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Illustrating a silly song…

12 minute read

March 25, 2025, 2:30 PM

So after two “downer” Journal entries in a row, I pledged on social media to make the next entry a fun one.  While I was operating the train and running various Today’s Special songs through my head as I did, I came up with something: the “Blue Cow” song by Clive and the Cowboys.  That one goes like this, singing about various silly things along the way.  I’d been wanting to do some humorous illustrations with an AI engine for a while, and this seemed like a perfect opportunity to do that.  This time, I used Meta AI, largely because they seem to do a better job with illustrations than Bing (which I have played with before), plus Meta, unlike Bing, doesn’t throttle you after fifteen inquiries.

In doing this, I tried to keep as close to the original lyrics as possible, deviating only if the original lyrics either wouldn’t make sense as a query, or if they produced weird results and I had to refine.  As I go through this, I’m putting the lyrics underneath the photos, and then if you click the photos, you’ll see the AI query that I used.  For Meta, to get it to do illustrations, you start your query with “Imagine” and then give the description of what you want.

So here’s the result.

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Conveying the original narrative and criticisms in a clear, balanced, and professional manner…

33 minute read

February 26, 2025, 11:45 PM

Recently, when talking to a friend from college, they mentioned that they had used ChatGPT in order to make some of their correspondence sound more professional and even-toned, i.e. they were using ChatGPT as a tool to refine their writing.  I had never thought about this as a possibility before, so I played with it a little bit.  I’ve never used the service for any serious purpose and do not intend to, but seeing as I have a very large repository of text content, i.e. this website, I decided to take it for a spin with some Journal entries that I had written in the past year and put them in the blender to see what it would come up with as far as rewriting them.  My requirements for selection were that they needed to be recently written so as to feature my current writing style, they needed relatively few photos (so no photo-heavy entries), and on a topic that would be less likely to become dated (so no political entries).  For each one, the prompt was, “Rephrase the following page to sound more reasonable and professional,” followed by the direct URL for the entry.

I like to think of this in reference to a scene from The Cosby Show where Rudy’s teacher compares various students’ papers about the American Revolution to Rudy’s paper with Cliff.  While the other children’s papers sounded typical for fifth-grade work, Rudy’s sounded much more adult, referring to “the harrowing campaign of 1777,” and “the ubiquitous melancholy that descended on the downtrodden warriors.”  She then goes onto explain, “When Mrs. Huxtable helps Rudy with a paper, her eleven-year-old capabilities come shining through.  And when you help her with a paper, I get ‘ubiquitous melancholy’ and ‘downtrodden warriors’.  When is Mrs. Huxtable coming home?”  In other words, it’s time to give these Journal entries the “ubiquitous melancholy” treatment, as ChatGPT rewrites a few of my entries to sound more businesslike.

One thing that surprised me when I went into this was that ChatGPT now has a “reason” button that you can select, which outputs the bot’s own internal monologue as it goes through and contemplates on what I fed it.  That was interesting to see what the bot’s own process was when it output the information.  I did not expect to get that sort of insight.

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The trend of redacting anything and everything whether it needs it or not is getting really old and needs to stop…

14 minute read

February 12, 2025, 2:38 PM

One of the things that has bothered me about online content for a while is when people will redact portions of an image whether it needs it or not, often the faces of bystanders, license plates, or otherwise.  They’ll do it either by the electronic equivalent of scribbling something out like one might do with a pen on a physical image, or by placing goofy oversized emojis over people’s faces.  The problem with this behavior is that it draws attention to the very thing that the people doing the redacting are ostensibly trying to make disappear.  In other words, these various redactions draw the focus off of whatever the person wants us to see, and the first thing we notice is this big smear of color that shouldn’t be there.

While this behavior has annoyed me for quite a while, there was recently some discussion in a group of fire alarm nuts that I’m part of after I posted a photo of the alarms in my old elementary school, Bonnie Grimes Elementary in Rogers, Arkansas.  Late one night, I decided I wanted to check up on Grimes and see how they were doing.  No one that worked there when I attended is still there, and that’s been the case for a while (and I suspect that a lot of the present-day teachers there are younger than me), so I really was just checking on the building itself, since I don’t know anyone in any of the photos.  So I went to their Facebook page and went for a dive.  I commented on a few photos.  One photo that I commented on was about the spelling bee, about how I had done the same thing on that same stage three decades prior.  Another one was about the addition of a second set of glass doors at the main entrance to form a vestibule.  There was no vestibule in the front before.  Just go through the front door and that was it.  I also commented on a photo showing a metal play dome on the playground, mentioning that it was installed when I was a student there in the early nineties and that I was glad that it was still in use, and also about the absence of a wooden play structure next to it that they had built later.  All in all, I had a good time doing a virtual visit back to my old elementary school.  Based on the photos, the school has been maintained very well over the years.  The walls have been painted, and the floors have been replaced, but the place looks amazing, and does not look like a 38-year-old school.  My middle and high schools looked far worse back when I attended those schools than Grimes does today, and those schools were half of Grimes’ current age.  I also checked up on the fire alarm system, and found, to my dismay, that Grimes finally got a new fire alarm system last summer, and so the Wheelock 7002Ts of my childhood are gone.  Though I’ll say that 37 years is a pretty good run for a fire alarm system.  It served the school well, and so while I was sad to discover that the alarms that I knew were not there anymore, that old system had more than done its job, keeping thousands of students safe and announcing the start of hundreds of fire drills over the years.

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Yes, that is a photo of me in a red speedo…

9 minute read

December 1, 2024, 12:00 AM

Some of you may have been surprised to open the website today and find this photo staring back at you:

December 2024 splash photo, showing me wearing a Santa hat and a red speedo.

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Revisiting ChatGPT…

22 minute read

November 1, 2024, 11:55 PM

Recently, a former colleague of mine shared a post on LinkedIn by Benjamin Stein (no, not that guy) that read, “Go ask ChatGPT: ‘Based on our previous interactions, what do you know about me that I may not know about myself?'”  My colleague said in her post that she was using ChatGPT to help with a job search, and shared some of the things that the bot said about her.  Not bad.

I responded to her post about my own experience with ChatGPT, saying, “All I know is that ChatGPT knows exactly who I am, probably because of my large online presence, and it told quite a few whoppers about me,” and then cited the Journal entry that I wrote about it last spring.  My colleague responded that she loved the entry, but considering that the original entry is now more than 18 months old, as well as the rapid pace of advancement in this kind of technology, I should run it again to see what it comes up with.  I liked the idea.

So I ran the entire process over again, asking the exact same questions, i.e. “What do you know about Ben Schumin?” and “Tell me about The Schumin Web,” and running each inquiry five times, using the default model, GPT-4o.  My methodology for scoring each of the responses was exactly the same as before, counting the number of factual claims, and then determining the accuracy of each one.  Accurate claims scored a point, inaccurate claims scored no points, and a mixture of accurate and inaccurate information scored half a point.  Then take that number and divide it by the total number of factual claims made, and that’s the final score in the form of a percentage.  As was the case before, I still don’t know what an expert in this sort of thing might do to rate the accuracy of these responses, but this is the best that I could come up with, plus this is the same method that I used before, giving us apples-to-apples results.

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I wasn’t expecting that so soon…

5 minute read

September 22, 2024, 1:05 PM

It figures.  Not even twelve hours after I posted the Journal entry about my trip to New Jersey and Long Island, which included coverage of the Kmart store in Bridgehampton, New York, I saw a post on Reddit that indicated that said Kmart store was closing, and shared the following image of the store:


Photo: Reddit user LordRavioli29

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If you want us to take you seriously, learn how to write…

8 minute read

July 19, 2024, 7:55 PM

It always amazes me at what kinds of stuff people allow to be published under their name, especially when they’re doing it with the expectation of making money.  More specifically, it amazes me at how poor some of the work is that they publish with the aim of furthering their business endeavors.  I have always been of the opinion that if you’re trying to market yourself, you should always put your best foot forward.  The idea is that when you are selling yourself, you should be on your “A” game, because that’s the best that you’re ever going to be, when you’re trying to woo potential new clients.  And if you can’t be bothered to do that when you’re trying to sell your services, what else are you slacking off on?

It’s like what they say about errors on a job application.  The conventional wisdom there is that if there is any kind of error, no matter how minor, on your cover letter or resume, be it typographical, spelling, or grammatical, your resume is going in the trash.  Let’s take a line out of my own resume from my description of my time as a bus operator:

Safely operated 40’ and 60’ buses on predefined routes, providing scheduled service to the general public.

Looks decent enough.  Good spelling, good grammar, and no typographical errors.  I’d hire me.  Now here’s the same line, but this time, I have deliberately added a typographical error:

Safely operated 40’ and 60’ buses on predefined routes, providing schedueld service to the general public.

Did you see it?  “Scheduled” is now “schedueld”.  It doesn’t change the meaning of the sentence (unlike, for example, when “public” inadvertently gets shortened to “pubic”), but if I submitted that to someone in hopes of getting hired, I would have no business being upset when I don’t get any calls back, because I didn’t do my due diligence in making sure that I had put my own best foot forward.  I couldn’t be bothered to make sure that I got the words all written correctly, and so there is no reason to think that I wouldn’t miss something far more sensitive on the job that could cost the company a lot of money.  The company can easily dodge that potential bullet by not hiring the guy who has already provided documented proof of a lack of attention to detail.

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Categories: Social media, Some people, Work

The future of the past…

19 minute read

June 27, 2024, 6:32 PM

Recall back in December that I spoke of the need to redesign this website in order to take advantage of various new features and functionalities that I’m not currently making good use of.  Lately, unfortunately, I have not made any headway on that due to my being backlogged on new content.  It’s like Jon Taffer of Bar Rescue fame once said, where an owner was too busy working in their business to be able to work on their business.  However, I did recently take a look at screenshots and other materials for various concepts from past redesign efforts to serve as some level of inspiration, and while I didn’t feel particularly inspired by these old concept designs, I thought it might be interesting to share them with you, to think about what Schumin Web might have looked like had I gone further with these various ideas rather than what I ultimately opted to go with.  I don’t regret not going with these various concepts because a lot of these were just explorations, but I definitely learned something about the site with each iteration.

First, recall that before the current “Modern Blue” design, which was introduced in 2012, I had been using a design that I had called “Faded Blue”, which was introduced in 2004 and was later modified into “Blue Squares” in 2008.  One new thing back then was that the advertising banner, which had previously been at the bottom of the page, would now be at the top of the page.  The first concept for that design was… not good.  Here is the initial concept for the Journal:

Initial prototype for the Journal in 2004.

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Raise a glass for ICQ…

8 minute read

May 24, 2024, 5:32 PM

Today, I woke up to this little bit of news:

"ICQ will stop working from June 26"

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A proper visit to Charleston…

28 minute read

May 9, 2024, 10:14 AM

From April 17-19, Elyse and I made a weekend trip down to Charleston, South Carolina.  It’s funny how this worked out.  After our visit to Charleston last October, we both were left wanting more.  We saw lots of potential in Charleston, and wanted to go back, but we weren’t sure whether we wanted to drive back again, vs. flying.  Charleston is eight hours away, which is quite a long haul, and it’s almost entirely through rural areas once you get out of the DC region.  In other words, not very exciting.  But then when we looked at airfare, we realized that it was really expensive, and that with all of the goings-on at the airport plus multiple flights, we wouldn’t save any time compared to driving, plus we would be limited as to what we could bring with us, and would probably need to rent a car down there.  All of that said, that pushed me into driving territory, because then we could bring whatever we wanted, go on our own schedule, and have fun on the way down and back.  Plus then we would have the HR-V in Charleston.

On the southbound leg, I tried to keep the trip as close to all-business as I could.  I only planned on making four stops: one in the Richmond area, one in Skippers, Virginia (the last Virginia exit on I-95), one somewhere in North Carolina, and then one at the Buc-ee’s in Florence, South Carolina.  That would get us to Charleston at a somewhat reasonable hour as long as we kept to it.

Richmond was intended primarily as a food stop.  My original idea was to stop at the Sheetz at the Atlee exit, and do Sheetz, and I pitched that to Elyse a few days prior to our trip.  It’s funny – when I pitched the idea, Elyse’s response was something to the effect of, “When were you going to tell me about this?” and my response was simply, “What does this look like?”  Elyse said that she didn’t want to do Sheetz, because we always do Sheetz, and then suggested we find a barbecue place.  I was like, “You had me at barbecue.”  Looking it up, I found two places that weren’t too far off of I-95.  One was a place called Q Barbeque up in Glen Allen, and then the other one was Oak & Apple right in downtown.  I chose Oak & Apple, because it was right in downtown Richmond, and closer to the freeway.  More or less get off of the exit, go like two blocks, and boom, there it is.

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Where does it go from punishment to exploitation?

8 minute read

May 1, 2024, 9:36 AM

Recently, this post by Nadia Ware came up on my news feed in a Staunton group that I’m in:

Any teachers at Shelburne Middle School need their yards cut,??? My son was showing off, talking back, taking advantage of the substitute teacher last week. (yes typical middle school 14yr old boy behavior but I’m over behavior he can control and choose not to) I took his phone away, no tv, earlier bedtime, no ymca and no overnight stay for a week. Want to add a YARD A DAY, Small yards bc he still has homework and study from 6-8pm.. thinking Wednesday and Friday.. please contact me if you can help. Appreciate it. P mommy

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Categories: Social media, Staunton

No, I do not have to get anyone’s permission for that…

11 minute read

March 30, 2024, 1:35 PM

It has always amused me about how often people play the permission-of-the-subject card with me.  Usually, it comes from someone who is a bit salty about coverage of their activities that may portray them in a negative light.  However, recently, someone played this card on a post that I made on Schumin Web‘s Facebook page in regards to a wildfire in Virginia that I recently photographed with my drone.  The post was about a photo that depicted a house burning to the ground that I am planning to run as part of a Journal entry about a weekend trip that Elyse and I had recently made:

1429 Coal Mine Road burns to the ground during a wildfire near Strasburg, Virginia.

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How’s that for gratitude…

11 minute read

March 19, 2024, 9:23 AM

Some people, I just don’t understand.  I had been involved in a Facebook group called “You know you’re from Gaithersburg, Maryland if”.  The group’s purpose was to share nostalgic content about Gaithersburg, Maryland, which is the town right next to Montgomery Village, where I live.  However, the group had extremely lax moderation, and by “extremely lax”, I mean “none”, as there was no one keeping an eye on things to make sure that good posts were getting through and off-topic or spam posts were being removed.  As a result, most of the group’s content consisted of advertisements for moving companies, air duct cleaning, gutter replacement, furniture cleaning, carpet cleaning, and car detailing.  In other words, it was spam city.  The only reason that I stayed in the group was to maybe get a piece of historic Gaithersburg content.  After all, I was in the group in the first place because I was interested in getting a bit of local history from the perspective of locals.  I’ve only been familiar with Gaithersburg since 2007, and have only lived in the Gaithersburg area since 2017.  So as far local history goes, I’ve only been around to witness a small slice of it.  I rely on other people to provide the rest.

Then one day this past December, while Elyse and I were out having lunch, I got a notification from Facebook saying that they wanted to promote me to admin of this group because the group had no active admins.  In other words, what I had suspected was true: the existing group admins had taken a permanent lunch break, so Facebook picked someone from amongst the membership to run the group.  I just had to tap “accept” on my phone, and they handed me the keys to the castle.  All of a sudden, I was in charge of a group in which I had been a somewhat passive participant for several years.

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Thinking about various church experiences…

22 minute read

March 9, 2024, 8:30 AM

Recently, I found myself discussing the Vacation Bible School that my sister and I attended in the mid nineties while I was in middle school.  It came from a post on /r/exchristian on Reddit, asking, “What do you still have memorized?”  My first reaction was to cite the offertory song that this program had us sing while they passed the plate around.  In thinking about it, I was struck by how misplaced the priorities were when it came to what this offering was to be used for (more on that later).  But then it also led to my recalling various other church experiences that I had while growing up, and how much of a mixed bag these things were.  Some experiences were quite good, while some of them were not exactly all rainbows and sunshine.

For some background, I attended church from 1989 to 2003.  I was never that much of a “religious” person to begin with, having spent the first eight years of my life without it.  My father grew up Jewish, and has practiced no religion of any kind for most of his adult life, i.e. he is ethnically Jewish, but does not follow the religion.  Meanwhile, Mom grew up in the Presbyterian Church, and attended church regularly until she began college, and then did not attend church at all from 1969 to 1989.  Thus my early formative years contained no significant religious indoctrination, short of attending a Baptist preschool during our first year in Rogers, and the religious side of things in that program was super light.  I don’t remember doing much religious stuff there short of a few trips to the sanctuary and the “God is great, God is good” prayer before our daily snack.  Outside of this, Mom would occasionally discuss religious subjects with me, though nothing too deep, but even then, I was kind of a skeptic.  When Mom would try to explain this “God” person, the way that he was described defied everything that I had observed in the world, and so I was like, okay, sure, and not really buying it, even at a very young age.  Likewise, I saw no purpose to the prayer that Mom and I did each night before going to bed for some time, because I never really thought that we were speaking to anyone other than ourselves.

Then in 1989, Mom finally found a church that she liked.  As I understand it, when we first moved to Arkansas in 1985, Mom had First Presbyterian Church in Rogers pegged as somewhere that she had wanted to go from the outset, but she was unimpressed with the minister that was there at that time.  By 1989, that guy had left and a new person had taken his place, and Mom liked the new guy a lot more.  We typically went to church on Sundays, we did the after school program that they did on Wednesday afternoons, and then we also did the Vacation Bible School week during the summer.

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When your photo of Giant becomes popular, and you don’t quite understand why…

3 minute read

February 6, 2024, 9:54 AM

Recently, when skimming around the Internet, I found a large number of YouTube videos using this image:

Giant Food in Burtonsville, Maryland

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