Hugh's Worthless Blog

I just received an e-mail from a fellow school parent who wanted to show my results numbers to some other folks, and that made me want to see if the St. Louis Board of Elections had updated their result numbers from two weeks ago. They did, but the numbers are not fully complete yet. I wanted to see the township breakdown for the Ladue School District Proposition 1 voting results and they have most of the votes tabulated by township , but not all of them. The results so far are pretty interesting, though. Since the election ended it looks like they have collected a few hundred more votes since the polls closed, so now the overall total is 4754 Yes, 4255 No, still a 500 vote decision. But if you break it down by township numbers you again see how the votes vary from location to location:   TOWNSHIP Yes No % Yes Diff Clayton 1375 1840 42.77% -465 Creve Coeur 2013 1472 57.76% 541 Missouri River 346 4...

After a surprisingly heated and divisive election, I was relieved to see the Ladue School District Propostion 1 pass 53% to 47% (4,580 to 4,074).  The mailer above was something sent to me and all other student families via e-mail from our parents group (not directly versus postal mail) about actual mailers sent out by the opposing group, Take Back Ladue Schools . I received plenty of the bright yellow mailers which always spelled out exactly how much my taxes were going up, but I never received that one since I do not live in the city of Ladue even if I am just a few blocks from the city border (they probably just sent those to residents within the 63124 zip code.) I wondered if these rather divisive mailers helped their cause or hurt them. Following the article in the Ladue-Frontenac Patch , I personally do not think the mailers were "hateful and mean spirited and has racial, ethnic and religious overtones" as the article said, but I do think the tone may have hurt the...

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...