Hugh's Worthless Blog

Back on January 6 of this year I ordered a 24 port Netgear Gigabit switch for our building which only cost $199 from NewEgg and also came with a $30 rebate which would be shipped as a $30 VISA debit card. Almost three months later the rebate card actually showed up last Monday so I thought I would try to spend it wisely for the department. Since my son was on Spring Break from his high school last week, he accompanied me to work last Wednesday and I appointed him the task of trying to maximizing the $30 debit card for "stuff" for the department without going over $30 (so we would not have to charge the rest to my university Pro-Card which would be a pain.) However, he looked at wireless mice (which I consider a waste for most cases here in the department) and other unneeded items since he considers supplies like wired mice, ethernet cables and blank CD's boring. In any case I wanted to see what I could find for a total of $30 to purchase for our department . I went t...

A new house nearby popped on the market in the last couple weeks and this one was of particular interest to me, since it stands on the lot where our old former house stood! The address now is 9125 Pine Avenue in Brentwood , but when we lived there it was 9121 Pine, a 1950's 1800 square foot 3 bedroom brick ranch, much like the one we live in now just a mile or so away in Richmond Heights. After we sold that house in the mid 1990's, it was purchased by a couple who then sold it several years later to Kingbridge Homes who was building a bunch of "teardowns" or "fill-ins" in western Brentwood in the early to mid 2000's. Our old house sat on a double lot in Parkridge, so when it sold they demolished the house , split the lot in half and built two large blocky homes in its place.  So when we drove by the other day and I saw a "For Sale" sign pop up in front of it, I had to see what they were asking for it. I was rather surprised to see it lis...

On this past Saturday, I received two note cards in the mail about the Proposition 1 tax increase for the Ladue School District . The first was from the district itself and spelled out the same old facts I had already heard. The second piece was much more interesting, a flyer from Takebackladueschools.com that spelled out exactly how much my tax would increase for next year and then tried to convince me to vote NO for the proposition. I flipped over the card to read the arguments, and was surprised to see some which seemed to contradict the well known facts given the on the district proposition site . The first claim was pretty surprising -- declining enrollment. I knew as a fact the middle school had the largest enrollment in years while my son was just there, so I thought I would check the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education site which should know the facts. They had a nice synopsis of every school district in the state, including one for Ladue. I have in...

With Whitney Houston's untimely death this past week, it made me think back to the mid 80's when I first heard her amazing voice. At that time my sound system consisted of a component stereo system with a turntable, a cassette deck and a FM tuner connected to a Sony amplifier and with my old Synergistic speakers from high school. But by late 1985 I had heard a new technology was coming out, digitized music on optical disks where there was no pops, crackles or tape hiss to hear and incredible dynamic range (not like the compressed stuff on the radio.) So in 1986 my wife and I purchased our very first CD player, a standalone Teac deck we purchased at a now defunct appliance store near Crestwood Plaza back when people actually visited that mall. As a full-time grad student at the time, the CD deck was quite an extravagance, but as a audio geek, I just had to have one to try out the digital technology. On the night we purchased the CD player, however, I knew I should purchase ...

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!