Hugh's Worthless Blog

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...

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 supp...

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!

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 ...

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...

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...

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 shipp...