It’s time to refresh things, but what to do…
6 minute read
December 27, 2023, 9:30 AM
Those of you who have been familiar with this site know that it has looked largely the same since the fall of 2012, when I introduced the “Modern Blue” design of the site. That design was refined about eleven months later, creating “Modern Blue 2.0”, which smoothed out some rough edges of the original design and eliminated some stylistic holdovers from the previous design. Since August 2013, there have been minor modifications to the design here and there, but no substantial reworking of the design has occurred since then. That means that the site has been on Modern Blue in some form for more than eleven years – longer than I’ve had any site design. If it tells you anything, the longest-lived site design prior to this was the “Blue Squares” theme, which lasted for four years and three months. This blows that right out of the water.
The reason I want to change is twofold. First, the design feels like the work of a much younger man. I launched that design when I was 31 years old. I am now 42. It reflects what 31-year-old me thought was state of the art design, but now it feels a bit long in the tooth. There were also design choices made back then that I don’t think that I would do today if I were to do it all over again. Right offhand, the main page has some odd gaps in it that are the result of the way things of different lengths fit together. The main page has always been a launch page for the rest of the site, but it’s also not very tight in its design, and those flaws are baked right into the site’s design. Additionally, besides a design that is dated in appearance, the site’s theming is also a bit dated as far as things go under the hood. WordPress has changed considerably in that time, going from the TinyMCE editor to a new one called Gutenberg, and WordPress has also adopted blocks in a major way. I still use TinyMCE to write for Schumin Web, and my theme does not support blocks in any way because it predates their introduction.
All that said, Schumin Web is in need of a new theme, not only to update the look of the site, but also to extend its functionality. There is so much that I’m missing out on by not having a block theme, and I can’t help but think that my existing theme is now holding me back. Plus it’s time for a visual refresh, because while the whole content-in-boxes look is nice enough, its time has passed.
Continue reading…Categories: Schumin Web meta
A weekend in Augusta County, unsupervised…
28 minute read
December 22, 2023, 5:00 PM
I did my quarterly trip down to Augusta County on December 13-15, and this time, unlike most occasions when I do this trip, I was doing it completely unsupervised. Elyse was pet-sitting for a friend of ours, and so she was in Fort Washington while I went down to Virginia. With that in mind, I took full advantage of this situation, packing in all of the stuff that I would want to do that Elyse would probably not have the patience for. In other words, lots of drone photography, mostly photographing Augusta County school buildings, with the thought’s being that very few people would get good aerials of these relatively small schools. I had a good time, and I felt very productive.
I got out of the house around 11:00, and then hit the road. This was a trip where I went down via US 29 and back via I-81, and things immediately did not look good, as I encountered major traffic on the Beltway. That was annoying, but I recovered well enough, though I did start to contemplate how much of a difference it would have made to go an alternate route for a Charlottesville trajectory, with the thought’s being to 270 to 15 to 29, going via Point of Rocks and Leesburg, or something similar to that. After all, the alternate route works well when I’m going to I-81. That alternate route bypasses the Beltway and I-66, going to I-81 via US 340 and Route 7 via Harpers Ferry and Winchester, and only adds seven minutes to the trip. I ran my proposed alternate route for 29 through Google, and it adds about thirty minutes to the drive to go across Montgomery and Frederick counties via local roads, and then 15 at Point of Rocks, and joining 29 just south of Haymarket. This also bypasses the busiest part of my route on 29, in the Gainesville area. The question really becomes a matter of whether this alternate route is worth the additional time to travel it vs. dealing with the annoyances of the Beltway and 66, as well as the additional cost involved with taking the express lanes.
In any case, once I got to the express lanes on the Beltway, I took them, and continued in the express lanes on I-66, because I didn’t want to risk any more delays. I made a pit stop at the Sheetz in Haymarket, and then from there, I took 15 to 29 and then the rest was normal for a trip down via 29. The plan was to dip into Warrenton on the way down to photograph some converted restaurant buildings. I had spotted a few of these on past drives through Warrenton, and now I was going to do them, along with whatever else I found interesting on the way down. This was also why I hit up the Sheetz in Haymarket rather than the third Sheetz (Bealeton) like I normally would. Warrenton came before the third Sheetz, and I wanted some food inside of me before I got busy.
Categories: Augusta County, Charlottesville, Family, High school, Middle school, Staunton, Staunton Mall, Stuarts Draft, Travel, Waynesboro, Woomy
Yes, we are back in the air again…
6 minute read
December 2, 2023, 11:27 PM
You may recall that when I wrote in this space about my recent trip to Chicago, I described how my DJI Air 2S drone went to a watery grave in Lake Michigan following a forced landing due to battery depletion while I was flying in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, taking my entire day’s worth of photos down with it. The good news is that I am now whole once again. I got a new DJI Air 3 drone, which, among other features, sports twice as much fly time per battery than the Air 2S, and then I also activated the flyaway coverage that I had with the Air 2S and got a new one of those, too. So all in all, I’m in good shape. I have new equipment that is faster and more powerful than my previous equipment, plus I also have some pretty solid equipment as a backup drone.
That also means that the Mini probably won’t see much action anymore. The thing about the DJI Mavic Mini is that it’s not a bad drone, but it’s not a great drone, either. It lacks collision sensors, so it’s not going to stop you from plowing headlong into an object. It’s also fairly slow-moving and gets kicked around in the wind a bit. It also uses wi-fi as a transmission protocol, and as such, it’s prone to interference. And now being the third one on the totem pole, it’s probably not going to see much use. I will use the Air 3 as my primary drone, and the Air 2S will be the drone that Elyse will use as well as my backup. So it’s like this exchange in the third episode of Roseanne:
Darlene: Mom, if Becky has a heart attack, I’m in charge, right?
Roseanne: Right!
DJ: Mom, if Darlene has a heart attack, I’m in charge.
Roseanne: Right, DJ! If both your sisters are dead, you’re in charge.
Categories: Cameras, Montgomery Village
It’s been ten years since I left that place…
10 minute read
November 26, 2023, 3:02 PM
This year marks an anniversary that just seems weird to think about: it has now been ten years since I left my job at Food & Water Watch. Ten years since I finally decided that enough was enough, and left an extremely toxic work environment.
The relationship started out innocently enough. Back in 2007, I was really involved with political activism, and I was also looking for a job that would enable me to get out of Walmart and move out on my own. A nonprofit organization that advocated for consumer issues seemed like a perfect fit. It was something that I could easily explain to my parents when it came to what the organization did, and the job that they were offering, office manager, was a perfect entry-level job for someone getting their first “real” job after college. I remember finding them in a search on Idealist.org while sitting at an Internet terminal at the Staunton Public Library, a few hours after Walmart fired me. I bookmarked their listing, and then, two days later, I fired off an application for them while sitting with my laptop at a coffee shop in downtown Staunton, along with a bunch of applications to other places. I got a call for an interview a few days later, and then I scored a second interview at the end of the first interview. The second interview went well, and then the following week, I got a call offering me the job. I produced this Journal entry immediately after getting it.
The job, meanwhile, was one of constant evolution. When I started, the organization was only about twenty people, with most working out of the Washington, DC headquarters. My role was something of a generalist in a small nonprofit. Then as the organization grew, my generalist role evolved with the organization. Over the years, I want to say that they created about five or six different specialized roles out of my job functions. And eventually, they evolved my role right out of existence, and made it very personal, even though there was no reason for it to be that personal. You know that it has to be bad when someone quits a job like that without something new lined up, and that’s exactly what that job was, as the toxicity was starting to consume me. But despite having to cash in my 403(b) account in order to have money to live on while I figured out my next move (and let it be known that those bastards never paid out my unused vacation time), I ultimately landed on my feet, getting a job in public transportation that I still enjoy nine years later.
If you want me to take you seriously, do your research, and don’t play the victim card…
12 minute read
November 17, 2023, 2:10 PM
Recently, while I was checking for copyright violations, I turned up a tweet by Twitter user @alx. The tweet, from this past September, showed my photo from 2004 of a Simplex fire alarm at Taylor Hall with the caption, “Any idea what this does?” I assumed, based on the date, that it was supposed to be commentary on the recent incident where Democratic representative Jamaal Bowman pulled a fire alarm in the Cannon House Office Building. Yes, Bowman is an idiot for doing that, but that’s beside the point. Looking the tweet over, I did not see the attribution that is required per the terms of the Creative Commons license under which that particular image is offered, so, per my usual practice, I submitted a DMCA takedown request to have that unauthorized usage removed. Then the folks who process these things at Twitter removed the image about twelve hours later. That speed is typical for Twitter, since they’re usually really good about processing DMCA notices, even following Elon Musk‘s acquisition of the platform. In other words, for as much of a cesspool as the Twitter has become these days, if there’s one thing that they still do right, it’s copyright enforcement. So as far as I was concerned, our transaction was complete. The image was removed, and we all went on with things.
Then the next day, I got an email from the folks at Twitter, telling me that Alexander Joseph Lorusso of Worcester, Massachusetts had submitted a DMCA counter-notice against the tweet that I had reported earlier, and that, as per the usual process, they would restore the content in ten business days unless they receive notice that I’ve filed an action seeking a court order on it. Here is what Lorusso said in his counter-notice when prompted for a reason:
This picture is a picture of a fire alarm and is on WikiCommons stating it is free “to share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work”
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Simplex_pull_station.jpg#mw-jump-to-license
This person is weaponizing DMCA against me
Categories: Copyright infringement, Social media
A trip to the Midwest…
11 minute read
November 11, 2023, 10:17 AM
From November 2-9, Elyse, our friend Kyle, and I took a road trip out to the Midwest. We went to Austintown, Windsor, Detroit, Dearborn, Chicago, Sheboygan, Gary, Elkhart, Cleveland, and lots of places in between over the span of eight days. The genesis of this trip was a desire to visit Chicago to see my sister and do stuff there, and then it expanded a bit into a much larger adventure. This was always intended to be a road trip, and we put quite a few miles on the HR-V over the course of the trip. It also means that the new HR-V has traveled further in its first year than any of my other vehicles ever did over their entire careers. The new HR-V has gone as far north as Ottawa, as far south as Charleston, as far east as Brooklyn, and as far west as Chicago. The only vehicle of mine that has gone further in any of those directions is the Sable, which traveled as far east as Quincy, Massachusetts in 2010. The highlights were a visit to The Henry Ford, where we not only saw the exhibits, but I also viewed a photo of mine that the museum licensed from me a long time ago, doing my own version of a walk through a Chicago neighborhood that SpinnWebe did as a spoof of a photo set of mine, a visit to the Kohler factory up in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, a siren test in Niles, some drone flights around Gary, Indiana, a visit to Garfield Heights, Ohio to see the former City View Center shopping facility that was later successfully repositioned as an industrial park, a visit to the Kent State University May 4 Visitor Center, a small museum about the Kent State shootings, to see a photo of mine that was used there, and finally, a ride on Cleveland’s RTA system. Unfortunately, my DJI Air 2S drone did not survive the week, as a stronger-than-anticipated wind caused it to run out of battery power on the way back from a flight in Sheboygan, which caused it to force-land into Lake Michigan, taking all of my drone shots from that day with it. However, I had my original drone, the DJI Mavic Mini, on hand in case Elyse had wanted to fly, so it was quickly pressed into service to complete the trip.
I’m going to do a full photo set about this trip for Life and Times, so right now, I’m just going to share a few photos of the highlights.
Categories: Canada, Chicago, Photography, Travel, Wisconsin
Playing with the AI image generator…
22 minute read
October 27, 2023, 10:02 AM
Recently, a friend of mine posted some computer generated images from the Bing Image Creator, which uses the DALL-E system as its base. I enjoyed their posts, so I decided to take it for a spin myself with subjects that were more relevant to me. My first idea was to have it generate me. The way I saw it, ChatGPT kinda sorta knew who I was, so it seemed reasonable to see if Bing Image Creator could perform similarly.
The first prompt that I gave it was “Ben Schumin in Washington, DC” and this is what it produced:
Categories: Afton Mountain, Artificial intelligence, Baltimore, Fire alarms, Honda HR-V (2018), JMU, Kia Soul, Mercury Sable, Stuarts Draft, Today's Special, Toyota Previa, Washington DC, WMATA
The group process interview…
8 minute read
October 16, 2023, 9:30 AM
Recently, while I was alone with my thoughts while operating the train, I recalled the weirdest job interview that I ever had. That was the “group process” day that the Office of Residence Life at JMU did as part of their selection process for new resident advisors, at least back when I went through in the early 2000s. You spent most of the day in Taylor Hall with the Residence Life people, doing various activities with your fellow candidates so that the hall directors could see how well you worked as a team. The sense that I got was that it was well-intentioned, but it was a bit misguided, because the dynamic was quite different from what one would experience in real life, and thus the utility was quite limited.
The way that it worked was that they put everyone in groups of about five people, and those were the people that you would be working with throughout the day. Then they rotated you through a number of different rooms, where they had different scenarios for you to work through as a group. I don’t remember all of them, but one of the situations that they put us in was where we had to get everyone from point A to point B across what was supposed to be a dangerous moat or something. One person was not allowed to see, I believe, and another person was not allowed to speak. I was the no-speak person in that exercise, which was a challenge for me, but we all made it across successfully.
At the end of the day, you were asked to do an evaluation of how the group process interview went, as well as an evaluation of your own performance in their interview. Then the group process interview was followed by two conventional one-on-one interviews at a later date. One interview was with one of the next year’s hall directors, i.e. the people who would ultimately be selecting the RAs, and the other was with a member of the full-time staff, such as an area coordinator (i.e. the hall directors’ bosses). Those were pretty straightforward, being your typical job interview, where the interviewer asks you to share times when different things happened in your life and/or career, and find out how you handled them.
I can’t believe that we went to South Carolina…
18 minute read
October 13, 2023, 5:51 PM
First of all, I have some news for you: I bought a bus. Elyse had been trying to talk me into buying a bus for a while, and I had consistently said no. But then one came up on GovDeals, which is a website where public agencies sell surplus property, that had promise, and I said okay. This unit was a New Flyer D35HF from CARTA, which is the transit agency serving Charleston, South Carolina. If this sounds familiar, “Biscuit” at Commonwealth Coach is another unit from the same agency, and is the same model of bus. I won the auction for a surprisingly low amount, as we paid nearly twice as much to get “Biscuit” for Commonwealth Coach. We then immediately made a deal with Trevor Logan, a fellow transit enthusiast in the DC area who runs the TTMG website, to trade this bus for an Orion V that he owns after he expressed his thoughts about the significance of the unit. It worked out quite well, because while Elyse and I simply wanted a bus to have as a fun vehicle of sorts to take places and show off, Trevor wanted to fully restore and preserve the bus for sentimental reasons, as he had a close relative who worked for CARTA some years ago, and that relative had operated this specific unit. So swapping made everyone happy, as Elyse and I would get a bus to have fun with, and Trevor got something of great personal significance that he would restore.
With that said, buying a bus from a transit agency in South Carolina meant going down to South Carolina to retrieve it, because these auctions are typically as-is-where-is, i.e. the agency provides little to no assistance with the removal of the item. I wanted to line up this pickup trip with a three-day weekend that I had later in the month, but unfortunately, with deadlines for removal and such, it couldn’t wait. So I would spend October 5-6 traveling down to Charleston and back with Elyse and our friend Montigue to retrieve this vintage bus. The whole week prior to our heading down, I was saying to myself, “I can’t believe that I’m going to South Carolina.” Then on the way down, I was like, “I can’t believe that we’re on our way to South Carolina.” And then once we were there, I was saying, “I can’t believe that we’re in South Carolina.” Seriously. This was not something that I had anticipated doing this year.
Categories: New Flyer D35HF, South Carolina, Transit, Travel
Apparently, I just have bad luck when it comes to cars…
11 minute read
September 29, 2023, 11:20 PM
Apparently, I just have rotten luck when it comes to cars, as the new HR-V has already made its first visit to the body shop. Back in July, Elyse and I got rear-ended on the GW Parkway on the way home from work. We were in a work zone, and I had to stop short after someone stopped short in front of me. I was successful in not hitting the guy in front of me, because I was maintaining a good following distance, but then the guy behind me wasn’t so fortunate, and plowed into the back of the HR-V. That was a big jolt. The car, meanwhile, was on top of things, as it popped up a message on the screen saying something like, “Hey, I think we got hit. Want me to call 911 for you?” Turned out, though, that 911, after playing hot potato with me (the accident happened in Virginia, but my phone connected me to Montgomery County, who transferred me to Fairfax County, who then transferred me to US Park Police), wouldn’t send anyone out since there were no injuries and both cars were still drivable. So we just exchanged information and kept it moving. Here’s what the damage to my car looked like:
Categories: Honda HR-V (2023)
A blank slate for the future…
9 minute read
September 20, 2023, 8:46 AM
From September 13-15, Elyse and I made our usual trip down to Staunton, where we photographed a bunch of stuff, did a bunch of other stuff, and also saw my parents. On the middle day of our trip, I did what I consider to be a final update on the demolition of Staunton Mall. The demolition work had been completed some time between our December trip, when I flew the drone around the mostly-demolished facility, and our March trip, but due to scheduling issues, I wasn’t able get out there to actually photograph it again until September. With demolition completed, I intended to physically go in and photograph things with my DSLR and my phone, rather than go in by remote via the drone. The idea was that with the demolition work completed, whatever was left should be pretty stable, so I didn’t need to worry about falling debris or anything else, because it was being left for an indefinite amount of time, until whatever new development that is to replace the mall begins construction. Don’t get me wrong: the drone is a great piece of equipment, but it isn’t able to capture the same amount of detail that one can get by actually going in with a conventional camera and getting right up close to things. That’s not a fault of my drone by any means. You really don’t want to take the drone close enough to anything to get that level of detail in the first place, because that comes with an unacceptable level of risk of an accident. If the drone makes contact with anything, the motors will stop, and it will go down. The drone, by its nature, is also much faster moving photography than one might do when shooting conventionally, and as such, you’re not usually able to stop and appreciate what you’re looking at when you’re flying a drone, i.e. it’s easy to miss a lot of details in the moment. With fairly limited fly time (a drone battery only lasts about 20-25 minutes), it behooves you to get in, get your shots, and get out. By walking in, I was able to slow down and take more time to focus on my surroundings, and I noticed a lot more detail than I would otherwise.
Categories: Augusta County, Staunton, Staunton Mall, Urban exploration
Two stories about Woomy…
3 minute read
September 8, 2023, 11:33 PM
Recently, while we were driving home from shopping, Elyse asked ChatGPT to tell her a story about everyone’s favorite orange curmudgeon: Woomy. I don’t know what the exact parameters that she gave it were, but it came up with decent enough material to come up with something at least somewhat heartwarming. Check these out:
In the heart of Alexandria, Virginia, there lived a curmudgeonly orange octopus named Woomy. Every day, rain or shine, Woomy would climb aboard the DASH bus, his tentacles a tangle of frustration. He’d grumble and grouse about the noise, the crowds, and the whole human world around him.
Passengers would stare, amused by this unexpected commuter. Woomy’s sour expression became a familiar sight, and people began sharing stories of his antics. But despite the attention, Woomy remained steadfast in his curmudgeonly ways.
One winter’s day, as snow painted the city white, a young child with curious eyes got on the bus. Ignoring the stares, the child approached Woomy, offering a small, hand-knit scarf. Woomy’s eyes widened, his expression softening just a bit. He accepted the scarf with a tentative tentacle.
Categories: Alexandria, Artificial intelligence, DASH, Woomy
No, my mother is not selling concert tickets…
8 minute read
August 22, 2023, 9:30 AM
I don’t understand what makes people send money to random people on the Internet, but I’ve seen it happen, and have recently been put in the unenviable position of being the unwilling spokesperson regarding one of those people, advising people not to give their money to someone who is acting under false pretenses. I’ve seen it happen with people who are desperate for love, getting scammed under the mistaken idea that it will help them get laid. Apparently, people looking for concert tickets are also quite vulnerable to being scammed, as I’ve come to find out firsthand when my mother’s Facebook became compromised, and a new person started using the account to scam people who were seeking to buy concert tickets. What happened was that Mom clicked on something that she had absolutely no business clicking on, and that allowed an attacker to seize control of her account. They quickly changed the login credentials in order to lock Mom out of it, and then started putting the account to use for more nefarious purposes. I found out about it by people who saw my name on Mom’s Facebook account, then, seeing that I had a verified account, came to me to find out if I knew who the seller was, and wanted to know when their concert tickets would arrive. I did some research, and turned up several examples of what was going on:
Categories: Family, Social media
Twenty years of Journal entries…
21 minute read
August 14, 2023, 1:48 PM
I’m a little bit late with this (because I remembered the wrong date – sue me), but I feel like I still need to mark the occasion: July 23 marked twenty years of the Journal on Schumin Web. Yeah, I’ve been doing this specific incarnation of blogging for over two decades now. Though truth be told, blogging has been a part of Schumin Web since day one. It originally started out as a weekly feature, aptly called “News of the Week”, and it had this very nineties-looking logo to go with it:
I’m pretty sure that took me about five minutes to make, and I probably made it in MS Paint or something. I also don’t remember what font that is, and I’m fine with that, because some things should probably remain in the past. Unfortunately, most of the News of the Week content has been lost to time, as it was retired before I began actively archiving content, and the Internet Archive can only do so much.
Categories: Schumin Web meta
Toronto was fun, and flying… wasn’t bad.
34 minute read
August 11, 2023, 8:09 PM
So the trip to Toronto that I discussed in my earlier Journal entry about going flying again was a whole lot of fun. I did not know that one could pack that much fun into three short days. Seriously, this was a really fun weekend trip, where we got to spend time with friends and see lots of interesting things.
First, though, let’s address the elephant in the room: yes, I went through with it and went flying, and no, I didn’t die. I don’t know if I would necessarily characterize flying as “enjoyable”, but it was at least relatively painless. This trip was in part a test to see how well I would tolerate flying, with one of two possible results: either my horizons would be expanded greatly, or I would never fly again. Fortunately, it was the former, as I think that my being much more mature since the last time I flew, plus my doing a little bit of research did me well. I also had Elyse with me, who is something of a seasoned flyer and knew what we needed to do, so I just had to do as I was told. We took public transit from the house to Dulles, via the 58 bus, the Red Line, and the Silver Line. Then security at Dulles was relatively straightforward, throwing all of our stuff on a conveyor belt and running it through this massive machine. Though I did roll my eyes at having to take my shoes off – but I wore flip-flops on purpose in order to expedite that process. Once we got through security, it was just a matter of waiting until our plane arrived and then it was time to board and depart. This whole airport thing was totally new to me, so I was just sort of taking it in. I’d never been past the main atrium at Dulles before, so there was lots to see. We took the air train to our terminal, which was pretty straightforward, but seeing as it was fully enclosed, it was no fun for fanning, since there was no real angle to get a photo of the vehicles. Though with its being fully automated, there was no cab, which meant that you got a great view of the roadway ahead.