I’m going flying again…
6 minute read
July 21, 2023, 8:07 PM
Remember when I wrote that Journal entry about how I had not flown on an airplane in more than two decades? That non-flying streak ends next week. Elyse and I are taking a Wednesday-to-Friday “weekend” trip to Toronto in order to see an exhibit at the Myseum of Toronto about television in Toronto. As you probably guessed, there are elements from Today’s Special involved in this exhibit. The exhibit runs through the middle of next month, and so I figure, we’ve got to go see it. I found out about the Myseum exhibit from Nina Keogh (who played Muffy), and it opened just after we had finished our trip to Ottawa. I really wanted to go to the exhibit, but I felt like I couldn’t do another trip to Canada so soon after the last one, both for cost reasons, but also for time reasons. But eventually, I determined that I couldn’t resist, but that the only way that the trip would make sense would be if we flew. I played with it in my head, and then pitched it to Elyse, and she was supportive of the trip, but was surprised that I suggested flying. But an exhibit about Today’s Special will mean a lot to me, so I considered it worth it. I loved the children’s television exhibit when we went to Ottawa, and so I’m excited to see this second take on a similar subject. If it tells you anything, I heard Muffy’s voice in my head, telling me, “I know you want to visit me, but to do it, you’ll have to fly, you see.” Damn it, Muffy, you talked me into it.
Once we get to Toronto, we’re staying at the Chelsea again, which is within walking distance of the Myseum and also “The Store“. My plan for the day is to visit the Myseum and the store, and see what else I can get myself into in that general area. It all works out because the Chelsea is about four blocks from the store, and then the store is about four blocks from the Myseum.
I suppose that this trip is the logical conclusion of a process that had led me to do a lot of thinking. For about seven months, from early November to early June, I was working various services that took me past Washington National Airport several times a day. I would roll up and see all of these people boarding with their little suitcases and going wherever. I also saw the planes take off and land as I went by. This happened day in and day out. And it got me thinking. It made my flightless life feel quite confining, as I saw people traveling the world, and I was under a self-imposed limitation based on how far it would be practical to travel via road or rail. I did a whole lot of regional travel, but I started to feel a little constrained, as there were things that I wanted to do but were either unreachable by car or impractical to do with the time that I had available.
Categories: Airplanes, Today's Special, Travel
Twenty years out of college…
17 minute read
July 12, 2023, 12:20 PM
This year marks twenty years since I graduated from college, and in seeing all of the people posting stuff about college graduations and such on Facebook these last few months, it’s made me realize that I have a lot to say about my college experience. It’s one of those things where I wish that I had known then what I do now, and it makes me wonder how things might have gone if I had reached the same present as today, but knowing what I know now.
It’s worth noting that with the passage of time, I have come to view my college years in an increasingly negative light. In the moment, as documented in my College Life website, which now serves as an archive of what was once a section of the main website, I was having a pretty good time and enjoying life – or at least that’s the public face that I tried to put on about it. The truth is that I never felt a sense of belonging there, my performance caused me to develop a major inferiority complex while there, and I coped with the stress of the environment in unhealthy ways. I believe that the root cause of all of my difficulties was a then-undiagnosed case of autism. However, high-functioning cases of autism like I have still weren’t really looked for and diagnosed like they are today. I was not formally diagnosed diagnosed with autism until 2022 at the age of 41, when I finally decided to put the question to rest.
First, though, when it came to my deciding whether or not to go to college, that was never really a decision. My parents had determined, practically from conception, that I would go to college, and that was that. When it’s been drilled into your head that you were going to college like it was a commandment from on high or something for your entire life, that’s just what you did, largely from not knowing any better, and that you would then get a “college job” after getting that degree. So growing up, any thoughts that I might have interest in fields that didn’t require a college education were more or less quashed, and any exploration of those fields was discouraged because that conflicted with my parents’ plan to send me to college. It was also strongly implied that any path that did not lead to a college degree was a failure, because it didn’t live up to my parents’ expectations for me. It caused me to think that the people who went down the vocational track in school were failures, because they couldn’t get into college. I understand that my parents wanted what they thought was best for me, and they considered a college education to be that thing, but the mindset that they inadvertently instilled was quite toxic, and it took many years to unlearn. I suppose that was something of a failure on their part, because with my now being the same age as they were when they were raising me, they almost definitely knew better about jobs that didn’t require a college degree, but that’s not what they instilled in me, intentionally or not.
Smoke blankets the city…
3 minute read
July 4, 2023, 10:02 PM
Funny how things work out. The smoke from Canadian wildfires that blanketed the eastern US in a thick layer of haze in early June was not a good thing to have happen for any number of reasons, but putting on my photographer hat for a moment, I was kind of kicking myself for not getting out in it and photographing the haze like I meant it. All I got were a few phone shots taken from the car, going southbound on I-95 while heading home after taking Elyse to Ramblewood, a campground up in Darlington, on June 8 for an event:
The view at the northern interchange between I-95 and the Baltimore Beltway.
A fun weekend where no photography goals were met…
13 minute read
June 29, 2023, 8:44 AM
From June 21-23, Elyse and I made a weekend trip to Virginia, but instead of centering on Staunton like we usually do, we centered on Roanoke (but don’t worry – we still saw my parents in Stuarts Draft). We had planned this trip largely as a photography outing, and then the weather didn’t cooperate. It was raining continuously almost the entire time, which made for a more difficult drive than I would have liked, but the trip was worth it. I guess that you could say that while we didn’t necessarily do much in the way as far as photography, we laid the groundwork for future trips by identifying potential subjects. I didn’t want to lay groundwork for the future this time around, as I really wanted to bring home the goods, but such is what happens when the weather doesn’t cooperate. I brought my DSLR and my drone on this trip, but neither one of them ever left their respective carrier.
The plan was to drive down from the DC area to Lynchburg via US 29, spend the afternoon and early evening of the first day in Lynchburg, and then head over to Roanoke, where we were staying at the Hampton Inn located downtown (the one built on top of a city parking garage). Then we would spend the entire second day in Roanoke, largely with Commonwealth Coach & Trolley, which is a bus museum that Elyse and I both serve on the board of. Then on the last day, we would head up to Staunton and Waynesboro, where I had some things that I wanted to get over there, before going over to see my parents. What ended up happening was pretty similar to plan, but not quite. Our departure was delayed, because we already knew that much of the day would be a rainout. The drive down to Charlottesville was fine, making one stop for food at the third (Bealeton) Sheetz. We made a brief stop at Barracks Road in Charlottesville, and then we were back on the road. It started raining harder once we cleared Charlottesville, and we saw three different accidents between Charlottesville and Amherst where people had clearly wiped out after driving faster than conditions allowed. One of those accidents was a police car, which was clearly totaled in its accident. We took it slowly, especially since I didn’t have that much experience taking the new HR-V in driving rain like this before, plus I wasn’t as familiar with the stretch of 29 from Charlottesville to Lynchburg (particularly from I-64 to VA 151) as I am with 29 north of Charlottesville.
Categories: Friends, Honda HR-V (2023), Lynchburg, Roanoke, Staunton, Stuarts Draft, Transit, Travel
I feel compelled to weigh in…
13 minute read
June 15, 2023, 10:10 PM
Recently, Reddit has been embroiled in a controversy over the site management’s plan to charge for access to their application programming interface, or API, which would affect the operation of various third-party apps, which previously had free access to the API.
First of all, this is how I browse Reddit. I have a Reddit Premium subscription, which means that I get an ad-free experience using a web browser or the official Reddit app, along with a few other perks. When I’m on my phone, I will typically use BaconReader, a third-party app, to access Reddit. I started using BaconReader before Reddit had an official Android app, and I’ve gotten used to it and have seen no reason to change. More specifically, I use the paid version of BaconReader, which provides me an ad-free experience on the app. The free version of the app runs its own ads in an effort by the developers to make some money that Reddit sees no part of, regardless of Reddit Premium subscription status. So before we get into things too deeply, that’s my situation, i.e. I have a premium subscription to the site, and I use an ad-free third-party app on my phone.
As far as the issue at hand goes, I feel that charging a fee for API access is reasonable enough. To me, it only seems fair. Third-party apps depend on Reddit for their content, and so if Reddit were to die, the third-party apps die right along with it. You profit from Reddit’s content, selling subscriptions, app licenses, and running ads against it, so you need to pay your content provider. Especially when one considers that Reddit is, in fact, a for-profit company and not a charity. Just because one has never turned a profit doesn’t make one a not-for-profit entity. It just means that you’re a for-profit company that has never managed to make a profit. Consuming server resources through your app but not compensating the operator of said server just makes you a parasite, since you’re not paying for the resources that you consume. It’s nice that Reddit has offered it that way for a while, but it sounds like the free ride is about to end. It’s a perfectly valid business decision. I will say that when it comes to how much to charge for API access, I do not know what the proper amount is. I am not an app developer, nor do I know how much it costs to operate Reddit. All I know is that paying some amount for API access seems fair. And you don’t get to complain when someone who was offering a service for free stops offering it for free, because you weren’t paying for it, and, as my mother likes to put it, “You’ve got to pay to say.”
Categories: Reddit
A weekend trip to Pittsburgh…
15 minute read
June 11, 2023, 2:25 PM
From May 31 to June 2, Elyse and I made a little weekend trip to Pittsburgh, where we explored around a bit, saw some friends, and got lots of photographs. Pittsburgh was something that we had wanted to do for a while, after our very fun and productive trip in 2016, but I didn’t want to do Pittsburgh as a one-day trip ever again. It’s far too much to pull off in one day, even though our 2016 trip was wildly successful as far as accomplishing our objectives.
Our route there was pretty typical for Pittsburgh, going from home to Frederick to Breezewood to the Pennsylvania Turnpike. We also spotted the point where the turnpike was rerouted in the 1960s to bypass the Laurel Hill Tunnel. Then we detoured onto I-70 at New Stanton in order to visit Washington, Pennsylvania. That side trip was for Elyse, as she wanted to visit a hobby shop at the local shopping mall, and she also wanted to visit the George Washington Hotel, where they apparently had a very vintage toilet. From there, we headed into Pittsburgh. I photographed in Breezewood and in Washington,
Then the middle day was largely transit-oriented, as we took the buses all over the city to accomplish our objectives. I wanted to do the inclines during the day, as I had only ever ridden them at night on my previous two visits. I also wanted to get daytime photos from the overlooks. We also went back to the Cathedral of Learning at the University of Pittsburgh, meeting up with our friend Patrick Nedz there, and meeting up with our friend Jared Chambers later on. We saw a few elevators, and rode a lot of buses, and had a good time together overall. Surprisingly, we never touched the light rail system, aka “The T“, on this trip, other than to purchase our SmarTrip cards for Pittsburgh (which are called ConnectCards) at Wood Street station, and then coming right back out.
Categories: Breezewood, Pittsburgh, Travel
I went to Ottawa…
6 minute read
May 24, 2023, 2:39 PM
From May 17-20, Elyse and I made a weekend trip to Ottawa. The primary objective was to go and see the Canadian Museum of History in nearby Gatineau, where a Sam and Muffy puppet from Today’s Special were on display as part of a larger exhibit about children’s television in Canada. The exhibit was amazing, with puppets and costumes from all kinds of Canadian-made children’s programming on display. We also explored around Ottawa and Gatineau. The latter was a particularly interesting experience as that was my first time in a place where the predominant language was not English. Ontario is largely English-speaking, and signage is largely bilingual, containing both English and French, but once you cross the border into Quebec, it’s like a whole different world, as everything is in French, and only French, and some people over there do not speak English. It was my first time experiencing a language barrier in a major way, and while I managed, remembering that a large amount of English words are derived from French, it was certainly a challenge nonetheless (but Google Translate helped a lot).
I am planning on doing a larger, more detailed photo set in Life and Times for this trip, so to avoid duplicating efforts, I’m just going to share a few photos here and let that be that for now.
Categories: Canada, Roads, Today's Special, Travel
A missed (or ignored) opportunity to really do some good…
16 minute read
May 9, 2023, 8:39 AM
I’m sure that you all are familiar with how terrible my seventh grade year was at Stuarts Draft Middle School. I’ve written about it at some length, and also discussed it a little bit more after my autism diagnosis last year. Recall that during seventh grade, I had a large problem with bullying, both from the students and from the staff. In fact, that year was unusual because of heavy bullying from fellow students as well as staff. Most of the time, the bullying largely came from the staff, and bullying from fellow students was less so (though it did happen), but in seventh grade, it came from all over pretty consistently (Michael Stonier was just the most memorable of many), and I was miserable for it.
Frank Wade, the chief bully on the staff side that year, had referred me to guidance for my alleged “problems”, and I would visit with Jan Lovell, the guidance counselor, on a weekly basis for the remainder of the year. I didn’t mind going to guidance, because while they were terrible in their own right with their continued attempts to gaslight me into thinking that I was the problem rather than the victim, it meant that I wouldn’t have to deal with my bullies for a time. In hindsight, though, this was just exchanging one bully, i.e. Mr. Wade and all of the kids that he enabled, for another bully, i.e. Mrs. Lovell the guidance counselor, but one bully was easier to handle than multiple bullies at once, though it was still crappy no matter how you sliced it.
Recently, I was thinking about one thing that I brought to Mrs. Lovell towards the end of the year, and I realized that she either missed or deliberately chose to ignore a tremendous opportunity to look into a bullying problem in the school. It really made me think that while I don’t know how much they were paying her to be the guidance counselor, whatever it was, it was probably too much. At that point in the year, I recognized that things were very bad, and I also recognized that the chances that things would improve before the end of the year were slim to none. To that end, I had already mentally written seventh grade off as irreparable. In other words, I was just doing my best to make it through it, and looked towards the future. To that end, I had prepared a list for the guidance counselor of all of the kids that I did not want to be in homeroom with the following year, with the idea’s being that since guidance was the entity that did student scheduling and such, I was submitting this request to the correct department. It was not a large list, mostly because homerooms were done alphabetically by last name. Therefore, I only had the chance of being in homeroom with people with last names starting with P through Z. So out of about 300 kids in a grade, I only had the possibility of being in homeroom with about 75 of them, and my list was limited to that subset. And considering that students were arranged in three different “teams” in middle school, each belonging to a group of teachers who all worked together with the same kids, what I was really asking was that I be on a different team than these kids in eighth grade.
Categories: Autism, Middle school, Schumin Web meta
My glasses make me feel so fine…
6 minute read
May 4, 2023, 9:38 PM
It’s funny how things work sometimes. For 22 years, I had one pair of glasses and wore that pair every day. The glasses varied over the years, going from nearly round in 2001, and slowly becoming more and more square as I upgraded in 2005, 2008, and 2010. Then in 2016, I switched from wire rims to plastic. But even with that change, I still only had one pair with my current prescription, and kept old pairs as spares. I mean, glasses were expensive, ya know?
Then a couple of things happened. First, I discovered Zenni Optical, after Elyse got an extra pair of glasses from them that were branded by FaZe Clan. This ensured that she would have an extra pair after she had her own glasses emergency when were on a trip back in 2021 (her old glasses came apart in a way that wasn’t fixable while we were outbound), and it also meant that she could now rotate between pairs.
Then, last October, my glasses were destroyed by the airbag when the original HR-V got totaled back in October. The following day, I practically turned the house upside down looking for my old pairs of glasses, and I couldn’t find any of them. I don’t know what happened to them, but they were nowhere to be found. Go figure. The day after that, I went and got new glasses made at LensCrafters, so that I would be back in business on that front, getting an updated prescription for glasses with a slightly updated design. I initially got single vision lenses in order to have glasses in an hour, since I was going on that trip to Tennessee, and needed to be able to see right away.
After we got back from Tennessee, I got the lenses upgraded to progressives, because that’s what you have to do when you’re mature like me. When I was talking to the guy at LensCrafters to get measured for progressives, I made sure to get the pupillary distance from him, so that I could “get a cheap spare pair on Zenni”. He gladly gave it to me and explained how it needed to be entered in. Cool. I ordered the progressive lenses for the glasses that I already had from LensCrafters, and then I ordered a spare pair later from Zenni, in blue. The Zenni glasses showed up first, before the new lenses from LensCrafters did, so I set the Zenni glasses aside, since the idea was that this was a spare pair, and I didn’t want to get used to progressives on a cheap pair, when my LensCrafters glasses cost me several hundred dollars (under the assumption that “more expensive” means “better”).
Categories: Glasses
A weekend in New York…
32 minute read
April 26, 2023, 8:33 PM
From April 12-14, Elyse and I took a little weekend trip to New York City. This was the new HR-V’s first road trip, and what better place to go to than New York, I suppose. It was definitely a different experience than the Soul’s first road trip, which was the trip home from Staunton the day after I bought it, as well as the original HR-V’s first road trip, which was a day trip to Philadelphia.
With this trip, I was looking forward to seeing how the new HR-V did on a long trip with the various smart features that it has built into it, such as the adaptive cruise control and the lane watch system. I had tested these things on my commutes to and from work on various occasions on a somewhat limited basis, but I hadn’t done a long drive with them yet. The good news was that these systems worked quite well together on our trip, which we took largely via I-95 and the New Jersey Turnpike. I think that this was probably the least stressful drive on I-95 that I’ve ever had, as the cruise control maintained a safe distance from the cars ahead of me, and it maintained my lane quite well, following the various curves in the road. That put me, as the driver, in something of a more “strategic” role, as I was responsible for navigating and making lane changes and such, as well as watching out for any hazards, but the car largely drove itself. I wouldn’t use these systems on city streets, but for a road trip on freeways, it was great. The thing to remember, though, is that these are driver assist features. This is not self-driving, and should not be confused with that. This does not absolve the driver from the responsibility of driving at the proper speed for conditions, and it also does not mean that you can kick back and play on your phone behind the wheel. Not at all – you’re still very much in charge, even if this does automate certain parts of it.
The trip up was fairly uneventful. We had to detour onto Route 1 from White Marsh to Joppa in order to avoid a backup, and there was a construction project on the Delaware Memorial Bridge, which had a direct connection to the Turnpike that crossed us over to the southbound span. Additionally, Maryland House, one of the two full-service travel plazas on I-95 in Maryland, was closed for emergency plumbing repairs. And then, of course, when driving on the New Jersey Turnpike, the speed limit signs are merely suggestions. Just keep up with traffic, and you will be fine. And if traffic is going 20 over the speed limit in a work zone, you’re going 20 over in a work zone, too. Otherwise, you become a hazard to traffic. Then upon arrival in the New York area, we got on I-278, where we followed roughly the same route that we did in our impromptu 2017 trip to New York, but in reverse. We parked on the street in front of our hotel, the Aloft, got checked in and brought all of our stuff up, and then I took the HR-V to its own hotel, which was on the next block over.
Categories: Driving, Family, Honda HR-V (2023), New York City, New York Subway, Photography, Travel
Thinking about mental math for a moment…
8 minute read
April 19, 2023, 4:55 PM
I’ve mentioned before that working on the train allows me a lot of time alone with my thoughts. Sometimes that leads to my working through some of my problems and coming up with some solutions, sometimes I am mentally writing out Journal entries, sometimes it just replays traumatic experiences over and over again (though writing that letter and then mailing it to the other driver really helped me make peace with things, i.e. mentally, I think I’m going to be okay), but sometimes, I’m just doing things in my head like figuring out how many presidents have unique first names as far as the list of presidents goes, or doing math of some sort.
Funny thing about math. Growing up, I always thought that I was bad at math. I always tended to struggle in math in school, and looking back, I don’t quite understand why, because as an adult, I’m pretty sharp with math. Give me a calculator, and I can solve just about anything. I’m inclined to blame the various teaching methods used for my math struggles growing up, since it wasn’t until college, when I had Dr. Ed Parker at JMU in a summer math class to satisfy my degree requirements, when he taught us algebra in a way that made things finally fall into place. In other words, the way that we teach math kind of sucks. I also realized that I just plain don’t like division. I find it overly complicated. Flip it around and express it as multiplication, though, and I’m fine – then it all makes sense to me. Similarly, I am never doing long division by hand ever again. It’s too complicated, and besides, it’s not like I don’t always have a device with a calculator on it with me all the time these days. This, of course, is contrary to what the teachers always said growing up, i.e. that we wouldn’t have a calculator with us all the time. Clearly, these teachers never anticipated smartphones in the nineties. It’s an even stranger statement considering that calculator watches already existed at that time, even if they were not the most common of things, meaning that some people already did have a calculator on them at all times, strapped to their wrist.
Making a weekend trip out of a delivery…
15 minute read
April 7, 2023, 10:00 AM
Recently, I was finally able to complete the last little bits of business related to the car accident from last October, and put it all behind me. On Thursday, March 30, I made the 175-mile journey to Stuarts Draft in the Scion – a trip that would leave it back home with my parents, where it belongs. And while I was at it, I made a weekend trip out of it, coupling it with a day in Richmond, where I did some photography. As such, I would traverse what I like to call Virginia’s “Interstate square”. If you look at a map of Virginia, the various Interstate highways in the state form something like a lopsided square, consisting of I-66 to the north, I-81 to the west, I-64 to the south, and I-95 to the east, and Strasburg, the DC area, Richmond, and Staunton at the corners:
Categories: Driving, Family, Harrisonburg, Howard Johnson's, JMU, Photography, Richmond, Roads, Scion xB, Staunton, Stuarts Draft, Travel
I am once again in a Honda HR-V…
10 minute read
March 24, 2023, 6:33 PM
All I have to say is, thank goodness. Five and a half months after my original Honda HR-V was totaled in an accident, and on the 27th anniversary of this website’s founding, I am at last back in an HR-V. It was a much longer journey than anyone expected, but we got there. The thing about buying a new car right now is that because of a semiconductor shortage, the demand for cars far outstrips the supply, and most new cars are already spoken for before they’re even manufactured. As such, right now, you can’t just buy a new car off of the lot and then drive it home. Rather, you’ve got to get into the queue, and your car will be built and delivered in a few months’ time.
The biggest take-home for me in the whole process was learning a lot about how cars get to dealerships. Going into this, I thought that the customer ordered the car that they wanted, the dealership placed that order with the manufacturer, and then the manufacturer would build it and ship it to the dealership, where the customer would be waiting. Turns out that’s not how it works. How it actually works is that the manufacturer makes whatever they want, and then they allocate a certain number of cars to each dealership. Then the dealerships either sell those cars themselves, or trade them amongst each other to meet customer needs. I suspect that my lack of understanding of how this worked led to some delay, as I inadvertently sent my contact at Shockley Honda on a wild goose chase with a very specific request that made it harder to get me a car.
But before I got to that point, I had to make sure that another HR-V was what I wanted for my next car. That wasn’t as straightforward as one might think, because Honda had redesigned the HR-V for 2023. Therefore, it wouldn’t be the same HR-V as I had just lost. The HR-V had gotten a platform change, now sharing a platform with the Civic rather than the Fit. It was also a bigger vehicle than it used to be. On October 10, a day or so after the accident, after getting my new glasses and speaking with many different people from the insurance company, I was heading home after dropping Elyse off with a friend for a little while. My route took me past Herson’s Honda in Rockville, and I glanced over at the lot to see what they had. To my surprise, there was a 2023 HR-V sitting on their lot. Time to act: I busted a move across a couple of lanes of traffic to get in there to see about taking that HR-V for a test drive. I talked to the salesman, and he showed me everything on it, and we took it for a spin around Rockville, over various kinds of roads so that I could get a good feel for how it handled. It all felt very familiar. In other words, while it may have looked different and it had a lot of fancy new features, it was still an HR-V under all of that. Then the next day, I took Elyse with me to the dealership and we gave it another test drive. Funny thing was that neither the second salesman nor Elyse noticed that I never set the mirrors, the seat, or anything when I got into it. I just jumped in and we were off, because it was all still set for me from the day before. That second test drive validated my findings from the first drive, and I also asked a few questions that I had forgotten to ask the day before. So it was settled: my next car would be another HR-V. And in what felt like a surprising move, I went with the EX-L trim, i.e. the top-tier version. Reason was that on the 2023 models, EX-L was the only trim that had a moon roof. The sport trim didn’t have a moon roof anymore.
Categories: Frederick, Honda HR-V (2023)
Walking through Afton Mountain…
5 minute read
March 20, 2023, 8:38 PM
From March 15-17, Elyse and I did another trip down to Augusta County, and we had a good time overall. This was typical for these sorts of trips, in that we stayed at Hotel 24 South in Staunton, did stuff, and also visited my parents. This was supposed to have been the trip where my parents’ Scion xB, which I’ve been driving since late October, went back to my parents to stay, but due to a delay in my new car’s arrival, it ended up being a pretty conventional trip.
On the middle day of our trip, we got together with our friends Evan and Andrew, and we visited the Blue Ridge Tunnel. For those not familiar, the Blue Ridge Tunnel is a former railroad tunnel that was built in 1858, and was used by various railroads until 1944, when the tunnel was abandoned in favor of a new tunnel constructed nearby, which is still used by railroads today. I had first learned about the Blue Ridge Tunnel when I was in high school, but while I knew that it existed as an abandoned tunnel, I never knew exactly where it was. Otherwise, I probably would have sought it out and explored it. In late 2020, the tunnel reopened as a rail trail, and the public was invited to hike the tunnel. Elyse and I had it on our list of things that we wanted to do, and since our friends wanted to do it, this seemed like a perfect opportunity. We all parked at the east trailhead, which is off of Route 6 on the Nelson County side of the mountain. I got my DSLR and my tripod, and we were off. We all hiked out to the tunnel together, but then when we got to the tunnel, Elyse, Evan, and Andrew hiked it more or less straight through, while I used the tripod with my DSLR to get some photos of the tunnel itself.
Categories: Afton Mountain, Friends, Travel
It both impresses me and amuses me…
28 minute read
March 10, 2023, 4:21 PM
You all have probably heard about the artificial intelligence tools that can write articles and such that have been taking the Internet by storm lately. One such service is ChatGPT, which is a chatbot by a company called OpenAI, which can answer your questions about various subjects. I asked the service about myself and about Schumin Web, because (A) my name is unique, and (B) Schumin Web is also unique, and (C) I’ve been around on the Internet long enough that I figure that it should know who I am. Additionally, giving it inquiries about myself and my website, I was able to do a good check of accuracy because I know me really well, and I know my own website really well.
So on March 1, I ran the inquiry five times for each, and collected five different responses for each. In evaluating what it spewed out for each one, I found that the accuracy was a bit questionable, and varied quite a bit. It got some things right, and it got some things very wrong to the point of being comical. In its discussion about Schumin Web, it was actually quite insightful, making points that even I hadn’t thought much about, doing way more than I would have otherwise expected from an AI chatbot. I was also a bit flattered, because in running other people who I feel should be far more notable than me, it didn’t know who they were, even with some additional prodding, while it knew who I was right out of the gate without any additional clarification or questioning, and it knew what Schumin Web was without even blinking.
In judging the accuracy of each output, I scored them by factual claims. A claim that was accurate got a point. A claim that was inaccurate got no points. A claim that was a mixture of accurate and inaccurate information got half a point. Divide by total number of claims to get an accuracy percentage, which would be the final score. I don’t know if experts in this sort of thing would score it this way, but it’s the best that I could come up with, and for purposes of this discussion, we’ll go with it. 
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Categories: Artificial intelligence, Myself, Schumin Web meta