Hugh's Worthless Blog

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 pl...

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 migh...

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...

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 C...

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. Lou...

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 p...

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 t...