Hugh's Worthless Blog

After a three year absence, we are happy to announce the Samuel United Church of Christ St. Patrick's corned beef dinner is back for 2023. We will be having our dinner this year on Saturday, March 4 , from 4:00 pm to 7:00 pm . The menu will consist of premium corned beef from Kern Meat Company, along with assorted side dishes (typically in the past it has been cabbage, potatoes, carrots and Irish soda bread.) The meal also includes beverages and our homemade dessert bar of treats created by friend and members of Samuel UCC .  Neither Samuel UCC or Kern Meat will keep any of the donations, 100% will go to the local St. Louis chapter of Habitat for Humanity to provide affordable homes for local families. Samuel is donating the space, beverages, desserts and labor and Kern Meat is providing the food for the meal and their guidance in preparing the meal to their restaurant level standards. Here is an interesting article from St. Louis Magazine in 2019 about corned beef in St. Louis

Orange= Fall 2020, Blue - Fall 2021 Today was the final day of class, so we have successfully completed another semester during the pandemic here at Washington University in St. Louis . Since the campus COVID-19 dashboard was updated today with final numbers for the semester, I have decided to create a graph that compares the student positive count from Fall 2020 to Fall 2021. The orange line shows last semester, and the blue line shows this semester. For Fall 2020 we ended a slightly abbreviated semester with 273 total student cases over the 95 days from the beginning to the end of classes. For Fall 2021 we only had 175 total positive cases, so we had a reduction of about 36% over 102 days. The total number of positive faculty and staff cases also dropped significantly, from 120 last fall to only 78 this fall (a very similar 35% decrease.) Last Fall the university did require masking when in any public indoor spaces, and that continued again this year when a lot more people were pres

  Commencement was yesterday on-campus at Washington University in St. Louis so the semester and school year are officially finished. On our COVID-19 dashboard the final date was May 12, and at that point we had 602 positive student cases (504 undergraduate and 98 graduate students) and 208 positive faculty and staff cases for the full academic year (since September.) My graph above shows the positives with the students combined as the orange line on top and the faculty and staff on the bottom in blue.  Since we have 7100 full-time undergraduate students and 6600 full-time graduate students for the academic year, that comes out to about 7.1% of our undergraduates and about 1.5% of our graduate students being positive at some point during the year. The large difference is probably due to our undergraduate population primarily living on campus and congregating together whereas the graduate population lives on their own and most likely interacts with much smaller groups of friends and c

  Happy New Year! The year 2020 is thankfully over and we can all look forward to a brighter 2021 when we can all get vaccinated and things will start going back to some form of "normal". The Fall semester at Washington University has ended and Spring semester does not start again until the last week of January.  During the fall, I was tracking the total reported positive cases off of the university's dashboard and was happy to see how well we were keeping the spread at bay at first. Within our population of over 7,000 on campus undergraduate students and nearly as many graduate students, we stayed under 100 total positive student cases through all of September and October (our classes started September 14.) In my graph the total student positive cases is in orange and the total faculty and staff numbers are in blue.  In the middle of November, as the temperatures turned colder and students spent more time inside, our positive numbers spiked, doubling from 95 on Novembe

This weekend when I booted up my aging Dell Latitude E7440 it was installing yet another Windows 10 update so I let it do its thing until it was ready to let me log in. Unfortunately, once I was able to log in, the system was running at a snail's pace and simple tasks were taking several seconds instead of instantaneously as they had just a day beforehand. So I thought I would try using System Restore to take it back to a restore point in late November when I know the system was running in its old perky self. Unfortunately, the system started into a painful loop where it would keep rebooting and trying to repair itself until it came to a point where it said it could not repair. I tried booting it in Safe Mode and it would not even boot in Safe Mode. I was resigned to reinstalling Windows 10 on the system when I noticed I had an Ubuntu 18.04 boot flash drive here at home so I thought I could at least boot it up with it and copy over a few files on the local SSD I had not copied ove

  During the pandemic I have been doing a number of jigsaw puzzles in my spare time, so my thoughtful wife, Penny, has been finding a number of them for me to put together. Unfortunately, one of her purchases did not turn out so well as they shipped the wrong puzzle, in fact they shipped two identical National Park puzzles that we did not want. After a lengthy dispute, she was able to get her money back, but the company said we could keep both of the undesirable puzzles. Therefore I decided to put one of them together and try it out. One of our faculty members in my department at Washington University teaches a very popular National Parks course so I thought I could at least learn the names of some of the parks. First off this puzzle is made from a very flimsy card stock which is not much thicker than a playing card. The backing of the puzzle is stamped with the letters A through H which allow you to figure out which section of the puzzle it is which can be helpful since almost all t