Hugh's Worthless Blog

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...

  At the beginning of this month Google decided that our old Google site dedicated to our free church play scripts had to be updated so we decided it was time to do as Google asked and update it. The options there were pretty limiting but I was able to migrate all the content and the 13 script pages we had there into a new format Google site. One thing we noticed, however, is that it would not allow me to put any Google Adsense ads back on it, and once I read around I realized nobody could add Adsense ads to Google sites since 2013, and we were only allowed to keep our ads intact because our site was opened up before 2013 (it was created back in 2009) and we were grandfathered.  So today I decided to migrate the whole thing to WordPress which is easier to use anyway and allow Google to place ads back in it. I am hosting it on my same HostGator site that hosts my calculator site where I can actually run a number of WordPress sites. My " Dead Reckoning " estate planning site ...

Yesterday I received a phone call from a fellow Washington University employee who worked at West Campus asking what was the best way to watch next Monday's eclipse since he was coming in to work that day. The university is actually sponsoring an Eclipse watch event on our campus (with ice cream), but unfortunately none of our campus is within the range for totality so it would only be a partial eclipse party. Our campus further west is extremely close to the edge of totality so the West Campus employee was asking if he could just walk across the street and down the block to see the full total eclipse. I told him he could, but he would likely only experience a few fleeting instances of totality and it would be better for him if he could get further south and possibly further west for a better experience. However, since West Campus is located very close to the Forsyth Metrolink station and all employees can receive a free Metro U-Pass, I realized the easy solution. Hop on th...

Danforth Campus West Campus Shuttle stops - August 2017 For the past several months, one of the most favorite pasttimes here on the Danforth Campus of Washington University has been grumbling about parking and all the construction on campus. One of the solutions the "powers that be" came up with was the new ParkSmart option where a bunch of people park over at West Campus and then take the Metrolink or the new West Campus shuttle to get between their cars and their work on the Danforth campus. Many of the people who had their parking displaced when the lots in front of Brookings closed were the people who work on the east end of campus, namely in Sam Fox , the Brown School , Engineering , Brookings, and those of us in Earth and Planetary Sciences and Physics too. So to appease us "Easterners" they placed a stop on the east end of campus, first on the northeast corner of Forsyth and Hoyt. They had a test run in April, and I tried it out and it actually wor...

We have known for a long time that the construction was going to begin here on the east end of the Washington University campus, but it is still sad to see all the tall, huge trees along Brookings Drive disappear.  Starting on Tuesday they have been cutting them down and the canopy of green in front of Brookings Hall is quickly disappearing. Here is a time lapsed animated GIF taken from a camera we set up in our building . Refresh the page or click on the image to see the time loop again: With the east construction and east parking lots gone, everyone from our building is now parking in the Millbrook lots and walking to our building from there. Unfortunately, the construction in the middle of campus is blocking the pathway in front of chemistry (Louderman) so the best route is to walk along Throop and take the detour north of Throop that heads down near Forest Park Parkway, and then follow Throop to our building (taking the pathway between Urbauer and Compton ...

Median Household Income of Selected Colleges and Universities I was pretty intrigued when a new study appeared last week which highlighted Washington University in a not so great light, but I was a bit surprised how local journalists analyzed the results. An article in the New York Times first reported on the new study which puts Wash U at the very top of colleges where the top 1% (in terms of income) outrepresent the bottom 60% in household income. The numbers are based on some older data, but in the article 21.7% of Wash U students come from the top 1% ($630K+ income) compared to only 6.1% from the bottom 60% (<$65K.) The Wash U administration uses these numbers to pat themselves on the back and boast how in just four years they are projected to more than double that 6.1% number to 13% (still a pretty paltry figure.) But what both recent Post Dispatch and Student Life articles tend to do is focus too much at the top and bottom of the socioeconomic data, and skip the much ...

The recent article on the medical school at the University of Missouri-Columbia possibly losing its accreditation, made me curious of the demographics of the current medical students at the four medical schools within the state, and also prospective undergraduates who may be applying to the schools. Some quick Google searches led me to a bunch of interesting tables at the Association of American Medical Colleges  which shed some light to the diversity of medical students in Missouri. The first thing I noticed on the AAMC site was some tables of the racial breakdown of students from various undergraduate programs who apply to medical colleges. In Missouri, there is only one undergrad program that produces 15 or more African-American graduates that apply to med school, Washington University with 20. There are, in fact, only three undergrad programs in Missouri that produce more than 100 Caucasian-American med school applicants. Below I have a table I compiled of medical school ...

Since the Pokemon Go craze started, I was excited to realize there were three PokeStops which I could reach without having to leave our building, with one being the Mars Rover Replica in the middle of our building. One day while Googling about Pokemon Go, I found an online travel company, Skiplagged ,  that put up a really cool, real time Pokemon monitor , which anyone can contribute to by running a scanning process over a specific geographical area. They had a rather involved method written up to run it using Python on a Windows PC, but with a Linux system pre-installed with Python, running it was pretty trivial. They even have a threaded version now that runs extremely fast, so I have it scanning all sorts of areas in the St. Louis area (specifically Richmond Heights/Brentwood, WashU to the Loop, the Central West End, and SLU.) With just my one Linux server scanning those four areas with their Python script, it has made St. Louis show up as a bright, purple Pokemon hot sp...

These days it seems like customer support is going away faster than landlines and paper mail. But I can at least state that JLab Audio appears to ship quality products, honors their "lifetime warranty" and responds very quickly to warranty claim requests. I received my original J4 earbuds in October 2013 and they have lasted about 2 years of almost daily use, with three different players/phones I have used to listened to music on my Metrolink rides to and from work. But finally one earbud went out (one of the wire connections I believe actually broke) so I thought I would test out their lifetime warranty. On Friday October 9, I submitted my claim and they said they would need a order confirmation. So I needed my daughter to e-mail me her Amazon order which included the $30 J4 order from 2013. After I submitted that (Oct 11), they responded I then needed to send them the old earbuds and they would give me store credit for the purchase price once they received them and coul...

I received my CyberPower CP350SLG a couple weeks ago and I realized I had not followed up on my previous post about the APC BE350G I received for Christmas. The CyberPower 350VA model is substantially smaller than the APC unit and fits neatly under our desk. There are three battery backed up outlets and three that are surge only, with one separated from the other two on each for power bricks. I plugged our AT&T U-Verse modem/router and one cordless phone on the battery side, so they should last quite a while since they are the only two devices on battery power. The big deal for me with this low priced UPS, however, is the simple fact that you can actually disable the audible alarm. I thought I would need software and a USB cable, but in reality all you do is press the power button twice quickly to toggle between alarm on mode and alarm off mode. I wanted it off, so after two quick button presses it was set. I tested it by unplugging the unit from the wall and sure enough, th...

I am used to getting all sorts of preposterous e-mail scam messages in my various electronic mail accounts, but I was amazed one day recently to receive an actual Air Mail letter through the old U. S. Postal Service from South Africa. My name and address were hand written on the envelope with the incorrect middle initial, so I was quite curious what it was: Wow, someone actually went through the trouble of mailing this letter all the way from South Africa to me in the hopes I would contact them so they could pay me some portion of that $8.5 million. Do they not realize these scams have been around forever, and that modern day scam artists use this wonderful medium known as the Internet? This mailing cost them real time, effort, postage and paper to send this to me, not just a bulk e-mail burst from some mailing software. I hope they do not think the little "MEMO" line at the bottom added anything to their letter since that does not look very impressive at all (no re...

Since I work on a college campus where building construction never ends , I love to watch the construction progress both live and virtually. They have been working on the expansion to the Brown School of Social Work here at Washington University for a while, and I see the construction progress from the big parking lots just fine. However, I discovered they have a live  webcam which looks from Goldfarb Hall so we can see what it looks like from that vantage point. Yes, I could get off my lazy behind and walk over there the several hundred feet and look, but I prefer to do so from my desk! I also like the live  webcams they have up over at the medical campus which views the construction there from three separate vantage points. You can see the traffic going up and down Kingshighway from the three views which makes it easy to track individual cars as they drive around. If you lived in the Central West End and had people visiting you that you knew would be driving on Ki...

The latest endowment numbers for the end of 2014 are in for all colleges, and it looks like everybody had a good year due to booming investment markets. Leading the pack as always is Harvard at almost $36 billion, up about $3.5 billion from last year. That means its endowment increased in value about the current total endowment of Ohio State or Johns Hopkins . If we look at local universities, Washington University saw a nice 17.5% increase to jump from $5.65 to $6.64 billion to remain the 17th wealthiest college endowment in the country. That means it increased in value about one billion dollars or a "SLU-worth", as Saint Louis University saw its endowment pop back up over the $1 billion point (#87 on the list), which it had not seen since before the market crash several years back. Another local university who saw a hefty increase was Lindenwood , who increased 17.4% to jump from $122 million to $143 million to have the 372nd highest endowment in the USA. All these...