Hugh's Worthless Blog

I will have to admit that I love Craigslist , and I have used it well both for buying and selling things. We have only purchased one item via it (my son's Wii which was a great deal!), but have sold and just plain given away a lot of items using it. The most intriguing section for me is the "free" section which he have used primarily to get rid of unnecessary things. It is amazing how you can post an item for $20 and nobody will want it, but if you post it for free you will immediately get 15 respondents in a few minutes. In the past two weeks we have used Craigslist to get rid of our old lawn mower which had worked but was damaged when a part fell off and the blade sliced into it (ouch!), and also my son's old bike which he actually outgrew a couple years ago. In both cases I just e-mailed the person interested and told them to pick up the item in the front of our house where we left them. So I never actually met the people who received our lovely, former possession...

I hate people who send huge e-mail attachments. It really clogs up our antiquated e-mail server. So when one of our fine graduate students asked me what she should do instead of e-mailing a large attachment, I first told her to use some standard file sharing site like SendSpace or RapidShare , but I also told her a neat service set up on campus at our business school. I remembered it was called "dropbox" something so I googled it and found it, dropbox.olin.wustl.edu . That is a nice service for those of us at Wash U, but it would be neat if such a service were available for the world... but it is! In my google results I found another site, which anyone can use and can store 2GB of space for free, similarly named DropBox . One of the first neat things I realized about it was it actually had a download executable for Linux which immediately made a positive impression on me! I grabbed it and installed it on my Ubuntu box and it worked flawlessly. It also worked fine on my XP l...

We had been seeing the ads for the restaurant at L'Ecole Culinaire and since we live so close by we thought we would try it out. We had always enjoyed dining out at cooking or hotel schools like the CHIC in Chicago and the Statler at Cornell where we went to college. Since we still love to go out and eat here in St. Louis , we ventured over to their restaurant on the first day they were open for lunch. The first thing we noticed is that they do not have much parking! They really need to let patrons know where they are supposed to park. The restaurant itself is small but very well attended. There was one fellow who kept straightening all the centerpieces and place settings on the tables, and we always saw one or two student workers milling about. The lunch menu was small and the choices did not appear overly "gourmet". The special of the day was a bison burger stuffed with cheese, and other choices picked by my group included a club sandwich, a "margherita" pi...

I just finished reading Little Pink House by Jeff Benedict which was a very interesting book since it was written more as a non-fiction novel than as some boring legal treatise. I find it frightening that it is so easy for a municipality to decide to "blight" an area for purely economic reasons. The topic seems more appropriate now that we have moved back to mid-county which is "eminent domain" central in the St. Louis area since we are located just a few miles from both the failed Hadley Township efforts in Richmond Heights and also the languishing McKnight and Manchester redevelopment plans in Rock Hill. We used to live in Brentwood, and I remember back in the mid 80's driving down Brentwood Boulevard south of Clayton Road and actually seeing these lovely brick structures known as houses. First they removed the neighborhood that is now the southern parking lot for the Galleria, then they took down a nice little street of homes behind the old Brentwood Square....

Well, we run several web sites on our departmental SunFire server, but the two most popular ones are the departmental web site for Earth & Planetary Sciences and our informational meteorite site that is linked by scientific sites all over the internet. Today I was looking at the browser stats for both sites (for the months of May and June 2009) and noticed quite a substantial difference between the two: Departmental Website Internet Explorer 49% Mozilla Firefox 40% Safari 8% Chrome 2% Others 1% Meteorites Website Internet Explorer 68% Mozilla Firefox 25% Safari 5% Chrome 1% Others 1% I know that the meteorites site actually receives more than twice as many hits as our departmental site and it gets a lot more hits from from "non edu" sites, so it most likely better represents the general browsing world as a whole. Our departmental site gets a lot more hits from within Washington University and also from other universities and from people interested in our academic progr...

Well, they have been saying today was the day, so when I came in today, I checked www.mozilla.com to see if they really were going to make their release by the "first half of 2009", and it looks like they are waiting a few more hours. Another site claimed it was going to be released around 5pm GMT which translates to noon here in St. Louis. I'll be curious to see how quickly it will download once it is released. It is only an 8MB file and is heavily mirrored so it should be able to be downloaded fairly quickly. I have been using the RC3 for the last week or so on my laptop and it already seems pretty stable. I am not sure why they are waiting until the last minute. I checked the FTP site at ftp.mozilla.org and they do not have it there waiting either. Update 10:30am St. Louis time: Okay, it is now available and it downloaded quite quickly. No big deal as expected! It seems the same as RC3 to me, which is fine! I even checked the log files on a couple web servers and i...

I've been reading a very educational book I just happened to come across while I was visiting the county library on Lindbergh. It is called "Dear Mr. Buffett" and it is written by an author named Janet Tavakoli . She was originally trained as a chemical engineer (which I, of course, consider a good thing), but she later received a business degree and worked primarily in financial analysis positions at commercial banks for the past 20 years or so. She spells out very precisely how mortgage backed securities, CDO's and credit derivatives work, and how banks have used them to make themselves rich earlier in this decade, and how they are now being rewarded for their earlier greed and reckless promotion of these over leveraged and over rated products by the generous bailout funds from the taxpayers. What a great country we live in when you can not only promote a bad product and profit from it, but if you have friends in the government you can even be rewarded for your mi...