Month: February 2024

Journal

@SchuminWeb

The most pointless school day ever…

7 minute read

February 17, 2024, 8:03 PM

This year marks thirty years since the most pointless day of my entire school career. It was the only day that I attended where, if I were to do it all over again, I am 100% certain that I would have skipped it. That was the day that Augusta County decided to have a snow make-up day on a Saturday. Yes, you read that right: they had school on a Saturday.

I suppose that the lead-up to this made enough sense, because in Augusta County, the winter of 1994 was a very snowy one. School was cancelled for a total of 16 days over the course of that winter for various weather events, including one instance where we were out for the entire week. The thing about Augusta County, though, is that the schools use one calendar across the entire county, but being such a large county (only Pittsylvania is larger), the conditions end up being very different in various parts of the county. So if road conditions would be too treacherous for students in the more rural western part of the county to go to school, they would call a snow day. Thus, students in the more urbanized eastern part of the county (where I lived) would also get the day off, but our roads, being more heavily traveled, would typically be fine. So with 16 snow days, three were built into the calendar, i.e. they made the school year 183 days long, assuming that we would have at least three snow days, i.e. those snow days were essentially freebies because the calendar already accounted for them. That in itself was a first for Augusta County, as the previous year had no built-in snow days at all, therefore all of the snow days that we had that year had to be made up. For a region that is north enough to get a lot of snow but south enough to where people still freak out over it, it’s surprising that they didn’t build in snow days before 1993, especially considering that the previous year had 14 snow days (why do I still remember this?). So accounting for the three built-in days, that meant that we had to make up 13 days.

The way that Augusta County allocated make-up days was something that I disagreed with. They generally preferred to use existing time off within the year for make-up days before extending the year out into June. While they would add some days at the end of the year before some holidays, they only were in the make-up day plan after one or two other school holidays, conference days, teacher workdays, etc. had already been taken away. So having 16 snow days, we were going to school five days a week from the last snow event in March all the way to June 17, with no breaks of any kind, as every single teacher workday, parent-teacher conference day, and long holiday weekend had been commandeered for instruction. I would have preferred to just tack every single make-up day onto the end of the year in June and leave the breaks intact, because I felt like those off days had value because they prevented burnout all around (and trust me, the burnout was heavy that year, and was exacerbated by jackoffs like Frank Wade, who were more than happy to remind us that we had our Memorial Day holiday back in January). And really, with the schools’ being out for more than two months in the summer already, it’s not like anyone would really notice an extra week. If they had extended it out to June 24 or beyond, I doubt anyone would have cared much, except maybe those families who planned big vacations immediately after school let out (and they should know that the end date for the school year is really not set in stone until spring).

Categories: Augusta County, Middle school

Some spherical images of a dead mall…

6 minute read

February 12, 2024, 11:10 AM

Do you remember when Elyse and I visited Owings Mills Mall back in 2015? I wrote about it in the second part of the “Everything Else” photo set, but what I didn’t show you, mainly because I lacked the capability to display it properly at the time, was that I also shot some spherical photos of the place. I was glad that I did, too, because the management would close the interior of the mall less than two weeks after our visit, and the mall was demolished about a year later in preparation for redevelopment. The property now contains an outdoor shopping center called Mill Station, and from everything that I can tell, the center is now thriving. I suppose that tells you that the mall itself was the problem, and that the area is, in fact, a good location for retail – just not that retail, apparently. It’s also spurred additional development beyond the old mall property, so clearly, things are going well there.

So as far as the spherical panorama images go, when we were exploring the mall, I used the Google camera app, which could shoot spherical panoramas, and took eight photo spheres of the place. You start in one spot, and then it tells you how to move the camera in order to image the entire thing. The result is essentially a single Google Street View image of wherever you are standing. I first learned how to do this in August 2014, and I did it on and off for about a year. I eventually lost interest in the photo spheres, after Google discontinued the Panoramio service and rolled it all into Google Maps. As is typical when Google rolls an existing service into another, much functionality was lost, and Panoramio’s going into Maps was no exception. The way that they wanted you to shoot photo spheres after that was with a separate Street View app, and it would more or less upload directly to Google Street View, and wouldn’t save as an image file of mine. So that was a bit of a deal-breaker for me. As far as this website goes, I couldn’t get the images to display properly on here natively, and really didn’t want to have any additional plugins for the site just to power a single Journal entry. Then I recently discovered that Flickr will embed these things on third party websites, such as this one, and we were in business.

Categories: Baltimore County, Photography, Retail