Hugh's Home Page
Okay, I updated my photo!

My Name: Hugh U. Chou (don't ask what the "U" is for)
My Primary E-Mail: huchou@gmail.com
My Phone: Samsung S23 FE using Mint Mobile
My Location: St. Louis County, Missouri, USA
My Position: Research Systems Engineer
at the premier research university in St. Louis.
to help me keep my site around forever

My Ever Popular Financial Calculator Site

St. Louis stuff

My favorite St. Louis Buffet Restaurants
and St. Louis Mid County Restaurant Reviews at restaurants.hughchou.org
My favorite St. Louis Charities
St. Louis, Missouri School Districts
St. Louis, Missouri PC Shops and Internet Providers

Other Fun Sites I Have Worked On

Fun Math Factor Picking Game (Geek Game)
Dimension Computer (Hi, Jim!)
Accuquote (Hi, Byron!)
Equity 4 U (Hi, Abby and Mike!)
The Frugal Duchess (Hi, Sharon, enjoy those muffins!)
HSH Mortgage Research (Hi, Keith!)

  • My former company was primarily Windows based, which is quite sad indeed. Luckily many here at the university use not only Windows, but also Macs and even desktop Linux. I definitely prefer the Linux and Mac sides of things myself. For system programming I love Perl. There is no substitute. For web programming I use JavaScript and PHP too, and prefer the Apache or nginx web server. I have written Active Server Pages years ago too, but I try not to admit it.

  • Home computer History:
    1. 1987: 10 MHZ 8088 Clone, 640KB, DOS 3.30, 30 MB Hard Drive, 1200 baud modem (upgraded to a 14.4K that fried, and then a 2400 that didn't)
    2. 1991: 12 MHZ 80286 Zenith Laptop, Win 3.0, 2MB RAM, 40 MB drive, 2400 baud modem
    3. 1996: 60 MHZ PowerPC 601 driven Macintosh Performa 6116CD, 40 MB RAM, 700 MB HD, 33.6k modem, 14" Color monitor, Iomega Zip drive and MacOS 8.5. I was so excited to go up to 33.6 kbps!
    4. 1998: 233 MHZ PowerMac G3, 64MB RAM, 2GB HD, Yamaha 4x4x8 SCSI CD-RW (boy is it noisy!), MacOS 8.6 (upgraded!)
    5. 1999: Dell Inspiron 7500, 450 MHZ Pentium III, WinXP SP2, 256 MB RAM, 25 GB hard drive, 56K modem, DVD-ROM (my old company paid for it, sold them cheap after their collapse)
    6. 2001: 1 GHZ Duron on ASUS A7VL-VM, 256MB PC133 SDRAM, WinXP Pro, 40GB & 12GB hard drives, GeForce4 MX440 graphics card, 56K modem, from Simplified Computers in Urbana-Champaign, IL. Great company! (Thanks, Dan!) I got my 20x10x40 CD-RW from Jim Humphrey at Dimension Computer, a great low-cost place to buy a PC system or components in St. Louis.
    7. 2006: Our business school was unloading a Dell Optiplex GX1p for $10, so I bought it. I added some more memory, and gave it to one of the people in the department who needed it for their laboratory.
    8. 2008: Another Olin purchase, this time for $20 was a small Optiplex GX150 (1 GHz P-III, 384MB RAM, XP SP2) which had replaced the old Duron which was making some weird noises after 7 faithful years!
    9. 2013: I won an Acer C710 Chromebook from a raffle! I love this little thing. Google stopped allowing it to update itself in 2019 so now I run CloudReady on it. It won't run Chrome OS Flex so I am stuck on the final version of CloudReady.
    10. 2014: The university did purchase a Latitude E7440 for me which is still quite usable (1.9GHz 2C i5-4300U, 16GB DDR3L-1600, 256GB SATA SSD), especially since it is running Linux full-time.
    11. 2021: We replaced my wife, Penny's, old Lenovo G580 with a new Lenovo IdeaPad 5i for her so I inherited the G580. I replaced the aging hard drive with a spare SATA SSD I had, installed Lubuntu 22.04 on it, now it is my portable Zoom laptop since my E7440 is setup at my desk as my "work from home" desktop. I can still Zoom from the 7440 but since the G580 is portable I can set that one up to use anywhere in the house, whereas the 7440 always has the two external monitors, USB hub, keyboard, mouse and external webcam connected.
    12. 2022: My aging Acer Chromebook kept crashing so I inherited an old ASUS Zenbook UX330UA Ultrabook my son used in college, and now it has been re-invigorated using ChromeOS Flex to be a usable system for me.

  • List of the smaller computers in my departmental office at the university and the higher end systems I manage in our High Performance Computing (HPC) facility

  • The annoying Windows 10 on my Dell Latitude E7440 crapped out so I am running Ubuntu 22.04 with Cinnamon on it now full time as my work from home system, and I use my ASUS Ultrabook as my "fun" laptop.
  • Here is my list of my favorite freeware for Windows computers.
  • Where I buy stuff online
  • My completely worthless blog

  • I really don't live in St. Louis City, but actually in St. Louis County in Richmond Heights in the Ladue School District.

  • I am not very interesting really, but my brothers sure are!

  • Our old cat, Mr. Punkers, passed away in March 2022, but his memories continue on Tik Tok, now with videos of our new cats, Ollie and Hobbit.

  • Free Church Plays - Site containing church service play scripts written by my wife, Penny, primarily for children's Christmas programs and pageants. Some had been performed at our previous church, Mount Zion United Methodist near Creve Coeur. It also now contains plays by Anna Muhm who previously worked at our current church, Samuel United Church of Christ in Clayton. You can watch various performances from recent church services on our FaceBook page.

  • New Book Study Guides - Sunday School Book Study Guides written by my wife, Penny. First one: "A Gift of Hope" by Danielle Steel

  • Room Parties Web Site- Site for craft and game ideas for elementary school room parties compiled by my wife, Penny. She also has a Gluten Free Recipe Cravings site and a smaller serving recipe site.

  • Schools I have attended:



  • "Kindness is more important than wisdom,
    and the recognition of this is the beginning of wisdom."
    Theodore Isaac Rubin, M.D.