When you realize that you got dumped for being autistic…
6 minute read
December 16, 2024, 8:47 AM
It’s funny what kinds of things cross your mind sometimes. I was preparing some material for my photo site, which is work of a more “mechanical” nature, i.e. it doesn’t require much in the way of thinking. When I’m doing this kind of work, my mind has space to wander. And for some reason, in this instance, my mind went to the relationship that I had with a girl named Sarah Chegash back in 1998. We were both 17, and we both worked at CFW Information Services doing directory assistance. We went to different schools, so we only ever saw each other at work. She started there in the summer of 1998, after I had been working there about a year, and we really hit it off. We chatted a lot, and we would give each other smiles from across the room. It was really cute. We started dating in November of that year, but it only lasted a few weeks before she dumped me, and then she quit her job at CFW not long after our relationship ended.
When we were dating, it was not exactly the easiest thing ever. I suppose that I got too caught up in my own head about it, putting too much emphasis on the idea that it was a “date” and how to behave on account of that, and not about just enjoying the time with this person who had clearly shown an interest in me. “Highly nervous” would be putting it lightly. And she was trying to put the moves on me from time to time, but I was too uptight to actually respond or otherwise participate. I was like, I know that she is doing something that indicates interest, but I don’t know how I’m supposed to respond to this. That said, because I had no idea how to respond, I did not reciprocate. All I knew is that was a very awkward situation, and I felt very uncomfortable, not so much because of what she was doing, but because I was totally clueless on what I was supposed to do and how I was supposed to respond.
Meanwhile, what we did on our first date was so stereotypically me. We went up to the DC area and took the Metro from Vienna to Pentagon City, where we fully explored Pentagon City Mall. My first time transferring between the Orange Line and the Blue Line at Rosslyn was on that date. We had a good time, and I got to hit a few nerd goals, even if the time was a bit awkward overall. But getting on the train and being able to be a little nerdy about it at least made me feel slightly more comfortable.
Categories: Autism, Schumin Web meta, WMATA, Work
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:
Categories: Artificial intelligence, Schumin Web meta, Social media
Looking back at my travel year…
14 minute read
November 28, 2024, 9:54 PM
As 2024 starts to come to a close, and plans for December have largely solidified, I thought it might be fun to revisit a Journal entry from January where I discussed travel for this year. At the time, I had some big plans, and in looking back, it shook out a little bit differently than I had anticipated. But I enjoyed it all the same.
Right off the bat, a January trip to New York was already booked when the entry was written, and so that went off as scheduled. That ended up being one of my more memorable trips to New York for a few reasons. First, the route that Aaron and I took going up to New York was different than usual, due to the roadgeek-like desire to complete I-78 in its entirety. I had been on most of it already, but was missing a segment in New Jersey. Aaron had never been on any of it, so this was entirely new territory for me. It was enjoyable, and we got to visit Allentown, Pennsylvania, which was new for both of us. However, due to time concerns, we spent very little time in Allentown other than to fly the drone around and check out the fire alarms and elevators at a random office building. However, the most memorable thing that came out of that trip was that I developed a nasty case of COVID-19 while in New York. I suspect that it was the let-down effect in play, where I had likely caught it somewhere a while before, but my body held off on getting sick until the stress was off and I was ready to go have fun. That led to a first day where I had some very mild symptoms that I was able to ignore and keep hidden, but then by the middle of the second day, I wasn’t able to hide it anymore, as it was clear that I wasn’t feeling well, and that running on all eight cylinders was doing me no favors. I also got a different perspective on COVID masks on this trip, since I was sick with COVID for part of it. I tried to do the right thing and cover my infection (because trust me, you did not want to get what I had), however, I soon ran into a significant problem: that mask was like a little greenhouse, and my nose was running like a faucet with thin mucus. Plus with my breath coming out into that mask, it created a very warm, moist environment in there. That was the most disgusting thing that I dealt with the entire trip, as the snot from my nose was running down my upper lip, into my mouth, past my mouth, around my mouth, and down my chin. Let’s also not forget that the mask blocked my ability to mop it up as I needed, plus became something of a snot bucket in and of itself, as it was quickly covered in snot from top to bottom. I think that I made it about 30 minutes in the mask before I said the hell with it because it was just too gross and caused more inconvenience than it was worth. I preferred to leave it open in order to be better able to blow and wipe, plus with exposure to cooler, drier air, it had a better chance of thickening and/or drying up some rather than just sitting in that warm, moist environment that kept it thin and runny. I really don’t understand these people that can mask all the time, especially when sick, because when I was sick with the Ronies, I couldn’t stand masking because it was just so nasty inside there. My getting COVID on the first trip of the year also made me start to wonder if this was going to be a thing for travel this year, i.e. I was going to get sick whenever it was time to go somewhere.
Categories: Harrisburg, New Flyer D35HF, New Jersey, Personal health, Schumin Web meta, South Carolina, Travel
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.
Categories: Artificial intelligence, Schumin Web meta, Social media
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
Categories: New York, Reddit, Retail, Schumin Web meta
That post certainly aged like milk…
4 minute read
August 16, 2024, 8:12 AM
It’s funny… I know when I write some Journal entries that they will not necessarily age well, but some become dated a lot faster than others. Usually, when it comes to entries about politics and current events, I know that they will become dated more quickly than something else that isn’t related to politics or current events. Multiply that by a zillion when it comes to posts about elections and political candidates that aren’t primarily civics lessons. Those posts tend to become dated fairly quickly, often once the election is over.
However, I don’t think anything has aged worse than a Journal entry that I wrote a few weeks ago called “The Democrats are playing with fire…” talking about the Democratic Party’s circular firing squad, where they have this tendency to devour their own people at the slightest hint of anything, and that they had, at that time, turned their sights on President Biden. In that entry, I suggested that the Democrats not devour the president, with the idea that they needed him in order to win in November, and I made a whole bunch of arguments in favor of sticking with Biden. As it would turn out, the party devoured him, as Biden dropped out of the race a little more than a week after my entry published, which rendered my entire Journal entry moot.
So on one hand, I’m kind of salty about the loss of my entry’s relevance. It now goes down in history as the entry that became irrelevant and/or moot the fastest. This one became moot even more quickly than my “I believe that we have finally reached the other side of this thing…” entry from May 2021 where I was declaring all of the pandemic nonsense over, and then officials reneged on their all-clear and reinstated a lot of the nonsense all over again. At least we got to have the summer on that one before everyone started screaming “delta, delta, delta” and made my entry moot. Even more so than regular datedness that comes with Journal entries about elections, such as “Petty tribalism has no place in the 2020 cycle…” that became dated as soon as the primaries ended. But it at least was relevant for a little while.
Categories: National politics, Schumin Web meta
Say hello to Piwigo…
16 minute read
July 27, 2024, 3:45 PM
Beginning on Friday, July 26, you might have noticed that the website looks ever so slightly different. There is a new camera icon in the header, and a new link at the bottom of the pages called “Photography Portfolio“. This is for a new photography site that I recently launched:
Categories: Copyright infringement, Photography, Schumin Web meta
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:
Categories: Artificial intelligence, Schumin Web meta
Raise a glass for ICQ…
8 minute read
May 24, 2024, 5:32 PM
Categories: Netculture, Schumin Web meta
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:
Categories: High school, Middle school, Montgomery Village, Photography, Schumin Web meta, Social media
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.
Categories: Schumin Web meta
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
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
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. 
Continue reading…
Categories: Artificial intelligence, Myself, Schumin Web meta
A look at Lakeside dining past…
8 minute read
June 23, 2022, 12:56 PM
While I was rounding up all of the material for the photo set about Zane Showker Hall, I dug through a lot of old photos of JMU in order to make sure that I had captured all of the relevant material. Generally speaking, whenever I’m doing a photo set for Life and Times that requires rounding up historical photos or otherwise tells a story that is not in chronological, such as Staunton Mall, which included photos taken over multiple days and also a hefty dose of new material, presented in a very different order than it was originally shot, after I gather it all into a work folder, I sort it all out by subject and place the subjects in the order that I intend to present them. In the case of a smaller, non-chronological set like Showker or Staunton Mall, I will usually write and place photos at the same time. Compare to a travelogue photo set like Toronto or North Carolina, where I will do all of the writing first, and then add photos only after the entire narrative has been written. Regardless of how it’s assembled, though, after I complete the first draft, I will typically start cutting things out, as I tend to load things on pretty heavily in my first draft. Sometimes, I’m cutting things out that are extraneous to the story. Other times, I’m trimming the number of photos down to a more manageable amount.
When I was doing the Showker photo set, I originally planned to include photos of some of the dining attractions that were around the building, and actually did a decent amount of writing related to them. One thing that I planned to include was a little bit about Mrs. Green’s, which was a dining operation in nearby Chandler Hall. I also planned to include some discussion of a small food truck that JMU operated in the mornings in front of Showker that I called the Chuckwagon. I ended up cutting both of those, but for different reasons. As far as Mrs. Green’s went, I originally opted to include it because it was in Chandler Hall, which was demolished to make way for Hartman Hall – thus it was something of a “before” for Hartman Hall. However, considering that I only spent about fifteen minutes in Hartman Hall, tops, it came off as extraneous. So I cut it, which created a tighter photo set. For the bit about the Chuckwagon, I realized that I was devoting a large chunk of space to what was essentially a failed test concept, and it had very little to do with the subject other than its being parked in front of Showker. Ultimately, it took the discussion off on a pretty long tangent, and so in order to keep it on subject, it was removed. And for a photo set that was primarily about architecture, anything not about architecture just didn’t fit.
Categories: JMU, Schumin Web meta