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.
Continue reading…Categories: Artificial intelligence, Today's Special
Saying goodbye to a childhood icon…
9 minute read
March 19, 2025, 2:37 PM
Categories: Canada, Today's Special
And now she’s in Mobile…
5 minute read
March 10, 2025, 9:26 AM
This is one of those subjects where you just have to let out a big sigh. I never really thought that I would see the day, but the SS United States, also known as the “Big U”, left Philadelphia under tow by the Vinik No. 6 and was taken down the east coast, around the tip of Florida, and up the Gulf of Mexico to Mobile, Alabama, where she is to be stripped of everything that isn’t metal, and then sunk to become the world’s largest artificial reef and be something of a diving tourist attraction for her new owners, Okaloosa County, Florida, while at least one of her funnels as well as her mast will be preserved to become part of a museum about the ship on land nearby. I feel like this is something that nobody really wanted to see happen to the Big U, but after more than 28 years spent sitting at Pier 82 in Philadelphia, she had overstayed her welcome, and the owners of the pier went to court to have her evicted. And at that point, with her losing her longtime berth, and no prospects for a rehabilitation on the horizon, it came down to whether it was better to scrap her or to sink her. Okaloosa County, Florida stepped up and she was to be sunk.
And of course, like everything with the United States, even her departure was long and drawn out. She was originally supposed to leave Philadelphia to begin her preparations for sinking on November 15, 2024, and Elyse and I had planned to see her off, booking a room at the Hampton Inn in Pennsville, New Jersey in order to watch her go underneath the Delaware Memorial Bridge. Then that date was scrubbed, so I cancelled the reservation. Then another date was announced that I couldn’t make, and that date came and went, with the Big U’s remaining at her longtime pier across the street from IKEA. She finally left Philadelphia on February 19 – a day that I had previous commitments that precluded our going. However, we did follow the Vinik No. 6 on MarineTraffic as she passed the Delaware Memorial Bridge that evening, and then cleared Cape May to enter the open ocean. I also enjoyed seeing all of the various photo updates showing the ship going down the Delaware, and then out at sea for the first time since the nineties. Then I got a certain feeling of sadness when she arrived in Mobile, because that meant that it was time for her preparation for her date with the bottom of the ocean to commence.
Categories: Ships
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.
Categories: Artificial intelligence, Schumin Web meta
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.
Categories: DC area local news, Elementary school, Fire alarms, Netculture
Winter in Harrisburg…
8 minute read
February 2, 2025, 1:54 PM
On January 24, while Elyse was at MAGFest, I went up to Pennsylvania for some wintry fun. Most of the fun occurred in the Harrisburg area, as I had a few things in mind that I wanted to photograph, mostly with the drone. The trip was inspired by my friend Andrew Reams, who recently flew his own drone over Three Mile Island, and got some shots that I was not able to get when I flew around that site in 2021 due to DJI-imposed geofencing that was in place at the time (I have complained about this on here in the past). Now, after verifying that the geofences were indeed gone, I wanted to give it another flight and get the shots that I had wanted to get before but was locked out of getting. I couldn’t justify an entire trip just for Three Mile Island, though, so I did what I usually do, and came up with other photo targets to fill out an entire day. The final result wasn’t necessarily the most efficient trip, but I thought it turned out well, as the snow on the ground made the landscape look different than it usually does.
My first stop was fairly random: the interchange between the Pennsylvania Turnpike (I-76) and I-83 in New Cumberland.
Interchange between I-83 and Limekiln Road in New Cumberland.
Categories: Harrisburg, Photography, Winter weather
The inauguration is over…
7 minute read
January 21, 2025, 10:12 AM
I guess that is that. The inauguration is over and done with, and Donald Trump is once again our president, for better or for worse. I didn’t vote for him, and I suspect that the next four years are going to be a wild ride. And despite what the doomsayers in the news media as well as social media have said, we’re going to make it through this and get to the other side. After all, we survived one Trump presidency, and we can survive another. Watching how quickly a lot of things normalized after another administration was in charge after Trump left office in 2021 lends some credence to that.
It’s kind of interesting to watch Trump’s rise to politial prominence over the last decade or so and kind of put it together. I feel like it started with his questioning the legitimacy of Obama’s citizenship. Recall that during the 2008 election, a lot of noise had been made about Obama’s citizenship, and therefore his eligibility for the presidency. At the time, it was considered fringe, i.e. only lunatics, referred to as “birthers”, believed that Obama wasn’t a natural born citizen. Obama released his certificate of live birth from the state of Hawaii, and that was more or less the end of it. Obama was elected, and we all moved on. Then fast forward to around 2011, and Donald Trump, then just a rich New Yorker with bad hair, a big mouth, and a reality TV show, started making a lot of noise about the whole birth certificate thing, years after the issue had effectively been settled, with the idea that the certificate of live birth was insufficient, and that he wanted Obama’s long-form birth certificate. A lot of other people joined in on this, and it became an issue all over again, even though the issue had been settled, and Obama had been president for more than two years by this point. I figured that the Obama administration would ignore it and just keep on doing their thing, and let the whole matter burn out because the administration won’t bite. After all, Trump was just a nutter. He was a rich and influential nutter, but a nutter all the same. But then, surprisingly, the Obama administration took the bait, and released his long-form birth certificate in response. Suddenly, Trump just got a lot of legitimacy in the political sphere. He made a lot of noise, and the president responded. If the president had simply ignored it, I wonder if Trump would have just faded off of the political stage and we would only see him whenever he was opening a new hotel or firing a contestant on his TV show. I wonder if the Obama administration’s responding to Trump’s noise was the biggest mistake that the they made during their eight years, even though they had no way of knowing it at the time. I appreciate the rationale that they gave for it, that they were trying to put the issue to bed once and for all and move on from it, but the action gave legitimacy to the revival of a long-settled issue and enabled Donald Trump. Sometimes you have to let things die a natural death rather than attempting to execute them, even if you find them undesirable to have around, and this was one of those things where they should have simply ignored it and let it fizzle out on its own.
Categories: National politics
At long last, she is home…
11 minute read
January 18, 2025, 8:46 AM
I have some good news: at long last, my New Flyer D35HF transit bus is home. I had it brought in via truck, basically because I considered all of the various factors and it just worked out better to get it trucked in rather than driving it. The main factor was that we still have a few remaining mechanical issues with the bus, and we’re just about there when it comes to fixing it, but I was getting tired of having a long-distance relationship with the bus mechanic. Make no mistake: General Diesel is a great shop, and I would recommend them to anyone in the Charleston area who needs trucks or buses serviced. They were extremely helpful to Elyse and me, they were very communicative about what was going on with the bus, they answered all of my questions, and they were happy to rescue us after the last two attempts at retrieval ended unsuccessfully. But my being more than 500 miles away had its challenges, as I couldn’t actually go over and see what was going on myself, and I also had no real access to the bus, because any trip down required a large commitment of time and money for traveling, lodging, etc. Add to that how we had already made three attempts to bring her home, and while we certainly made something out of most of those trips separate from the bus-related activities, that time and expense was starting to add up. The thought was that a successful transport would involve transportation to Charleston for Elyse, myself, and possibly also Tristan, along with lodging, fuel, and a three-day time commitment. And this was for a bus that none of us were particularly familiar with because we had collectively spent all of about three days with her over the span of about a year. And after three failed retrieval attempts, I wasn’t feeling another one. We were also really lucky that all of our breakdowns happened in the Charleston area, because that was an easy return-to-launch-site kind of mission abort. It might have been a whole different story had this happened somewhere in rural North Carolina, for instance, which was still very far from home, but also far from our shop. All of that said, shipping the bus was starting to sound pretty attractive, paying once and knowing with certainty that she was going to make it all the way here, plus that freed me up to attend to other things.
The process of shipping the bus was a challenge, mainly because I had never done something like this before and therefore didn’t know what I was doing. I started by using Shiply, which was essentially an online brokerage service where you put out a proposal for something that you need transported and then shippers bid on it. That was overwhelming. I was getting bombarded by bids from all kinds of little shipping companies that I had never heard of, and all of them seemed very pushy, which didn’t make me comfortable at all. That pushiness was a real turnoff, especially when there was no hurry to complete this job (it wasn’t hurting anything staying in South Carolina), and I refused to be rushed, especially when I didn’t know much about what I was doing. I ended up going back to my various contacts and got more recommendations for how to transport this thing, and tried again. One contact recommended uShip, which is similar to Shiply. I put a request for proposals out for there as well, however, that led to the same overwhelming bombardment as Shiply, plus a number of shippers did their own research and contacted me outside of uShip to try to get around uShip’s fees. I was contacted through Schumin Web‘s Facebook page, my contact form, as well as on my Fine Art America store’s contact form (which is something that I didn’t know existed). My response to that sort of behavior, going around the platform where I made the request, was automatic disqualification. I was not going to enable that sort of shady behavior in any way, shape, or form, so by not respecting boundaries, they had de facto self-selected out of the process.
Categories: Frederick, New Flyer D35HF
When the bridge is gone…
6 minute read
January 3, 2025, 5:21 PM
On December 27, Elyse, Aaron Stone, and I went on a little outing that included a stop at Fort Armistead Park in Baltimore, which is located adjacent to the Key Bridge. This bridge was destroyed in the early morning of March 26, 2024 in a shipping accident that was captured live on camera, where the MV Dali collided with a support pier. Following evidence collection for an investigation into the accident, the debris was removed and the shipping channel was reopened.
I had first visited Fort Armistead back in 2022 on a previous outing with Elyse and Aaron, which is a popular location to photograph ship traffic going in and out of the Port of Baltimore, and got a few shots of the Key Bridge at that time:
Categories: Baltimore, Baltimore County, Roads, Ships
A fun little trip to the Valley…
11 minute read
December 26, 2024, 10:03 AM
From December 18-20, Elyse and I took a trip down to Virginia, staying in the Staunton area. This was the usual one of these trips, where we go down, do stuff, and then see my parents. This time, we went down via US 29 and back via I-81. Surprisingly, it wasn’t as big of a photography trip as I’d hoped, owing mostly to weather conditions. But overall, we had a good time.
We started out with a side trip in Northern Virginia, stopping at a small Polish grocery store in Vienna that Elyse had previously identified. Nice place. Then we continued, stopping at an antique mall in Culpeper. That began as a restroom stop for Elyse, but as it would turn out, they had a big area with model train stuff, which Elyse spent some time looking at. She ended up getting a small model railcar from there. I found two things interesting. First, they had a vintage exit sign in the back:
Categories: Family, Fire alarms, Friends, Roads, Staunton, Travel, Virginia, Waynesboro
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
Now that we know how the story ends, let’s discuss…
12 minute read
November 10, 2024, 10:15 AM
That was certainly an interesting election night. First of all, I couldn’t help but think that the news coverage reminded me of an episode of Deal Or No Deal, in that there was a lot of yakking amongst the talking heads, then it’s suddenly time to make a call, which felt like opening a case. And then depending on what was in the case, we all went “yay” or “awwww”, and then finally at the end of the night, we open up our own case and find out who the next president will be. The only thing missing was the banker.
That observation aside, the night felt a lot like election night in 2016, when Hillary Clinton lost the election to Donald Trump. There, Elyse and I were at home, watching the election results roll in, and we saw a lot more states get called for Trump than we expected to see. I remember when they called Ohio, Elyse said to me, “Trump is going to win, isn’t he?” I was doing the math there, and I didn’t want to agree with her, but it was looking like that was going to be the case. Then the next morning, we found out that it was.
This time around, I was at work, and checked in on the election on my breaks. I couldn’t help but notice that with every check of my phone, Trump remained ahead of vice president Kamala Harris. I expected a Trump lead early on due to the red mirage/blue shift phenomenon, where precincts with lower populations, which typically tend to vote Republican, get counted quickly because they’re small, giving an early bump to the GOP candidate – thus the red mirage, because the Republicans get that early boost. Then as larger population centers, which typically tend to vote for Democratic candidates, get counted, the Democrats catch back up – thus the blue shift. So when I saw all of the early returns come in and saw that Trump was leading, I was like, okay, red mirage, nothing to worry about here, because it will correct itself later on. Then after another trip across the line, I checked my phone and was surprised to see that Trump was still leading. I was starting to think, okay, when is the blue shift going to happen? As it would turn out, it never came, as Trump ultimately pulled out a victory over Harris. I would check my phone after each trip across the line, and watched as Harris’ path to victory got narrower and narrower. Then I watched it some more when I got home. Once Pennsylvania had been called for Trump, I realized that it was over. At that point, in order for Harris to make it to 270, she would have had to win in every single state that remained in play, but one of those states was Alaska, which is a very reliable red state. In fact, Alaska has only cast its electoral votes for a Democratic candidate once in its entire history as a state, in 1964 for LBJ. Every other time, it’s voted for the Republican, and there was no reason to think that this election would buck that trend. It was a certain sinking feeling to know that the path to a Democratic victory had fully closed, and a Harris presidency just wasn’t going to happen.
Categories: National politics
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