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2 minute read

June 29, 2004, 11:42 PM

Yes, after six straight days, where I worked all four different Service Desk shifts at least once, I finally have gotten another off-day. This Wednesday, I will be going nowhere near my own Wal-Mart. Other people’s Wal-Marts, on the other hand, are a completely different story, as most other Wal-Marts don’t look at all like Waynesboro’s. Most Wal-Marts are gray, red, and blue. Our store is beige and forest green. Our store has black signage and faux-wood floors. Most stores have some sort of blue signage and carpeting.

So I have yet to figure out what tomorrow looks like. Probably not going to go out, but rather I will probably take the opportunity to do some serious work on the Web site. I really need to work on it, since right now I’m behind on a few different projects, including spinning College Life off into its own subsidiary site, working on “The Lights of the Night” group of photo sets, and my “Memories” College Life set.

Otherwise, the phrase “Are your gas bills so high they make you want to cry?” is just perfect for me. To fill up the Previa costs almost $30 with these astronomical gas prices. And my car isn’t even one of those gas-guzzling SUVs.

Now sport-utility vehicles aren’t helping the price of gas, either. If people would all get small, fuel-efficient cars, maybe we could all get more for our money as far as gas goes. I know that when I eventually replace the Previa, I will be getting a small car, preferably a station wagon.

Continue reading…

Categories: Driving, Family, Food and drink, Schumin Web meta, Toyota Previa, Walmart

< 1 minute read

June 22, 2004, 12:57 PM

It’s been just a touch more than a week since last we spoke, and it’s because I’ve been hurrying to finish a massive update to my Transit Center site. There’s LOTS more WMATA on there now, in the Washington DC Rail section. And today, I’m actually writing you from the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library in Charlottesville, because I’m over here for two reasons. First off, I returned some pants to Casual Male earlier, because trust me… these pants were WAY too big. Made me feel skinny. The pants were that big.

I’m also bus-sighting over here, so I can add Charlottesville’s CTS system to my Transit Center Web site. I’ve actually gotten 42 photos today so far, plus one movie, though I highly doubt I will use everything. Still, look for Charlottesville to join the likes of Metrobus, Dash About, CUE, and Harrisonburg Transit at a Schumin Web Transit Center near you.

And then tomorrow I’m going to DC! I’m meeting two fellow posters from SubTalk, and we’re going to do some serious railfanning. I’m meeting up with Oren H., as well as Jersey Mike. I’ve railfanned with Oren before, but never Mike. This ought to be fun!

Categories: Schumin Web meta, Transit

< 1 minute read

June 2, 2004, 10:39 PM

Yes, my birthday present is now officially on order: two Strong Bad tees. If only it worked like this, though…

Hey Strong Bad,
Get Bubs to give out free luncch (sic) specials and I’ll show you a hot girl.
Sincerly (sic),
Someone

Maybe if I can get Bubs to say his name backwards minus the first B, legend has it we can get a free lunch special, and maybe a free T-shirt if we’re really lucky.

Now if we can only get him to make another appearance on H*R as the Thnikkaman, and life will be perfect.

Though I should let you know that the current plan for the June cover photo (and by extension an explanation why one is not up yet) is that I am planning on dressing up as the Thnikkaman for the cover photo. A little tribute to one of my favorite Homestar Runner characters.

Still, I can’t wait to get my Strong Bad T-shirts. It will go quite well with my sister’s Teen Girl Squad T-shirt.

Categories: Birthdays, Homestar Runner, Retail, Schumin Web meta

< 1 minute read

May 2, 2004, 8:36 PM

I admit it – we at the Service Desk have tape. And tape really does hold the world together. How does one prove this? Just watch me some time. The item is busted, and obviously unfit for sale. The package is a mess, or it won’t go back in right. How do you close it up? Tape! Good old tape. Fixes things right up.

A customer today said forget the happy face, we’ve got some serious tape going on.

Otherwise, though, I had Bill Cosby’s “Little Ole Man” song in my head today. That’s the one where Bill Cosby talks about the little old man sitting on the step, with the tear kinda trickling down his cheek. He says, “What’s the matter?” and the man says, “A train just ran over me!” He says, “Mmm. How often does this happen?” And the man says, “Every day, about this time.” And Cos says, “Well, why do you just sit out here, then?” And the man says, “Because I cannot believe that it’s happening.” So Bill Cosby says, “Reach out! Take my hand! You’ll understand!” and then the chorus says, “Everything is all right, up tight, out of sight!”

And now I’m going to do some much needed Web site work. New store stuff, hopefully a new quote, and some other miscellaneous stuff.

Categories: Schumin Web meta, Walmart

3 minute read

April 12, 2004, 4:33 AM

My goodness, I hate mornings! But that’s what my day’s going to be today, as I have to work the 7 AM to 4 PM shift at the Service Desk. I don’t know what it is about me, but I’ve never been able to handle the mornings like I do the afternoons and evenings. I so can’t stand mornings. I’m no good before at least 10:00. Those 11 AM to 8 PM shifts on the Service Desk have spoiled me. Thankfully, though, I don’t get these early shifts that often.

Also, I had an interesting thing happen to me last night. I was investigating a troublemaker on the forums, and was zapping some rather obscene posts that this individual posted. All of a sudden, the posts reappeared, plus the forum went out of maintenance mode (which basically turns off the boards temporarily), which I put it in while Entangled Web moved me to a new server.

Turns out that while I was working, the DNS change, which usually takes a couple of days to propagate across the Internet, reached me while I was working on the forums. Thus I went from my site on the old server to my site on the new server. And in an area that made it through just fine.

The forums weathered the move just fine, but you know one thing that didn’t? The main site. Now before the DNS change reached me, I had made a small change to the splash page on only the new site (changing the © date to 2004, which I’d been meaning to do for a while) so I would know that it had cut over. Turns out I didn’t need to. The site looks like a bomb hit it! Basically what happened is when they moved my site, they didn’t get it all over there in all the right places. So now I have to fix it all up and get it running right again.

Continue reading…

Categories: Schumin Web meta, Television, Walmart

< 1 minute read

March 2, 2004, 12:32 AM

I could make a book with that as the slogan. A friend of mine mentioned it to me, and I think it would be pretty amusing, don’t you think? And you think about it – my site is loaded when it comes to information. I have all sorts of stuff, in the quotes, the journal, the photo areas, all that. Lots of observations about modern life.

Meanwhile, as my site approaches eight years old (no bull!), it would be interesting to have.

But yeah, March 23 is my site’s eighth birthday. Wow… eight years. I was fourteen years old when I started my site. Now I’m 22. I was a freshman in high school back then, with a zit or two here and there (I never had a completely-broken-out face full of zits during puberty). Now I am – say it with me – an adult, doing things that adults do, like going to work every day, paying bills, etc. etc. etc.

Still, eight years. Wow. Doesn’t feel like that long ago.

Categories: Schumin Web meta

3 minute read

December 22, 2003, 12:38 AM

Yeah, Wal-Mart is a full-contact sport, it seems. Of course, the day after Thanksgiving, known as “Black Friday” (a day where I wore all black to be silly) is very much full-contact, with the customers practically killing each other for great deals.

Then there’s me – I’ve managed to hit myself in the face a few times with oddly-shaped-but-light items. Mostly wrapping paper. I’m trying to manage the wrapping paper, getting it from the belt to the bag, and in the process manage to hit myself in the head. Really smooth. There was another time when I accidentally hit the checkout light (you know, the red thing with the number on it) with a roll of wrapping paper. A small flurry of dust fell off of the number and onto me.

All in all, though, I like my job, and so that’s always a good thing.

Continue reading…

Categories: Food and drink, Schumin Web meta, Walmart

< 1 minute read

December 20, 2003, 12:37 AM

Ladies and gentlemen, I have severe hat hair! This is what happens when you wear a Santa hat for nine hours straight. We’ve been wearing these little Santa hats on the registers, and I have a big head, and so my hair gets crushed. So say hello to hat hair. I figure it must be Wal-Mart’s method of getting us to wear the hats all day. Once you wear the hat for a little bit, there goes your good hair day. So you keep the hat on all day and only remove it once you’re safely out of the store and somewhere where people won’t comment on your hat hair.

Meanwhile, I’ve finished sorting images for The Schumin Web Transit Center, my new transit-oriented site, and now I’m combing through those images, and prepping images for the site. Basically, I’m clearing out obviously bad images (blurry, not properly framed, etc.), and bringing out the good qualities in the ones that are left. Most of them are of DC Metro (as in Metrorail), and so be prepared to see a lot of trains…

Categories: Christmas, Schumin Web meta, Walmart

< 1 minute read

November 28, 2003, 2:30 AM

It is up to my sister to come up with a better picture than my November 2003 picture for the splash page. She said, upon seeing it, “What are you doing to that poor dresser?” I will admit – after being told what it looks like, it does look like I’m humping the dresser, but I swear it was totally innocent. Ask Kathleen from LPCM, who took the picture, and she’ll tell you that it was innocent, too.

So my sister is in charge of December’s picture. She needs a little coaching on what I want in a picture. She wants to find a premade image of a buff guy totally naked except for a Santa hat covering his you-know-what, and photoshop my head onto it. I rejected it out of hand. No way on that one.

She still has to come up with something, and it had better be better than that last idea. I’m interested to see, myself…

Categories: Family, LPCM, Schumin Web meta

< 1 minute read

November 22, 2003, 11:04 PM

I’m looking at this page about highways in Texas, and if you look at the link (it will open in a new window, so don’t worry about losing me), notice the font on the road sign. That’s the actual road-sign font, which is officially called “FHWA Series E Modified”. For Windows, someone made a font called “Blue Highway”, which looks like FHWA Series E Modified.

I wish that I had this font back in 1997 when I did my site up with a highway theme. All my page titles were graphical road signs, but instead of the official highway font, I used about every different font I could find on those signs. I used Arial, Times New Roman, some ransom-paste type font, you name it. It was interesting, but if I had the real font, oh, how sharp it would have looked…

Categories: Schumin Web meta

< 1 minute read

November 11, 2003, 1:44 PM

I feel a little bit swamped today. I do want to get a new quote up to prevent the current quote from running for three full weeks, but when I will get to it is another story entirely.

But it’s good to be busy, because it means things are getting accomplished.

Categories: Schumin Web meta

< 1 minute read

October 30, 2003, 11:21 AM

Yes, spam, as in unsolicited commercial Email, is crippling the Email system. But not how you think. It seems that as a result of people and their overzealous spam filters that nowadays I’m more astonished when Email DOES arrive than it getting eaten.

It used to be so easy to get Emails through to people. Address, message, subject, and voila. Done. If I need to send a file as previously discussed, I attach it and go.

Nowadays, there have been cases of all kinds of messages being eaten. Kathleen, the LPCM campus minister, recently sent me a whole bunch of stuff that never showed up, eaten up by the Email monster. I Emailed Dr. Teske a sound that we had previously discussed. Never showed up, though interestingly enough, it did show up for the friend I CC-ed it to who’s on the same server. I Emailed Dr. Skelley a paper recently, and it never showed up. Very frustrating…

At least I got the spam filters taken off of Schumin Web. You send something to my Email address, and I can assure you, I will get it. This after I nearly lost some domain names because the spam filter was eating my confirmation Emails.

It’s sad when I can say that the spammers are winning in destroying Email, but not directly due to their own activities, but rather some overzealous filtering techniques that will eat more Emails than they let through.

Categories: Internet, Schumin Web meta

< 1 minute read

October 9, 2003, 1:29 AM

I do so love it when things come together. With the help of “STN 2” on the CafePress boards, I got a new set of ASP code up and running on my Online Store. I don’t know about you, but I think it looks really good. I also took the opportunity to make a few other changes on there to enhance the appearance. And it took maybe an hour tops to do the conversion and testing, testing it in a “test-stoer” directory (I mistyped and decided to leave it, since it was a test folder, after all). So take a look, let me know what you think… you know. All that good stuff. And buy some Schumin Web merchandise – the thongs are still there.

Categories: Schumin Web meta

< 1 minute read

September 20, 2003, 3:47 PM

Don’t you just hate it when things don’t work out? I’ve been having such difficulty with the photo for my upcoming “cell phone rant” quote, and as such, I’m forced to reschedule it from going up tomorrow to going up in another week. Thankfully, I have another quote ready to go, so it’s just a matter of swapping dates, but still… this was a quote I’d really “talked up” in the last week. But this is what happens when reality rears its ugly head sometimes…

Categories: Schumin Web meta

< 1 minute read

September 2, 2003, 7:50 AM

Who would think I could take elements of The High Speed Credit Pursuit and make a public administration case out of it? But I did… so I created for this project the Carinthia Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, otherwise known as CMATA. That ought to be a fun case, as I threw in a bunch of inside jokes not only on the “system map” for the subway (a modification of Metro‘s system map), but also in the case itself. Fun…

Categories: JMU, Schumin Web meta