Finally, a road photo that I didn’t have to research…
2 minute read
July 11, 2015, 10:12 PM
Whenever I find a photo online showing something amusing on the road, I always like to find out the location. I’ve become rather skilled at looking at background details in photos to sleuth out locations after posting and geotagging countless photos on Panoramio, as well as researching filming locations for Project TXL (a planned overhaul of the Today’s Special site). So imagine my delight to see this funny road photo, showing Thomas the Tank Engine being transported on the back of a truck:
Photo: Imgur
Continue reading…Categories: Harrisonburg, Popular culture, Roads, Today's Special
Yes, I made it to New York City…
2 minute read
June 13, 2015, 3:55 AM
Just in case the current photo feature’s being of One World Trade Center didn’t tip you off, I’m happy to say that yes, I did recently make it to New York City for that day trip that I had wanted to do on my birthday but quickly realized that I couldn’t do. So I regrouped, and did it the way that works best for me: planned in advance. I got together with my friend Doreen, and we went up on June 9. And here’s proof:
Doreen got this photo of me at the 81st Street subway station on the IND Eighth Avenue Line.
Categories: Friends, New York City, New York Subway
This is a message that I can get behind…
< 1 minute read
May 6, 2015, 4:58 PM
This message recently went up on the sign for the church up the street from me:
Couldn’t have said it any better than that. No religious overtones, and nothing cheesy. Just a nice message to help put things in perspective. Be someone that makes you happy. After all, we only have one life to live, and it’s far too short to spend it being miserable about yourself. Be the person that you want to be.
That is all.
Categories: Religion, Silver Spring
Fun in Philadelphia…
7 minute read
April 28, 2015, 11:29 PM
Back at the end of March, I went up to Philadelphia with my friends Melissa and Elyse. We had a list of things that we wanted to do, and we did as many of them as we could. We had a blast, plus we got to meet up with my cousins Mike and Tara for dinner. This trip was also a proof of concept for how my various little outings might go now that I routinely work late nights, since my typical workday runs from approximately 4:00 PM until just before 2:00 AM.
Logistically, it worked out this way: Melissa met me at Glenmont station around 11:00, and then we traveled up to Howard County to get Elyse. Then from there, up to Philadelphia via I-95. Then in Philadelphia, everything that we were planning was transit-accessible, save for one thing, but we worked it all out pretty well.
Our first point of interest was the non-transit-accessible one: the SS United States. This would be a quick look-see for some photos, and then move along to other targets. We parked at the IKEA store across the street, and then Elyse and I walked over for a look (Melissa stayed in the car). Here are pix:
I have ridden the 7000-Series…
4 minute read
April 15, 2015, 8:30 AM
Back in late March, Metro announced that the new 7000-Series railcars, which I toured in January of last year, would enter revenue service on Tuesday, April 14, on the Blue Line. So on that day, I got together with Elyse, and we sought out and rode Metro’s new 7000-Series railcars on their first day of revenue service. We met up in late afternoon, and we took the Red Line down to Metro Center from Glenmont. At Metro Center, we waited for the train. Elyse and I had been in communication with Metro’s social media team as we were making our way in, and they helped us with our planning, as they indicated when the train was entering service in the evening, how long it would be out, and where it was located, and in which direction it was heading.
And we watched the PIDS screens. We knew that the train would be eight cars, because the 7000-Series is designed to run in quad sets rather than married pairs. So when we saw something like this come up on the board, our ears definitely perked up:
Categories: Elyse, Washington DC, WMATA
I can’t believe I set off the DriveCam…
6 minute read
January 28, 2015, 7:57 PM
I had a good bit of fun on Tuesday. I went down to the Washington Auto Show at the Washington Convention Center with Elyse, and we wandered through, seeing all sorts of interesting things. We took the Red Line to Gallery Place, then took the 70 bus up to the Convention Center (and we got an artic).
Unlike most car shows that I’ve been to in my 33 years, this was primarily for auto manufacturers to show off new cars. As such, it was heavy on the marketing, and you could touch and interact with most of the vehicles that were there. If you go on a Tuesday, as we did, the place was pretty quiet. No wait for tickets and security, and no wait to see or do anything, and more time to chat it up with people.
Right off the bat, with its being a slow day, Elyse and I could tell that the people working the event were in a good mood. When I purchased my ticket, the guy mentioned that admission, normally $12.00, was only $10.00 with a SmarTrip, or $5.00 with a student ID. My old JAC card from my college days still lives on my keychain over a decade after I graduated college. I said, “I still have my old student ID from when I was in college.” The guy sold me a ticket at the student rate, and justified it by saying that it just says “a student ID”, and not that you had to be a current student.
Categories: Elyse, Events, Washington DC, WMATA
A splash photo that’s open to some interpretation…
4 minute read
November 25, 2014, 1:38 PM
This past Saturday, I got together with my friend Elyse, and we spent the day seeing what we could see, mostly in Rosslyn and Ballston. While we were in Rosslyn, we checked out the open-air patio on the fourth floor at the Le Méridien hotel (formerly Hotel Palomar) at the Waterview complex. The patio had decent enough views, but we ended up spending more time taking photos of the fire alarms, and as a result of that, got December’s splash photo:
Categories: Arlington, Elyse, Fire alarms, Schumin Web meta
“Not fooling anybody” in DC…
10 minute read
October 31, 2014, 11:50 AM
This past Saturday, I did some photography in Washington DC, but not the usual sort of photography that I do when I head into DC. This time, I photographed repurposed commercial buildings, i.e. buildings constructed with the standard architecture for a specific chain, and now operated by a business other than the one that the architecture would suggest. “Not Fooling Anybody” on Reddit, where people share photos of such conversions, describes it as “former chain businesses that have been converted to other uses, yet still strongly resemble their former use.” Some people might call these bad conversions, but I prefer to call them “obvious conversions”. After all, some conversions can look quite elegant, such as Italiano’s in Baltimore, which is a former KFC, but nonetheless still resemble the former tenant’s distinctive style.
It’s also worth noting that these sorts of buildings have no historical value of any kind, so they’re worth photographing while they’re still there, because they will be demolished when someone comes up with a more lucrative use for the land.
For this trip, I did my research. I had assembled a list of some places that I had spotted over the course of going wherever over the years, and then augmented that with some others that the folks on the DC subreddit brought to my attention, particularly on some corridors that I had never had any reason to travel under normal circumstances, such as Bladensburg Road and Benning Road. I then used Google Street View to visually verify all of the suggestions so that I knew what to look for in the field, plus I also did a virtual drive down a few roads using Street View to see if there were any others, as some corridors tend to be just teeming with them.
Categories: Converted buildings, Maryland, Netculture, Washington DC
Back to Cumberland…
10 minute read
October 11, 2014, 7:56 PM
On October 2, exactly a year and a half after my first road trip to Cumberland (where I produced a photography set), I was back out that way again. The purpose of this trip was to explore the downtown area a little bit more deeply, make some photo spheres, and check out a few things that I had missed the last time I was out there for one reason or another.
I had two planned stops on the way out. The first was at the westbound South Mountain rest area and welcome center on Interstate 70. Besides its being a logical spot to take a break, I wanted to get some photo spheres while there, plus I wanted to get updated photos of something that really bothered me on the last trip to Cumberland. In the Journal entry for the April 2013 trip, I discussed an errant apostrophe on the signage directing motorists to parking, where “RV” was pluralized using an apostrophe. The rule of thumb when it comes to pluralization in English, by the way, is that an apostrophe is never used to form a plural. Ever. I filed a request about this with SHA, which became case #SR-0198410, in early May of this year, to get it fixed, referencing the photo from 2013. I heard back from SHA a few days later, where they promised that they would have the apostrophes removed by the end of the month. When I was through that area again in mid-June, I swung by the eastbound rest area (opposite side) to check to see if they kept their promise. They did, as they scraped the apostrophe off of the sign. This left a somewhat inelegant result:
Categories: Cumberland, Photography, Railroads
No longer a Baltimore transit virgin…
7 minute read
September 28, 2014, 1:58 PM
Two weeks ago, I went up to Baltimore with my friend Elyse. We went for the Star Spangled 200 celebration, and wandered around the city a bit. And most importantly, I rode public transportation in Baltimore for the first time. MTA Maryland is a very different beast from Metro. MTA has buses, and MTA has trains, and there’s also a Circulator-type service. But the details are quite different. Elyse and I started out at Cromwell station in Glen Burnie, which is out by BWI. That’s light rail. DC doesn’t have light rail, as you know. There’s a streetcar system coming in DC, but it’s not here yet. Then there’s a heavy rail system, i.e. the Metro Subway, which we also rode. That’s more like what I’m used to. We also rode the Charm City Circulator, which is a free bus service that travels around the city, separate from the regular MTA buses (which we didn’t get to ride). And owing to cooperation between MTA Maryland and Metro, my SmarTrip card worked in Baltimore.
Most surprising was that the fares for the light rail were basically on the honor system. You bought your ticket at the machine, and then you just got on. No faregates, no fareboxes, no nothing. In my case, I loaded an MTA pass onto my SmarTrip.
So this was what I saw on my first ride on the Baltimore Light Rail:
Categories: Baltimore, Elyse, MTA Maryland
Google Camera is my new favorite toy…
5 minute read
September 6, 2014, 12:38 PM
I recently went on a trip down to Stuarts Draft to see my parents and sister, as well as my sister’s friend Vickey, and I came armed with a new app for my Android device: Google Camera. If you’ve never used it before, Google Camera is a camera app that will function as a regular camera plus do a few other things. Besides shooting regular still photos and videos, it will also do a lens blur effect, it helps in shooting panoramic photos, and it also shoots “photo spheres”, also called “spherical panoramas”. That last one is what I took for a spin on this trip. Those are the ones that I can post on Panoramio, and I believe that they go in as Street View (but don’t quote me on that just yet, because they haven’t fully propagated to Google Maps/Earth as of this writing).
Shooting them is surprisingly easy. Here’s a screenshot of the app in action, taking a photo sphere at my place:
Categories: Blue Ridge Parkway, Photography, Roanoke, Staunton, Virginia
So I found an app that lets you take stereo photos…
8 minute read
July 16, 2014, 10:24 PM
Last night, I found an app called 3D Camera for my Android phone. The idea behind the app is that you take two photos a few inches apart from each other, you line them up, and then the app makes a stereo image for you to look at. Depending on how you shoot them, they can come out as either crossview or parallel. I tested it out late last night on a Wheelock 7002T, and came up with this:
(By the way, I strongly recommend clicking each of the images on this entry to view them at full size in the lightbox)
Categories: Photography, Reddit, Retail, Rockville
Going back for the first time in 17 years…
4 minute read
June 26, 2014, 10:21 PM
This coming weekend is going to be so much fun. I’m getting together with my friend Pete, and we’re heading down to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, specifically Buxton, for a weekend trip. For me, this will also be a bit of a throwback to the nineties, as the last time I was down this way was in 1997. My family went to the Outer Banks five times in the nineties, for a week each time, from 1993-1997. Back then, we rented Park Place, a house in the Askins Creek neighborhood in Avon. This time, since this will just be a weekend trip, Pete and I are staying in a hotel for two nights, though I’m going to see about getting a few photos of Park Place on the way down (Avon is the town right before Buxton going south). I do want to stay in Park Place again one day, though, but that’s not going to happen on this trip.
When we used to go down that way as a family, it worked out to where Dad would generally just sun himself on the beach, and Mom, Sis, and I would find ways to entertain ourselves. The first year, in 1993, all the whole family did was get up, eat, and go down and sit on the beach all day. That got old quickly by the third day, and Mom realized it. So on subsequent vacations, while Dad was perfectly content to lay on the beach every day for a week, the rest of us found entertainment elsewhere on the island, as well as spent a couple of days on the beach. On these outings, we went up the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse a few times, we rode the ferry across Hatteras Inlet, and we did a few other things while Dad chilled out on the beach.
The last time my family went, in 1997, I was a freshly licensed driver, and did the driving that year myself, taking the Previa down to the Outer Banks with my mother and sister. My father, due to a work schedule conflict that year, had to travel down separately. That was fun, as it was my first time driving through a tunnel (the Monitor-Merrimac Memorial Bridge Tunnel), among other things. Still being a relatively inexperienced driver, I remember my being a little nervous while doing the drive down, but I managed.
Categories: Family, North Carolina, Travel
I completely nerded out on Sunday, and it was awesome…
14 minute read
June 24, 2014, 10:21 PM
I went out on a miniature road trip on Sunday, and I had a blast, taking photos of anything that vaguely interested me. It was more or less spur of the moment, when you consider that for what ended up being a photography trip, I only had my cell phone, and then, I didn’t bring my spare battery along. Thus it was a bit of a continual battle to keep a sufficient charge on the phone with only the car charger, but somehow, I managed, and the results came out pretty well despite my leaving my real camera at home. The way this trip came about is that I wanted to go up to and explore Westminster, Maryland. I’ve been wanting to explore Westminster for a while, ever since my father took an overnight business trip to Westminster a few years ago and I didn’t find out about it until it was too late in the day to go up and visit, because Dad didn’t realize that Westminster was as close to me as it was. That sucked, because I would have totally gone up if I had known. I’ll gladly travel an hour or so on relatively short notice to hang out with family.
So early Sunday morning, I just decided to go up and see what there was. I like doing these sorts of trips, because it’s basically a scouting trip, seeing if there’s anything that I want to explore and photograph in more detail in the future. Getting to Westminster is pretty easy: turn onto Georgia Avenue (MD 97) and take it all the way to Westminster. Seriously, it’s that easy. I got to Westminster just as the sun was coming up. After a quick drive through the main commercial area along Route 140, I located the downtown area.
The downtown area in Westminster has what I consider an unusual feature: a single-track rail line for the Maryland Midland Railway running diagonally through the main intersection in downtown. Main Street goes one way, and Liberty Street and Railroad Avenue (both MD 27) go the other way, and the rail line runs diagonally across the intersection. I would have loved to have seen a train come through here while I was in the area, but unfortunately, I did not get to see that this time.
Categories: Arundel Mills, Baltimore, Baltimore County, Companies, Converted buildings, Driving, Howard County, Howard Johnson's, Photography, Reddit, Sheetz, Vintage business, Westminster
Sometimes you have those weekends where you just have to get out of the house…
12 minute read
June 11, 2014, 6:06 PM
Ever get that feeling of “I just have to get out of the house”? I recently had that feeling, where I just needed a change of scenery for a little bit, and so I planned a weekend trip down to Stuarts Draft to visit the parents, going down Friday, and coming back Sunday. They were, as always, delighted to see me, and on the whole, we had a good time. I also made some extra space in my house, as, on Mom’s request, I brought my sister’s old bicycle back to my parents’ house. Gave me some practice in “beheading” a bicycle by removing the front wheel, and then reattaching it at my destination. But it travels much more easily without the front wheel:
The freshly-liberated front wheel.
Categories: Bicycle, Companies, Driving, Family, Fire drills, Harrisonburg, Middle school, Reddit, Stuarts Draft, Walmart, Waynesboro, Weather