And since VirtualBox is open source it is also free! The virtual disk file ended up being over 800MB, but over our fast gigabit network that is not a big deal. And if someone messes up their virtual machine, they can just delete the file and download it from our web server again. I thought it would take a while to setup but the XP installation ran very quickly on the Windows 7 system I was using to create it. I just booted it off an XP ISO image file and ran the install in less than half an hour. That was probably a lot faster than running it off a real physical CD. It is always fun to watch the "virtual Microsoft install time" decreasing much faster than real time. If only we could really change time like that...

Misleading Local Story on Blockshopper.com site

2010-12-07T13:30:00.001-06:00

I really love the stlouis.blockshopper.com site since they write up little stories about recent home sales in the area. Unfortunately sometimes they make some errors. For example they reported on the sale of a brand new infill home in Brentwood, but list it with the details of the old house that stood there before it was demolished and rebuilt. They state the house is a 3 bedroom, 2 bath 1,400 square foot house built in 1961 when it is really a 3,500 square foot brand new Kingbridge home with 5 bedrooms, and 4 and 1/2 baths (new house pictured below). Did they really think a building materials executive would purchase a 50 year old 1,400 square foot home for $735,000? I did check both Google Maps and Bing Maps and both still have the old 2009 house sitting there, so I saved its old picture and added it to this post. Otherwise in a few years, people will forget the old house that used to sit there (much like our old house in Brentwood that was torn down by Kingbridge whose photo I have saved for posterity.) I also like how the Blockshopper folks placed a picture of the entrance to Brentwood Forest as the photo on that story. That house is fairly close to Brentwood Forest in proximity, but it is now several times larger and several times more expensive that any condominium you will find in the complex. It does not take a fancy online mortgage calculator to figure that out (yes, of course I must plug my own calculator site!) I was actually originally on the BlockShopper site to see if they had any news on the house for sale on our street which seems to have disappeared from the CBGundaker.com site. We saw a bunch of cars parked in front of it on Sunday night and wondered if something was going on with its sale. There is no change yet on the county revenue site, but that usually takes a while. Heck, we are still waiting for the lady to move in who bought the house diagonally across from us in the summer of 2009!

Online versus Local Shopping Calculator Tool

2010-12-03T12:23:00.000-06:00

Now that the holiday shopping season is in full swing it is time to make the world a better place by spending all sorts of money (hey, that's what the marketings pros and politicians want us to think!) This years there are definitely a lot of deals to be found both at online retailers and at local bricks and mortar stores in your area. The question is, where to buy? I thought I would come up with a simple online calculator to help you decide the full costs of purchasing an item, since with an online purchase you often must pay for shipping and then you have to wait for your shipment to see what shows up (hopefully what you ordered and in good condition. With a local retailer you can actually select the actual item you get to take home and sometimes even try it out first. But then you must get to the store, deal with the crowds, pay sales tax, gas for your car (or haul your purchases on public transportation.) The hassle and time issues are hard to monetize, but the transportation costs, taxes, shipping and other real costs are easier to calculate. So I came up with my little calculator to help people decide whether to purchase online or locally. The other benefit or purchasing locally is to keep the profits in your area and to keep local retailers afloat. For example, I know I like to purchase items at our local Micro Center to keep it going. I am already planning on working there when I retire from my university job, and I want it to still be operational 20 years from now when I leave this place! Another local establishment I love is La Pizza on Delmar because they make such fantastic pies and they must stay in business forever!

Fun, Geeky Web Statistics

2010-12-02T13:51:00.008-06:00

Hey, it's the beginning of a new month which means I can look at the web statistics generated by webalizer for the department web sites and see how November 2010 went. Since we switched to using the main Arts & Sciences web server for our front end site, we have seen traffic on our departmental server drop by about half, from about 12,000 hits per day in fall 2009 to about 6,000 hits per day now. Now that the boring "administrative" type pages are all served by the centralized and standardized college server, all the content we are serving are the specific lab, personal and class pages created by the faculty, students and staff in our department. One thing I wanted to compare was how the browser has changed from November 2009 for both our departmental server, and for the meteorites site. From November 2009 to November 2010 the number of hits for the meteorites site has actually increased by about 50% from about 22,000 hits per day to about 33,000 hits per day. A lot of our hits there are by common folks who find some weird rock in their yard who think it might be a meteorite worth thousands of dollars. So they google terms like "lunar meteorites", "missouri meteorites" or "selling meteorites" and they find our site. Perhaps in this bad economy there are more people trying to make extra money selling meteorites!

So first I checked out the departmental hits which now no longer include all the hits diverted for undergraduate and graduate programs, course lists, student directories, resource listings or other such boring pages. Here are my lovely statistics:

Site	Dept	%	Dept	%	Meteorites	%	Meteorites
Year	2009		2010		2009		2010
All MSIE	114,664	47.22%	59,710	39.94%	378,346	63.29%	537,760	58.79%
MSIE 8	37,482	15.44%	28,599	19.13%	149,991	25.09%	362,707	39.66%
MSIE 7	44,273	18.23%	16,104	10.77%	153,511	25.68%	129,314	14.14%
MSIE 6	31,379	12.92%	12,560	8.40%	87,919	14.71%	60,387	6.60%
Firefox	83,617	34.44%	44,532	29.79%	155,729	26.05%	195,075	21.33%
Safari	29,482	12.14%	26,980	18.05%	42,614	7.13%	118,505	12.96%
Chrome	9,267	3.82%	14,961	10.01%	16,790	2.81%	54,300	5.94%
Opera	5,776	2.38%	3,299	2.21%	4,364	0.73%	9,015	0.99%

Totals	242,806		149,482		597,843		914,655

As expected the Internet Explorer numbers have gone down for both sites percentage wise, but it remains the dominant browser. However, on our departmental site the total IE use is now under 40% of all visitors whereas it still controls almost 60% of the traffic on the meteorites site, with 2/3 of them running IE 8 (less than half the IE users on the departmental site are running version 8). The Firefox usage on both sites has also gone down on a percentage basis with the big gainers being Safari and Chrome. In fact, Safari and Chrome now account for over 25% of the traffic on our departmental site, about the same at the Firefox usage. I am also astounded as to how many people are still using Internet Explorer 6 despite its major security flaws. Over 8% of the departmental visits and nearly 7% of the meteorite users still use it. On the meteorites site we had more visitors using IE 6 than Google Chrome! I could analyze these numbers forever...

Hadley Redevelopment Project Dies Anew

2010-12-01T13:24:00.000-06:00

It looks like time has run out for United Plaza LLC to come up with the $3 million escrow to continue with their redevelopment of the Hadley Township area in Richmond Heights. That is the area just north of the Maplewood Wal-Mart bordered by Hanley on the west, Laclede Station on the east, Dale on the north and Bruno on the south. An article on the KSDK site mentions something about Big Bend Blvd, but the affected area is actually quite a bit west of Big Bend. This whole area has been suspended in limbo for the past decade, and I wish something could be done to move it forward or to just let the residents alone. I wonder how many actual residents are still living in the homes there. This latest news reminds me of the book I read about eminent domain a year or so ago and the problems that can happen when cities decide they want to "change the character" of some neighborhoods. Now that the monster Wal-Mart/Sam's complex is there at Maplewood Commons along with the adjacent strip malls and stand alone restaurants (Applebee's, Red Lobster, Olive Garden), how much more retail development can we possibly need in the mid-County area? And we all know any new residential development in that area would be much too expensive for the people being displaced by the redevelopment. I am still waiting to see someone redevelop the old Clayton Schnucks at Clayton and Hanley. Talk about some prime real estate sitting idle. I am surprised a Walgreens or a Starbucks has not sprung up there by now.

My Black Saturday Purchases of the Year

2010-11-29T10:08:00.003-06:00

Being a typical tightwad, I was not planning on purchasing anything this past Thanksgiving shopping weekend, but unfortunately my home network decided otherwise for me. It was Friday afternoon and we were awaiting the arrival of some family friends, when my son and daughter notified me that the home network was down. This was indeed a major catastrophe since my son goes into massive withdrawals when his Xbox Live is down and my daughter must check the Facebook status of her 500 Facebook friends at all times. I just thought it was again time to reboot my old Belkin router (which always seems to crash whenever my daughter is back from college -- how curious...) However, I tried resetting the router a few times as well as the DSL modem, and the router could not dial into my DSL account on the modem. I tried dialing directly into the DSL modem using PPPoE from my laptop and then my son's Xbox 360, and both of those could log into the DSL modem fine, but the router no longer could no matter what I did to it. Alas, it appeared I would have to purchase a new wireless router! I hate having to spend money!

Luckily I checked the Black Friday "weekend" ad at MicroCenter.com and noticed that they had a D-Link DIR-601 N 150 router on sale for an incredible price of $19.99. One of the nice things about Micro Center's website is that on Friday evening I could check the inventory at the Brentwood store and see they still had 11 units available at that price. So since we were busy Friday evening with company I could go there early Saturday morning and pick one up. They opened at 10:00am and I was there by 10:15am with my son in tow since he loves Micro Center as much as I do. Sure enough there was the $19.99 router although I only saw one on the shelf, which I quickly grabbed. While my son was checking out the latest Mac products I went online on a MacBook Air and checked Micro Center's site to see there were still 9 units there at the store, so besides the one in my hands there must have been 8 more either in the back or in other customers hands. Also while I was there we needed some blank CD-R media so I picked up a 50 pack of Windata CD-R's for $4.99. I noticed they had a 100 pack of Philip's for $11.99 and a 100 pack of Windata's available there for $9.99, so I stuck with the 50 pack. The Philip's cost 20% more per CD-R than the Windata's and the Windata 100 pack was the same price per CD, so why pay for the extra 50 CD's I did not need for a while? I bet they all come from the same plant in China anyway. Today while I am typing this up I also noticed the D-Link DIR-601 is no longer listed on the Micro Center site. They have a D-Link G router for $19.99 or the DIR-615 N router for $49.99 (after rebate) but my special deal is now gone. I did notice that Amazon has it for sale at my same price of $19.99 (which is actually being sold by CompUSA)

On a somewhat related note, I noticed that we have been receiving an unusually high number of SSH attacks this morning on our Linux systems, which I can tell since I am running DenyHosts on an Ubuntu 10.04 Dell system, and have it set to e-mail me every time it detects a new denied host. I am curious if the hackers are running more attack scripts on Cyber Monday thinking that all the IT folks are busy doing their shopping (both business shopping which is fine, and also their personal shopping which may not be as appropriate.) I have been constantly spammed by every legitimate online retailer we have ever used with all of their Cyber Monday deals, and there are a lot of great deals to be had for organizations that need to make hardware purchases right now. As for the SSH attacks, denyhosts had set 8 new denied hosts yesterday and already 3 new ones this morning, which is an unsually high number on that system. For example, I only had 7 total new denied hosts all of last week (Nov 21 through 27), and so far this week we've already had 11. Is it a coincidence this happened over "Cyber Weekend"? I think not!

Interesting Numbers from the Midterm Election

2010-11-06T10:02:00.000-05:00

Since I love numbers, I found this article at StlToday.com quite interesting. On Tuesday night it seemed like the Country Executive race between Dooley and Corrigan would be very close, and it was with Dooley winning by just over 3% of the vote (51.04% to 46.79%), but in reality if you look at the votes from township to township there are hardly any close races there at all. There are 28 townships in the county and out of all of these there were only three townships where the votes fell within a 5% range of each other (Northwest: 49.1% Dooley 47.9% Corrigan, Clayton: 46.9% Dooley, 51.7% Corrigan, and Jefferson: 49.8% Dooley, 48.6% Corrigan). In all the other townships there was at least a 5% gap and in most the gap was huge, from Normandy and Norwood at nearly 90% Dooley, to Chesterfield being over 70% for Corrigan. There is definitely a large split in the voting preferences of the county with North County being strongly Democratic and West and South County being strongly Republican. The Central townships are always the most interesting ones to watch and we often determine who wins the elections. I noticed in this election that Dooley did not carry Clayton township (where I live) and he just barely won in Jefferson (the closest race) which is usually a pretty solid Democratic area with Webster Groves, Warson Woods and Shrewsbury.

Coincidentally the St. Louis county property taxes were just posted on the county website a couple days after the election, and most folks will not be pleased to see their property taxes go up while their home values do not. Since we did pass a bond issue in Ladue Schools this April I knew ours were going up, but it still is never fun to have to pay more in taxes. StlToday posted the school district increases and ours only increased a modest 4.03% whereas some districts had huge rate increases of 15% to 20% (Webster, Brentwood, MRH.) Our rate is still the lowest in the county so suppose I cannot complain too much. My mother-in-law owns a condo in Brentwood so I just checked her property tax and it went up by 14.5%. That is quite a spike. It is scary how easy it is to check all this public information online. Anyone can check how much you pay for property tax and when (and if) you paid them.

Yes, Your Vote Really Can Matter!

2010-11-03T09:13:00.003-05:00

Yesterday was election day, and thankfully now all the mailings and annoying TV ads can stop. There were some surprisingly close votes yesterday, including close calls for long time incumbents Russ Carnahan and Charlie Dooley, but the closest race I personally voted on was for the 24th district State Senate between Barbara Fraser and John Lamping. The Post article has Lamping winning by 239 votes, but at the St. Louis County election site they have added up some additional votes and his win dropped to just 172 votes from among 60,000 votes cast (30,384 versus 30,212) for a winning margin of 0.28%. There were also 74 write in votes who could almost have made the difference in this contest. So for anyone who thinks their vote did not matter you are wrong! If just a few hundred folks had decided not to vote the election could have gone the other way.

As for the results, I was happy to see both hotel taxes (Clayton and Richmond Heights) were defeated, I was surprised to see how close the "puppy mill" vote was, and I was surprised to see how large of a victory there was for the "earnings tax" proposition. Now that Prop A has passed the city earnings taxes can actually come up to a vote next April, and that will determine whether the city income tax actually changes or not. Since the votes from the city were strongly against the proposition (41,712 against and 26,423 for it), the tax will likely remain anyway, so it should have little effect on the St. Louis city income tax. It will just mean one more issue to vote on every 5 years for the city residents. I also found the school district votes interesting. The Hazelwood, Pattonville and Lindbergh school issues all passed, but Mehlville's failed and Kirkwood did a smart move in breaking their vote into two issues. Kirkwood had said if only the school improvement bond issue passed they would not need to raise taxes, but if the athletic facilities one passed they would need to raise them, so the bond issue for school improvements passed but the other did not. Did they really think residents would be willing to give themselves a tax increase for better athletic facilities in these tough times? If they had been lumped together as one bond issue it most likely would have failed so it was a good thing they split it up as they did. We did not have a vote in the Ladue district since we already had one in April of this year. Our enrollment in the school district keeps growing, so it is definitely good that we have more facilities where we can expand.

My Financial Advice - Now Open for Business

2010-11-01T12:31:00.001-05:00

Over the years I have written a ton of online financial calculators and in doing so have also doled out a lot of financial advice to people across the Internet. A lot of these people tell me I'm a lot better than the real "professionals" they have talked to and that I should go into business for myself. Well, I find it flattering, but I am not about to give up my day job at the university with one child in college and another going to be there in a few years. However, I have been doing a bit of on-line web consulting on the side, and thought why couldn't I expand that to include helping people out with simple financial advice? Since this is not my main source of income I can afford to answer the $10 question someone might have about their mortgage or their retirement plan. People will have to remember my training and experience is in system and software engineering and not finances, but I have self taught myself quite a bit about personal finances. In reality my degrees and experience in engineering may actually be better for some of these numerical analyses than your typical insurance sales person or stock broker could provide anyway. I am always surprised when some of these "financial professionals" e-mail me for advice in figuring out complicated mortgage analyses or investment projections. Wait a second, why are they e-mailing some computer guy at a university to help them with their jobs? Aren't they supposed to be the experts? Plus many of these financial pros are expecting me to help them out for free when they are trying to answer questions for their paying customers. Sure, I should spend my free time crunching numbers so they can please customers paying for their tailored suits and their BMW lease. Somehow that just does not seem quite right.

So now I am starting up "Hugh's Pick Your Price Financial Advice". You simply e-mail me your questions about mortgages, retirement, investing, taxes or anything, and I will try to answer your questions to the best of my ability. It doesn't get much easier than that. If I tell you something useful that saves you money or points you in the right direction, you should send me some cash, but only however much you feel my advice it worth. That way everybody comes out ahead. If you don't send me anything, oh well, I've been doling out free advice for years anyway. I am just guessing there are some nice people out there, and I know there are since some folk just send me cash donations without any personal interaction at all. Have a question you need answered? Let me know and I can try to help you out! Isn't that the way the Internet is supposed to be anyway?

Another election, another new tax

2010-10-28T12:48:00.000-05:00

As a resident of Richmond Heights, I get to vote for the hotel tax they want to impose to the visitors to their three hotels, the Cheshire Lodge, the Residence Inn by the Galleria and the new Hilton Homewood Suites. The vote for this tax occurs on the same day that Clayton residences will be voting to impose a similar tax on their many more hotels. Both taxes are similar and will allow the cities to add up to a 5% tax on top of the already over 15% tax to bring the total hotel tax to over 20%. If every hotel in the metro area imposed this same tax would be one thing, but if the hotel taxes in Clayton and Richmond Heights are that much higher than other locales, I think some visitors would look to stay elsewhere. For example their is a new Marriott Springhill Suites in Brentwood which would not be imposing this new tax located only a mile or so south of the Residence Inn and also located close to a Metrolink station. Frankly, I think the best thing that could happen for Richmond Heights would be if their own tax fails and the one in Clayton passes. Then the prices in Clayton will be even higher than they are now, and more visitors might choose to stay in one of the Richmond Heights hotels instead.

To be realistic, Richmond Heights is not and will never be a big destination point for people to visit, but Clayton is, primarily for business travelers dealing with the County government or one of the many Clayton businesses, or for visitors of Washington University. The only large, local Richmond Heights institution substantial enough to draw hotel visitors is St. Mary's Hospital, and it does not have the national draw to out-of-town visitors of more prominent hospitals like Barnes-Jewish or Children's. Even all the retail sales are driven not by one big company, but by a bunch of smaller ones (i.e. the Galleria, Boulevard Saint Louis, etc.) Richmond Heights is more of a retail and residential area that serves the employees of the local universities, hospitals and Clayton businesses than a visitors' destination. So I am going to vote against the tax. Even though that small revenue increase may help the city, I do not think it is worth it, and I believe it makes our three hotels more competitive if they are not as heavily taxed as other municipalities. Would an out of town visitor working with a Clayton business choose to stay in Richmond Heights if it weren't cheaper than staying in Clayton? I don't think so. It sounds like some Clayton hotels like the Ritz-Carlton are ready to fight the tax, so it will be interesting to see what the voters decide.

Over-the-Top Advertising of the Day

2010-10-20T09:08:00.003-05:00

In today's sensationalized media reports, you have to expect overblown claims in advertising, but I just love the e-mail I just received from Heartland America describing their 72 Hour Off-Lease Computer Blowout! I have purchased electronics from them in the past, but not computers since their prices always seem quite a bit higher than places like Geeks.com, Micro Center or Intechra (the old Retrobox). Plus they put phrases like "Huge 40 GIG HD" on their ad, which may have been true several years ago, but sure is not true today. They are selling a Dell "Optiflex" (love the typo) with a 2GHz P4, 512MB of RAM and, yes, a "HUGE 40 GIG HD" for $184.99. I also love the "Orig. MSR" of $499.00. Was that perhaps in 2003? In comparion, Geeks has an IBM ThinkCentre M52 with a 3GHz P4, 1GB of RAM and a 40GB drive (they do not claim it is huge) for only $114.99 and that includes free shipping. Why past $70 more for a slower processor with half the memory? That sure is some blowout all right! I checked our local Micro Center online and found prices more inline with Geeks as well, with a 3GHz P4 based HP EVO DC7100 with 512MB of RAM and a 40GB drive going for $119.99. Their site says there are three of them sitting in the Brentwood store ready to be purchased. That system you could even pick up today and have running on your desk by this evening! So whereas I could see someone deciding between mail ordering from Geeks to save on tax and avoid the retail hassles versus buying at Micro-Center to have it same day and see it in person, I can not understand any reason for buying from Heartland America. Unless you want to be the one person with a genuine Dell "Optiflex" computer! The only place cheaper to buy a computer around here is to buy a surplus computer from the university's own business school the day it gets posted. If only Scott had any good computers for sale right now!

Speaking of local computer stores, I just heard they opened a newly revamped Apple Store at the Saint Louis Galleria. It is supposed to be the largest mall based Apple Store in the country at over 6,000 square feet. I even found some photos somebody took of the opening on flickr. Wow, so now I live about a mile away from the largest mall based Apple Store in the country as well as a mile from the only Micro Center in the state of Missouri. I am truly living in Geek central in the midwest. Hey, if you want to live just a mile from both the Apple Store and Micro Center, there is actually a house for sale on our street you could purchase. Unfortunately, is it a completely rebuilt mega-mansion (definitely not a McMansion) that is more than twice the size and three times the price of anything else in our neighborhood (with the exception on one other recent teardown a block away). I cannot imagine paying that much to live on our street, and I am quite glad I did not!

Another week another Ubuntu

2010-10-12T15:36:00.000-05:00

Well, this Sunday was 10/10/10, and in celebration the Ubuntu folks at Canonical came out with their latest release, Ubuntu 10.10 the "Maverick Meerkat". I love the goofy animal names, but then again I am a big Ubuntu geek as well. Local St. Louis folk can download a copy of the ISO images from my university archive at wubuntu.wustl.edu. With the new release out, I decided it was time to do some upgrades. No, not of my 10.04 system to 10.10, but to upgrade some of our 8.04 servers to 10.04 now that it has been out for six months. Since 10.04 was a long term support (LTS) release, I had planned on upgrading our very stable 8.04 systems to 10.04 over the summer, but I never got around to it. With 10.10 being out, that reminded me they needed updating. Since 10.04 is a LTS release, it will be supported for 3 years for everything and for 5 years for the server packages (i.e. the core kernel and service packages.) So if I update everything to 10.04, they should be supported until 2013 for everything and until 2015 for the server packages. That is a mighty long time! I started upgrading three Dell systems this morning and they all upgraded flawlessly. The longest wait I had was waiting for each one to fsck the root file system when they rebooted. Now they are all running the Maverick Meerkat, and it has nothing to do with Sarah Palin!

Why Are People So Surprised Nobody Is Grabbing Ultra-Low Mortgages?

2010-10-02T09:53:00.000-05:00

The press keeps announcing how low mortgage rates are getting and then they seem surprised that so few people are refinancing or buying homes. It almost sound like they are being paid by realtors and lenders to convince folks to go out and get a loan while rates are so low. Some articles have been addressing some of the reasons so few are taking advantage of these low rates, but one big reason people keep forgetting is that rates have been very low for a couple years and there are not that many people left to refinance who qualify for these low rates. It is one thing to drop your rate from 6% or 7% to 4%, but for someone like us who refinanced last year at 4.910%, the 4.00% rate we could receive on a new 15 year loan does not seem worth the $2,000 to refinance. You can calculate the break even point of refinancing on my latest refinance calculator or using my older loan comparison calculator. How low can these rates go? If 15 year rates continue to drop well under the 4% mark (do I hear 3.5%?), we may actually start getting interested, but more likely now we are considering just going with another HELOC and replacing our primary mortgage with a line of credit. With an introductory rate of 2.99% and no closing costs, that could make more sense to many people with a lot of equity (i.e a LTV under 50%) to just take out a HELOC to pay off their mortgage and then just pay down the balance quickly.We have done it once before and in many ways that makes a lot more sense than another costly fixed refinancing. It seems that these days when people are refinancing more folks are getting smaller, shorter loans, as opposed to the larger, longer ones everyone wanted back in the early 2000's. That's good for the borrowers, but not so good for the lenders trying to make some money!

In Dedication of Dedications

2010-10-02T09:00:00.001-05:00

Yesterday was a beautiful day for a dedication of a new building on the picturesque Washington University campus. Unfortunately, it wasn't for our still unnamed building yet! It was for Brauer Hall, the lovely new engineering building adjoining Whittaker Hall and the even newer Preston Green Hall which is progressing very rapidly. The dedication seemed to coincide with the start of an energy symposium on campus which brings another 500 on campus. What the people at the dedication did not realize is that all summer long, the doorway to the loading dock of that new LEED certified, energy efficient building was left open practically non-stop during the day allowing its HVAC system to pump cool air into the hot St. Louis summer. What a great way to save energy!

As for the dedication, the people in our department were mad that the entire northeast parking lot was closed all day long for a dedication that started at 4:00pm. When I was leaving for the day and saw the people still seating under the tent, I noticed not even half the lot was full. Luckily I did not have to worry since I was just walking to the Metrolink! Another nice reason to use public transportation. Ironically, I was actually invited to the dedication as an active engineering alumnus so I could have received a parking permit to the lot for the ceremony. I wonder how much I could have sold it to one of my co-workers in the department.

New "Get Back" Calculator - Find the Yield Needed to Return to the "Good Old Days"

2010-09-02T13:34:00.000-05:00

I received an e-mail message today from someone looking for an online financial calculator to see what kind of return he would need on an investment to get it back to where it was in the past, before the big market slide of the past few years. Some people think if your investments go down a fixed percentage, say 20%, to get them back to where they were before you only need a 20% return, but that is not the case. You need a substantially larger percentage to increase that smaller balance back up to the value where it used to be. A drastic example is if your investment falls 50%, say your retirement portfolio falls from $400,000 to $200,000. To get back to $400K from $200K you then would need a 100% return to double that amount back up to where it was in the past. That is a pretty grim task to try to meet. So that is where my new calculator comes into play. You can either enter your fixed percentage loss, or just put your old balance and your new balance and I will calculate the bad news for you. In any case, none of it is good news, but it is interesting to see what your numbers would be. Check it out to see what is needed to "get back" to where you once belonged.

Fun Shopping - Geek Style

2010-09-02T09:43:00.002-05:00

Yesterday I gave a coworker a USB flash drive from my stash, so I thought I might have to replenish the departmental supply. I looked at what I had spare in my office and I have four Kingston DataTraveler drives, one 1GB model, two 2GB models and one 16GB which I use for moving bigger stuff. Then it was time to go to our CDWG web store to check out the current prices on Kingston DataTraveler drives (for which we get a pretty hefty discount). I thought I would write up a table comparing today's prices and also the price per gigabyte since I love analyzing numbers. Here is a little table with my calculated costs:

Capacity	Price	Price/GB
2GB	$6.06	$3.03
4GB	$8.36	$2.09
8GB	$15.32	$1.91
16GB	$30.07	$1.88
32GB	$62.37	$1.95
64GB	$155.92	$2.44
128GB	$384.24	$3.00
256GB	$779.62	$3.05

The first interesting thing I noticed is that it is hardly worth buying 2GB flash drives anymore since for only $2.30 more you can get a 4GB drive. That was timely since the only drives I now have to give out to folks here are a 1GB or 2GB model, drives I would not even buy these days (I am not giving out my 16GB drive!) The price per GB is 50% higher on a 2GB than on the cheapest drives, but is consistently about $2/GB from 4GB to 32GB drives. The sweet spot is currently at 16GB with a $1.88/GB price, but that still requires $30 for the drive. In most cases, people really do not need a 16GB drive for hauling around PowerPoint presentations and PDF files and even their music collections or a movie or two. For most people, a $8 4GB drive or at most a $15 8GB drive is really all they need. I was surprised to see that I could purchase a 128GB or 256GB drive now, although their prices (and their price per GB) are selling at quite a premium. For the same price as a 128GB flash drive you can buy a netbook with a 160GB spinning hard drive, and for the price of a 256GB flash drive you can buy a really nice notebook with a 320GB or 500GB hard drive.

For fun I thought I would compare the NewEgg prices to our university discounted CDWG prices. It shows some interesting results:

Capacity	Price	4+ Price
2GB	$7.99	$7.49
4GB	$9.99	$8.99
8GB	$17.99	$15.99
16GB	$30.99	$27.99
32GB	$59.99	NA
64GB	$150.99	NA
128GB	$344.99	NA
256GB	$722.99	NA

On the cheaper 2GB to 8GB drives CDWG gives us a better price especially since we get free shipping on everything as part of our university discount. Our discounted prices even beat the volume prices from NewEgg until you get to the 16GB model. However, once you move to the 32GB and higher drives, the prices are better with NewEgg, and they even sell those drives with Free Shipping. The obvious reason is volume where CDWG probably ships hundreds or thousands of 4GB and 8GB drives every day to large organizations like Washington University, whereas NewEgg probably ships more in smaller orders. Large organizations probably do not order large volumes of the larger more pricey drives, so NewEgg can compete there much more easily. Now that we order most items directly with a procurement credit card it does not really matter what vendor we use, but I still probably still order more from CDWG than from NewEgg, most likely due to our nice academic discounts and free shipping on everything. In reality, NewEgg's website is ten times better for searching for particulars, but once I identify what I want on NewEgg.com, I can usually find them with a model number on CDWG's site to make the actual purchase.

The 2010 Revenge of Teardown Mania!

2010-08-27T11:58:00.001-05:00

I receive regular e-mails on homes that have relisted at new prices, just because I am a big real estate nerd. One that caught my eye is on the corner of the block where we used to live in Brentwood, a 2005 teardown that is now for sale again. Anyone who drives up and down High School Drive knows what I'm talking about, it's this giant blob on the corner of High School and Lawn that listed near a million dollars back at the peak, selling for over $900K in 2005. Now it is back on the market and they recently dropped the price from $849K to $795K. Now I love the Brentwood area and the stately brick homes in that neighborhood, but that house in particular was a bit extreme in cramming a 4,000 sq foot house with a pool and a 3 car garage onto a not so large lot. The driveway for the house comes off High School Drive and is barely a car length long. In my aerial photo here from Google Maps you can see in in the upper right hand corner. If you notice the two large teardowns in the lower left corner, that is where our old house lived before it was torn down and replaced by the two behemoth block homes. Incidentally, in past Googling for Kingbridge homes, I found a Brentwood city document where it asked citizens to pick their "least liked" photo representing single family homes in the area, and those two houses on our old lot won (see page 32 of the PDF)! Our new neighhborhood only has one really obnoxious teardown, but there was the one further north on McKnight that was for sale forever, starting at about $1.7 million and finally selling for $1.1 million. There are a ton more in Brentwood between Brentwood and McKnight north of Manchester. Some of the other in-fill construction doesn't look so bad like this one for sale on Parkside or this one on Madge. At least the spread of "teardown mania" seems to have slowed with the poor economy. At least that is one good thing about being in such a nasty recession.

My latest Refinancing Calculator

2010-08-09T12:23:00.000-05:00

Well, last month I said we would not refinance, but just to be sure I had to write up a new online calculator to check things out! Because our current rate is a reasonably low 4.91% already, I had to call up our lender to see if there was any point in us refinancing, especially since our loan is also rather small, especially relative to any closing costs. Incidentally we used Schwab Bank who did a very good job and who I highly recommend, especially if you already have a brokerage account with them. They always gave us good rates and very quick responses via phone, e-mail or FAX. The very nice lady I talked to today was very informative and gave me today's rates on our smallish loan. Since it is under $100,000 the rate is actually a bit higher than the lowest available, 4.25% on a 15 year $90,000 loan and with closing costs she estimated at about $1,900, the closing costs would be over 2% of our loan value. They would also charge 0.25% of our loan to eliminate the escrow account and let us pay the insurance and property tax ourselves as we have done for a number of years. So my updated calculator answers the question, what would be wiser, for us to refinance our 4.910% 20 year loan or to take the closing costs money instead and just lower our overall loan balance? Our rate on a new 20 year loan was 4.54% so that was less than a 0.4% drop for us and hardly worth it. Using my new handy, dandy calculator I deduced refinancing to a new 4.54% loan makes no sense at all, and refinancing to a new 15 would take us over two years to "break even".

One thing I included on my calculator is the deductibility of the loan interest which is actually a bad thing when calculating your savings in refinancing. Since the interest deduction is a good thing in being a "discount" on your interest, when you are lowering your rate, the deductibility of your loan reduces the effects of rate reduction on your savings. Dropping a 6.0% rate to a 4.0% rate becomes more like dropping a 4.5% rate to a 3.0% if you are in a 25% total tax bracket. Plus if you are not paying very much loan interest in total, it may not be deductible at all if it is does not add with your other itemized deductions to surpass the standard deduction ($11,400 in 2010 for married filing jointly, $5,700 for singles). I believe ours may not break the standard deduction this year with our small loan amount at a rather low rate. Our current 4.91% rate on our ~$90K balance charges less than $4,500 in interest, so we must come up with $7,000 more in itemized deductions now to be able to itemize. So I calculated our savings as non-deductible (which should improve our savings), but even there our break even point is still over 2 years.

So despite having excellent credit, and the cash for closing costs easily available to do so, we probably will not refinance at these historically low rates. If either our current rate had been somewhat higher, or our loan balance had been larger we most likely would do it, but with an already low rate on a small loan, the payoff is just not there for us.

Metrobus Restoration August 30

2010-08-06T16:06:00.001-05:00

I recently received an e-mail from the nice folks at the Citizens for Modern Transit which spelled out the latest bus restorations that will occur at the end of this month, on August 30. Honestly, though, I have to admit I hardly ride the buses anymore, now that the new train schedule works so nicely with my commute to Wash U. However, if I did take #2, I realized my old bus stop at Brentwood and Rose would no longer exist as they are rerouting Metrobus #2 to not loop around the Brentwood Industrial Court anymore. I know there were always 2 or 3 ladies who regularly exited the bus right there (at the White Building where the DD's Irish Pub and Karaoke Bar lives), so hopefully they will still be able to get to work. Instead the bus now continues north of the Walmart all the way to Big Bend, and then takes Big Bend all the way to the St. Louis Community College at Meramec Campus. That is definitely a nice route for people to get to Meramec, but that will take them a looonnnggg time along Big Bend. It will take about 30 minutes to get from the Brentwood Metrolink station to the Meramec campus which would give any student plenty of time to get some homework or studying done on the bus. Luckily, if I still want to catch Bus #2 instead of the Metrolink, I can catch it at the Galleria where it will actually stop on every trip Northbound and Southbound now (it did not in the past.) Before it only stopped at the Richmond Heights station or up at the corner of Clayton and Brentwood (right under I-170) so stopping at the mall is actually much more convenient for the many employees and patrons of the mall who would no longer have to cross Brentwood Boulevard. It does arrive a little earlier in the mornings (7:11, 7:41, 8:11, etc) at the mall so I would definitely have to hustle a bit to make it at 7:41 there, although I should be safe with a Metrolink pickup at 7:47 or 7:59 just a skip away at the Richmond Heights station. I am not sure which would be faster to the Wash U campus, taking the Metrobus at 7:41 or the Metrolink at 7:47.

Speaking of the Washington University campus, I posted a PDF of my Metrolink stop weekday schedule for the Skinker and Big Bend stations on my handy, dandy online Blue line schedule. This is what I have posted on the board in my office to make sure I do not miss a train in the evenings! So far I have never missed the one I was planning on riding.

Since during bad weather (like the recent heat warning days) I more typically "park and ride", I am also interested in any changes in the parking conditions at both the Brentwood and Richmond Heights stations. Someone at work here said that at Brentwood we can now park on any floor of the Meridian garage, but when I looked there the signage seemed the same so I parked on the 6th floor as usual (a nice place to park when it is 100 degrees outside to keep your car cool!) The small Richmond Heights lot gets pretty full by 8:00am every day, so I was also curious about parking at the Boulevard garage or surface lot for Metrolink parking. How will they know if people are parking for a store or restaurant on the Boulevard or if it a Metrolink patron? Do the people there even care? I cannot imagine the large covered Boulevard garage is ever close to being full. Why did they not make that a Metrolink "Park and Ride" lot too?

Latest Operating System Usage Share Statistics

2010-08-02T14:10:00.003-05:00

Since today is the start of the month, I thought it was coincidental that I received an e-mail from Ziff-Davis with an interesting article saying how Windows 7 had surpassed Vista in usage as measured by checking website logs. I always check our monthly logs on the first day of the month, so I modified one of my handy, dandy Perl scripts to see how our local distribution compared to the numbers in the article. This is the last month I can easily check on our old departmental site since we are folding our main site into the boring, humdrum corporate look for the rest of the College of Arts and Sciences, hosted more centrally where the log files will not be as easy to obtain. Plus our new site is a drupal site running on an aging Solaris Sun, so it is incredibly slow compared to our old site of static pages running on an even older Solaris Sun. In any case the article was saying their numbers had Windows 7 at 14.5% versus Vista at 14.3% with XP holding a big lead at about 62%. They had Mac OS at right around 5% and Linux at under 1%. So now it was time to check and compare our numbers, first for our department site (about 240,000 hits for the month) and then our more popular and generally read meteorite site (over 700,000 hits). Our departmental site is accessed primarily by our prospective and current students and other academics, and it has a very interesting distribution:

Windows XP	137,873	57.7%
Windows 7	29,494	12.3%
Windows Vista	27,278	11.4%
Macintosh	24,494	10.2%
Linux	11,813	4.9%
Windows 98	7,574	3.2%

So even though our Windows numbers were proportionately similar to each other based on the article, the total Windows percentile was about 84% instead of 90%. Our Macintosh usage was twice as high and our Linux use was almost five times as high! Just to make sure there was no error in my calculations, I ran the same analysis on the very popular meteorite site which appeals to a much broader audience:

Windows XP	401,836	53.8%
Windows Vista	171,205	22.9%
Windows 7	116,156	15.6%
Macintosh	45,648	6.1%
Linux	7,473	1.0%
Windows 98	4,371	0.6%

Here we see that the total Windows count is over 92% as expected but Vista actually has a surprisingly large lead over Windows 7. The Macintosh and Linux numbers are more in line with the general population at 6.1% and 1.0%. We had more Linux hits on our departmental server than on the meteorites site that has about three times the total traffic. It is also interesting to note that the aging Windows 98 still has more than half the total of all the Linux distributions in both my cases! Some people (especially older academics) still like those 10 year old operating systems.

Mortgage Rates Plunge like Starlet Necklines

2010-07-17T09:59:00.000-05:00

Yes, the only thing plunging faster this summer than the necklines of Hollywood's finest are the interest rates on new mortgages. Unfortunately, it appears that there are not too many people who qualify left to take advantage of these super low rates. It seems like the only people left who want those loans are those who are not qualified to receive them. New winners this year are people looking for jumbo mortgages who are finally seeing their rates drop close to the 5.5% level. People like ourselves who could qualify for those great rates already did so in the past few years. We refinanced last year after we sold our house and grabbed a good rate during the dip late last spring (April 2009). Sure, we could cut an extra 0.25% to 0.50% off our already low 4.910% rate, but that is hardly worth the closing costs on the loan for us. So no matter how low the rates go, I doubt we will take advantage of them. Yet other folks who could use those lower rates simply do not have the credit to qualify. Now that the homeowners tax credit is over and we head into late summer and fall, I bet the lower end of the market will slow down so the only hope is on the higher end market. I have seen quite a bit on increased activity on my popular online mortgage calculator website, but I think people are just curious. I think many people with already low rates who might qualify are just hearing the news about even lower rates and doing some calculations. If they are like us they will realize it is just not worth it to refinance yet again right now. In our neighborhood there is not much real estate action, with the folks across the street giving up on selling there house. What will become of the housing market? Who really knows?

Inexpensive Pleasure Part II - The iPod Cable Adventure

2010-07-08T09:30:00.000-05:00

Even though I do not own an Apple iPod, each of my two children own an iPod Touch since they have very generous relatives. However, my son is not too gentle with his charging cable so he needed a new one. I know we could have made the very quick trip over to the Apple Store in the St. Louis Galleria and purchased one for $19 plus tax, but I knew there were cheaper options. First I checked my favorite local retailer in the world, and sure enough the Brentwood Micro Center had something available for one fourth the price of the Apple product. It is a retractable Kensington USB cable with an iPod tip included for only $4.99. However, with my experience with retractable mice, phone cords and other such items, I know they tend to break, and the tip may be the most valuable piece included. So I thought I would look around to see what else existed. At Cyberguys you can get a product called the Bone Link II for $11.95 which looks like exactly what I would want, a solid hunk of plastic with the two ends that my son could not destroy. However, with $5.85 USPS shipping that would cost almost $16 and I could buy three sets of the Kensington cables and tips from Micro Center. I checked the crazies at BestBuy.com, and they did not sell anything that was even as cheap as the $19 genuine Apple cable from the Apple Store. I am sure not going there! WalMart.com had a Startech cable listed for $9.99, but not at their stores, so I would still prefer the Kensington cable at Micro Center to that one. Continuing on to eBay I found generic cables for $0.99 with free shipping just about anywhere and even found shipping from the US from a seller named mlephi. At that price I could buy five of those for the same price as the very reasonably priced Kensington product from Micro Center or 20 of them for the price of the genuine Apple product with tax. And since my son was willing to wait the 4 to 7 days for it to ship from Georgia we ended up going the eBay route and help out an eBay vendor in the good old USA.

Inexpensive Guilty Pleasure - Sonic 99 Cent Sundaes

2010-07-05T11:20:00.001-05:00

Yesterday to celebrate the Fourth, we decided to skip the fireworks and go to Sonic instead. Since they have their after 8:00pm 99 cent sundae special, we decided to go there and indulge in some inexpensive ice cream. It was starting to drizzle but the Sonic had an awning and it was not too hot to just park there and eat ice cream. We picked the closest one to us, the one on Manchester in Brentwood which we had not been to in two whole weeks (since Father's Day, when I decided it would be fun.) Once again I ordered a hot fudge sundae, but it appeared to be just a chocolate one. But I did not complain since it was only 99 cents! It appears the Sonic Blasts are also only 99 cents since my daughter bought one (a Reese's one). They skipped the whipped cream and cherry on our sundaes and gave us more ice cream instead, so again, I did not complain. It all tasted pretty good to me! I remember earlier in the Spring we had stopped by the Baskin-Robbins at McKnight and Manchester one evening and they had a special nightly deal as well ($1 cones on Tuesday evenings, perhaps?) I am not sure if they still offer that special during the summer, but that sounds good too. There is also the St. Louis Frozen Custard on the corner of McKnight and Manchester (where the Rock Hill Amighetti's and Sherwin Paint store live), but I have never actually tried them out. We have visited Amighetti's, the paint store, and Bandana's and Baskin-Robbins on the other side of McKnight, but have never tried the frozen custard place. And speaking of that corner and barbecue, I have been curious about trying the Plush Pig barbecue that moved there recently. For some reason my family would rather just go to Bandana's instead of trying some place new. I love trying new places to eat!

BMI & BMR Calculator (Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate)

2010-06-23T13:33:00.000-05:00

My wife has been researching type 2 diabetes and recently checked a book out of the library which included a body mass index (BMI) chart much like the one pictured here. Whereas it is fairly easy to follow, I, of course, think it must be converted to an online calculator! However, when I checked the Internet, there were already a billion of them so I had to make one that was different. So my lovely BMI BMR calculator accepts either inches or centimeters for your height and pounds or kilograms for your weight and calculates not only your BMI, but also your BMR (basal metabolic rate) which determines how many calories you should consume! So I made a spiffy "all in one" healthy body indicator calculator which not only determines how underweight or overweight you are, but also tells you how many calories you should consume to maintain or improve your ideal weight.

My Metrolink Blue Line Online Time Schedule

2010-06-17T13:23:00.000-05:00

Since it is now less than two weeks away from the change in times on the Metrobus routes and Metrolink trains (five trains an hour during rush hour, every 12 minutes), I have decided to create my own handy dandy condensed online schedule for just the Blue Line between Shrewsbury and Grand Station during the work week. My schedule lets you select any stop time for any station, and it will automatically show you the times for that run at the other stations. It sure works easier on the eyes than the massive PDF file from Metro. In reality I primarily only care about the schedule between Brentwood and Skinker, but since I am putting this online I thought I could at least include the Blue Line out to Grand for any other Wash U people who could use it. I could have taken it all the way to Fairview Heights, but then it wouldn't be all that condensed, now would it? I will have to admit I have never ridden the train into Illinois, and I have never actually ridden it past the Brentwood station going the other way. Yes, I am just a pathetic St. Louis county resident who rarely ventures out of the county, but that is just the way I am.

Latest Book: The Fair Tax Solution

2010-06-16T20:46:00.000-05:00

Last week my wife went to the County library and tried to find some weird personal finance book to keep me busy for a while. What she brought back was a very interesting and fast read called The Fair Tax Solution by Ken Hoagland. The idea is to get rid of the current incredibly complicated federal tax system and replace it with a set federal retail sales tax that would also eliminate the FICA and Medicare taxes. The premise sounds much too easy to work, but the book was quite convincing. It is difficult to think of any big negatives of the plan besides the elimination of the complete "income tax" industry (tax accountants everywhere, H&R Block, Jackson Hewitt, TurboTax, etc.) and the very cumbersome transition from the huge current tax infrastructure in place to the simplified sales tax. I am surprised we have not heard more about this idea. It sounds like Mike Huckabee was a big supporter back before the 2008 election, but the idea died down back since the election. I checked around on the Internet and have found quite a few pieces against the Fair Tax saying that it would be regressive, hurting the poor more and helping the wealthy. That is the opposite of what the book said, so now I do not know who to believe. The FairTax.org site has a cool calculator on it, and I plugged my numbers in to see what would happen. Despite being somewhat over the median income level, we came out way ahead, but that is also with the 23% rate which many people think is too low to balance the federal balance. Hey, it sounds like a good idea if they could get the numbers to work out for the federal budget. Can't our government look at some type of real tax reform?

Ridiculous Mid-County Only Rain!

2010-06-14T16:15:00.000-05:00

Okay, I was checking on the radar before I left today and it looks like practically all of the Metro area was pretty much clear of rain. But when I looked out my window it was raining! How could this be? Sure enough, when I zoomed in on the KSDK radar the only rain in sight is centered directly on top of Wash U and Richmond Heights. I guess I will be needing my umbrella after all. What wonderful luck!

A Better Photo of Me and the Newly Released Metrolink Train Schedule

2010-06-11T12:46:00.000-05:00

Today I found a better, sunnier picture of myself as I was walking to the Metrolink station this week. It was warm, but still a much nicer day to be walking to the Skinker station than in the pouring rain (which seems to occur much to often these days)! And speaking of the Metrolink, I noticed that they have finally posted the updated train schedule that begins on June 28 (in just 17 short days.) The morning eastbound trains during rush hour that now depart at :04, :19, :34 and :49 from Brentwood will then be leaving at :09, :21, :33, :45 and :57 and the evening westbound trains from Skinker will change from :11, :26, :41 and :56 to :07, :19, :31, :43 and :55. Since in the morning I rarely could catch the 7:34 anyway and usually took the 7:49, I should make the 7:45 no problem and get here to work 4 minutes earlier! And in the evenings I usually take either the 4:26 or 4:41 so now I will have three choices at 4:19, 4:31 or 4:43 (and even 4:55 or 5:07 when I'm running really late!). I noticed that the off-peak schedule even shifted slightly as the off-peak westbound departures from Skinker will move to :08, :28 and :48 which is four minutes later than the current schedule (:04, :24 and :44) I compiled my own condensed timesheet from the large 6 page PDF file from Metro. They need to find a more efficient way of posting their times!

Big Brother is Watching... Me!

2010-05-20T15:58:00.000-05:00

After mentioning the Clayco webcam for Green Hall, I believe I spotted it yesterday mounted high above the building housing Kayak's Coffee on the corner of Skinker and Forest Park Parkway. Since today was so rainy and yucky (yet again) and my daughter wanted to know how the Metrolink parking worked, we drove and parked at the Richmond Heights station and rode the Metrolink in at an earlier time. As I was turning the corner this morning I was thinking, maybe, just maybe it was timed perfectly.... and it was! If you look at the picture above you will see three people holding umbrellas walking towards campus. The person with the large multi-colored umbrella is ME! My daughter (who refused to share my giant umbrella with me) is slightly in front with her smaller umbrella, and a lady who works in the engineering school is behind us (I see her many times when I am on the Metrolink, and I should really be nice and say "hi!") But sure enough I was able to find that picture of us on the Clayco webcam at the proper time this morning. It also offers a lovely view of "Mount Danforth" the giant mountain of dirt from the excavation for the foundation of Green Hall. The mountain will be an imposing presence for visitors for tomorrow's commencement ceremonies, which translates to me as "find the free food on campus day".

Wow, that was a fast home sale!

2010-05-17T12:32:00.002-05:00

Yesterday we were driving through our neighborhood when I noticed a nearby house that just went on the market a few weeks ago is already under contract. In addition last year there was another house on our street that went on the market and was also sold in less than a month. So a great location and a reasonable price can still definitely move a house in this slow housing market. Unfortunately, the house across the street from us is still for sale, even after a lot of people were visiting it in the first few weeks it was on the market. They originally priced it at a strange price point ($514,990) although they have now lowered it to $499,990. I believe they bought it near the market peak in 2006 so they are trying to get as much out of it as they can, but I bet if it had started at under the $500K point it may have sold by now. They had priced is substantially higher than what the house next to it sold for last year ($475K) even though the other house is actually larger. They are also using some tiny real estate agent I had never heard of before. The quick sale on the other street was priced a bit lower which definitely helped it move faster, but there is still another nearby home for even less that has yet to sell for a long time. The fact that the last home is in the Brentwood school district while north of highway 40 does not help, and neither does the fact that is backs up directly to the highway. The Brentwood district is a really nice one, but I do not understand why there are just a few homes north of the highway they decided to put in Brentwood instead of Ladue schools.

On other local news, I recently noticed my favorite online campus webcam of the Brauer Hall construction is no longer updating. It stopped April 22, and now just shows how the building looked on that date. Instead they have moved the webcam to be perched on top of Kayak's to monitor the new Preston Green Hall construction and also people walking to the Skinker Metrolink station. This shows the lovely "Washington University" sign which we can no longer walk behind since they fenced off the little sidewalk that cuts the corner (I do not think that was necessary!) Since I walk that way every day, someday I am going to try to time myself so I am standing right there on the corner so it will take my picture. Clayco also set up a webcam on the top of Liggett on the South 40 to show the construction going on down there. I do not find this webcam nearly as interesting, and you do not see too many people walk by or anything! On my walks by the completed Brauer Hall and the forthcoming Green Hall, I keep looking for a door that can allow me to cut through the engineering buildings on my way to the lovely Earth & Planetary Building (soon to be Scott Rudolph Hall.) They do not appear to be making it easy for people to cut through Whittaker then Brauer through Green. Hey, I see engineering folk cutting through our building all the time! Why can't we do the same?

All Hail the Lucid Lynx! (Ubuntu 10.04 LTS)

2010-04-29T16:11:00.000-05:00

Today I was trying to apt-get a package onto my linux desktop when I realized it was taking forever to connect to the Ubuntu APT repository. But that made me think, "Is today the day?" And sure enough with a quick Google search, I realized today was indeed the day of the final release of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, the Lucid Lynx! Since it was such an exciting event I thought I should join in the fun and download a copy to play with tonight. I grabbed the torrent and started up bittorrent to get my own copy of the desktop i386 ISO image. It is nice to be using bittorrent to download open source software -- which is what it is legally supposed to be used for (not for movies, pirated software, music, etc.) I booted my old iMac on the freshly burned CD and it fired right up to a very purple desktop. There are a bunch of new features to play with that should keep me quite busy tonight. I used to maintain the repository of Ubuntu ISO images here at Wash U, but the infamous WUARCHIVE server I had helped maintain in the School of Engineering had been decommissioned (as I learned one day on the Metrolink from the system admin who happened to be riding the same train that day.) So now I have a local repository of Ubuntu ISO images setup at wubuntu.wustl.edu for anyone who wants to download their ISO image there. Right now I just have the desktop i386 and amd64 images there, but I will add more as we need them here in our department. Over the summer there are a number of 8.04 LTS systems I will want to update to 10.04 LTS, and having the ISO images available locally is sometimes handier than pulling everything over the net. R.I.P wuarchive, but long live Ubuntu!

Open Hunting Season At Wash U?

2010-04-29T09:14:00.000-05:00

Two recent crimes have made big news here on campus and also apparently for the St. Louis metro area as a whole. First early Monday morning a female undergraduate student was sexually assaulted and robbed in the DeMun neighborhood just south of campus, and then just yesterday morning two undergraduates were mugged on the north end of the overpass to the Greenway walkway. I wonder if the publicity about these crimes is helping matters or hurting matters. Associate Vice Chancellor Steve Givens can be seen in numerous TV clips telling how the two mugged students did "everything right" in not fighting and in giving their assailant what he wanted. I am grateful our students were not hurt, but he is giving the message to criminals "come on over, we are ready to give you whatever you want and we will not fight back". That is the correct attitude for our students to have upon being accosted, but it sickens me that it may actually motivate criminals to target the university community even more. Our undergraduate student body is considered a bunch of unarmed, spoiled, rich kids who will gladly give up their parents' cash to whoever asks them. The crooks would be wise to try to differentiate the undergraduate students from the graduate students who tend to live off their own small stipends, or the many underpaid staff members. I am curious how much cash the walkway burglar received from the two undergrads there anyway. The thug would have been really mad to have mugged two people and only ended up with a few bucks.

I find the idea of using a whistle to be an interesting idea. I could see blowing one when a potential criminal is maybe 15 or 20 feet away from you, but once they are holding a gun or knife against you I do not see its benefit. You would almost have to judge in advance when an approaching person is a potential criminal, and then I could see people being accused of "racial profiling". I would hate for some of our male African-American students to have whistles blown at them just because people think they "might" be a criminal. With our school year drawing to a close and more students walking to off-campus residences at unusual hours I could see an increasing chance of more of these crimes occurring. More students should take advantage of the new Campus2Home shuttle program even if it may be not as convenient as walking straight home. Maybe Campus Police should hire some officers who are armed, "plain clothed" student lookalikes (i.e. young faced officers) who can patrol late at night where they are likely to be targeted. We definitely need to make arrests in some of these cases so that the local criminals know the pickings are not so easy on our campus.

Metro Announces Service Restoration Plan

2010-04-17T09:06:00.002-05:00

Yesterday, Metro announced their preliminary restoration plan for Metrolink and bus services that will be occurring for 2010. Starting on June 28, several bus routes will be increased in frequency (#70 Grand, and #95 Kingshighway, for example) and the rush hour Metrolink schedule will be increased from every 15 minutes to every 12 minutes (i.e. 5 trains per hour instead of 4 trains.) More details can be found on the Citizens for Modern Transit website. The September and November bus restorations will be more extensive but will require more people and equipment. They will actually be hiring more people which is a good thing! That sure beats them firing over 600 employees.

I will be curious to see how they tweak the current four Metrolink times during rush hour to become five. Before April 2009 they were running every 10 minutes (6 trains per hour) but because of single tracking across the Eads Bridge during its renovation they cannot increase the frequency quite that much. So moving from 4 trains an hour (for example :00, :15, :30, :45) to 5 trains an hour (:00, :12, :24, :36, :48) means one arrival time should stay the same, one will be pushed forward 3 minutes, another would be pushed back 3 minutes, and the one time 30 minutes after the "fixed" arrival time is replaced by two times, one 24 and one 36 minutes afterwards. I will be curious to see if the train I usually ride will be any less crowded or not after the June 28 changeover. I believe a lot will depend on the timing. If the train you usually ride is the one that now has been replaced with two arrival times 6 minutes before or after the old time, it will likely be less crowded, but if it the train on the arrival time that has not changed I bet it will be the same old people at the same old time. It will just be two months and we can see what will happen!

Great graphical maps of Proposition A results.

2010-04-09T12:12:00.000-05:00

I was reading an article on StlToday.com when I noticed someone in the comments links to some cool maps that show the results from both the votes on Proposition A and Proposition M back in 2008, and the change of the voting patterns between the two elections. I was surprised to see in how few areas the proposition actually lost this time, only in very far out West and South County. The victory in the percentage of votes was actually quite remarkable. It is quite a shift from November 2008 when only a few areas voted a majority to pass Proposition M (primarily the inner county areas where Metrolink runs, up through North County.) One big difference is the total number of votes cast, since November 2008 was a presidential election where 78.6% of registered voters cast votes, but this time only 22.1% cast their votes (which is still higher than they had expected.) I have always lived in either Clayton Township or Creve Coeur Township over the past 24 years, and those two townships voted for the sales tax both times, but I was surprised to see that the percentage "Yes" in Creve Coeur township (71.75%) was actually a little higher than the percentage in Clayton township (69.69%) where the Metrolink actually runs. Of course both of those were dwarfed by Hadley township (78.68%) right next to the city as well as University township (82.66%) both of which includes a ton of Washington University students, faculty and staff. The vast majority of the students here on campus were definitely voting for the proposition. Overall in the six central townships Proposition A passed with 72% versus 28% or an almost 3 to 1 ratio.

If all these mid county people are so "pro transit", though, why don't I see more of them on the Metrobus in the morning? I know in the evenings when I take Metrolink the trains are pretty crowded, but when I am riding bus (Red Line #2) north and east from Brentwood in the morning, there are only a handful of people who normally ride it (the one Blues fan who works at the Zoo, a teen going to school and the librarian in my building being the only other regulars.) I realize I come in to work earlier than many folks, but on the occasions when I park and ride the Metrolink at around the same time, it is always much more crowded than the bus. What do people have against the buses? They are actually quite clean and I find them quite punctual. It is much easier to find a seat for yourself on the bus than on the train, and you see more of the "street activity" than on the train when you are often either elevated above everything, or down in a tunnel where you cannot see anything. There used to be another lady who sometimes waited with me at the bus stop on Brentwood, but I no longer see her. (Maybe I frightened her off because I am so menacing). Once the old routes and schedules are restored I am not sure if other options will arise for me as well, since I may be able to take bus #1 (Gold line) north from Brentwood, and with the trains leaving every 10 minutes instead of every 15, I may be able to better connect from a bus to a train to take it into campus. Wow, I may have more public transit options than I need and even more multiple ways and times to commute to and from work without a car. Isn't that the way public transit is supposed to work? Fellow pro-transit supporters in St. Louis county, join me! Take the bus! Help show everybody that the bus is fine for anybody to ride!

The County Wins it for Prop A -- But am I a Cynic?

2010-04-07T09:11:00.001-05:00

I was expecting a close vote for Proposition A last night, more in line with the slight defeat in 2008, so I was pretty excited to hear about the huge 63% to 37% victory for mass transit for the region. This is a big win for the metropolitan area, but it made me start thinking about the opposition group, "Citizens for Better Transit", and wondered how they actually could have defeated this thing. In reality their arguments were pretty lame, and their spokespeople were not the most impressive of speakers. I was starting to wonder if they were actually set up by the pro Prop A group as being staged "opponents" they could easily argue and debate. This John Burns fellow does not come across as someone who knows much about what he is talking about, and who would really pick an unproven activist in his 20's as the lead spokesperson for their campaign? He does have that "common man" feel to him, but if I were setting up the campaign against Proposition A, I would find someone more experienced who could debate better against people like the mayor of Chesterfield or the chancellor of Washington University. The opposing group also could not address the biggest question as to what to do if Proposition A actually were to have failed. There would be another 600 Metro employees out of work, more services would have been cut, and there would be no apparent future for public transportation available for the region at all.

I likened Proposition A to being stuck in the wilderness in the 1800's and you have a fractured, infected leg. The only person who is available is a capable surgeon, but he will only fix your leg if you give him your gun and your horse. There is nobody else who can help you. You either give him your gun and your horse or you die. John Burns would say, "Look, I know this fellow may be a decent surgeon, but I've heard he beats his wife and plus he seems a bit greedy. You cannot afford to give up your horse and your gun, so you should not let him fix your leg! Leave it alone and it will take care of itself." Who would really take that kind of advice? Metro is currently our only choice and if we do not support them and keep them running our community would be taking two step backwards. You cannot be "pro transit" and vote against Proposition A. Voting for it was the only realistic option. So the transit tax had to win, and I am very glad it did. But now I am wondering if we voters were all played a little too well. Hey, I really do believe we landed people on the moon (and the rovers on Mars of course!)

Time to Vote X 2

2010-04-06T09:14:00.000-05:00

Today is it! The big election day in St. Louis County for Proposition A has finally arrived for the public transportation sales tax. That means the Chancellor can stop sending letters and e-mail to every student, their family, university employees and alumni reminding us to vote. I am not sure how many Wash U messages I have received reminding us to vote, but it may have matched the mailings reminding my daughter to apply to the university in the first place. What would the St. Louis county postal service would do without Washington University to keep them busy all the time? And in keeping with the transit mindedness of this election, I will just take off a little early and take public transportation to my polling place to cast my vote, and then walk home afterwards. It looks like a beautiful day to do so today. I should just feel lucky that I am someone in the county who is able to take advantage of public transit to commute and get around the area. Hopefully once the proposition is passed and more services are restored to their 2008 levels, more people will be able to do so.

My other chance to vote today is tonight for American Idol. I never have voted on the show, but week after week I am amazed to find Tim Urban back again for another week. Unfortunately, there is no way to directly vote somebody off the program. Plus there are not any others amongst the less talented contestants on the show who I would want to vote for to try to keep instead of Tim. For example, Didi from last week was not worth saving, but neither is Katie or even Aaron (or Andrew, for that matter.) But I am not writing my posts on American Idol here, but on my new Idol Blogger 2010 blog instead, just to see how many people will read it! I love testing out new things on Blogspot and Google, even letting my cat, Slinky, have his own blog, The Life of Slinky the Cat. Yes, I definitely spend too much time on my computer...

Four more days until the Proposition A Election!

2010-04-02T09:27:00.003-05:00

It is hard to believe but it is only four days until April 6 which is a very important election day here in St. Louis County. Yesterday I was driving from my periodontist (which is unusual since I rarely have to drive during the work week), and I took the scenic route through Olivette and Ladue on my way home. I was happy to see quite a few "Yes on Prop A" signs along the major streets (Old Bonhomme, Price, Clayton) as I travelled through Olivette, Ladue and into Richmond Heights. I noticed there were even some homes that had "Yes" for Prop A and "No" for Prop O (for the Ladue School Bond issue) in the same yard. Even those people who did not want to support the Ladue schools were willing to support public transportation. I saw a few anti-Prop O signs here and there, but no signs against Proposition A at all that I could remember. That was a very good omen, but I had to remember that it was Olivette, Ladue and Richmond Heights I was driving through, and not communities further out west. Would there be that much support west of 270? I have read some of the viewpoints against the proposition and I must agree they have some valid arguments. Is Proposition A perfect? Not even close! But as it is written now, if the proposition fails it will be a disaster for our region as more transit lines and services will be shutdown. I do not believe Metro manages the money they receive perfectly either, but I do not even consider that an issue. They are another large bureaucracy with waste and management problems present, but these days I am afraid that is the norm and not the exception (think MSD). As a logical voter you only have to decide one thing -- is it better for the community as a whole if this proposition as it stand passes or if it fails. And when you look at it that way there is only one answer -- it simply must pass. Without it passing many people could not get to work, get to school or simply get around the area. I know Washington University is one of the prime beneficiaries of its passage, so I may seem biased, but the university is a huge employer in the area and many employees and graduate students depend on Metro for their transportation. If you consider all the other universities (SLU, UMSL, SLCC, Webster) with students and employees who use Metro to get to school or work, you are talking about a ton or people affected. Hey, once it passes that does not mean Metro can just go wild and spend money with reckless abandon. Metro should definitely be watched to make sure the funding is spent appropriately, but they simply must maintain current services and expand them where they are needed.

New Personal Finance Book for the Self-Employed

2010-03-13T10:48:00.000-06:00

I just received a new book in the mail from Joseph D'Agnese and Denise Kiernan. They are both journalists who have written for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and they have now written a personal finance book together specifically for the self-employed and part-timers, called The Money Book. They did interview me for parts of it, so I may be a bit biased, but after briefly skimming it, I think it is an easy to follow read that could benefit many people (not just personal finance geeks like myself). I will read the book more in depth, but upon first skim, I had to find some calculator worthy section I could use to develop some neat online tool. Therefore I have created my own Money Book calculator. This allows you to enter your monthly income and also specify how much to contribute to specific emergency, tax and retirement accounts and also all your "mandatory" monthly expenses. After entering your numbers it tells you how much you have left for discretionary spending. Note that you should not take whatever is left and just blow it all on wild partying, but if that number is large, it means you can increase your percentages for retirement and other savings instruments. I also noticed their mandatory expenses do not include food and groceries so that must come out of discretionary income too. In this lingering poor employment environment where less people are finding conventional jobs and more people have "side jobs" to supplement their income, a book like this fills an important need. It should help many people who now are generating income from unconventional sources who have always just been employees at a large organization before, and never had to deal with doing so much on their own.