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New rugs!

August 2, 2018, 10:28 AM

So I have a little house update for you: carpet!  In the last month or so, I finally got the area rug question figured out, and procured and placed three area rugs in the house.  It makes for a much richer setting with some area rugs on the hardwood floors.  I put area rugs in my bedroom, the back bedroom, and the dining area part of the the living room.  So now, all three bedrooms and the living room have rugs in them.

For some reason, choosing home decor tends to stress me out.  I popped so many Advils in the process of picking these carpets.  I think it’s because it’s a significant cash outlay, because (A) furniture and carpet aren’t cheap, and (B) it’s something that you really don’t want to return, especially if if required special arrangements to get it home in the first place.  Choosing what loveseat to buy for the mezzanine was difficult, as I visited so many stores in search of the perfect loveseat.  I eventually settled on an Ektorp loveseat from IKEA, which turned out to be the perfect thing to put up in the mezzanine.

Deciding on the area rugs took the stress from the loveseat search and multiplied it by twelve.  I had three rooms to outfit, and each had to be perfect, but I didn’t know what “perfect” was.  I knew what my dimensions needed to be, and then worked from there.  I spent many nights on Amazon looking at area rugs.  More headaches.  I went to Walmart and Target’s websites.  Nothing good – need more Advil.  I went down to Big Lots and came out empty, save for a brand new headache.  I also went to Ollie’s up in Jessup, and came out with something for Elyse, but no rugs.  And rugs were my responsibility, since Elyse didn’t quite understand why I was so wound up about rugs, and often suggested that I “just pick something”.

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Categories: House

You know, he totally looks like…

July 31, 2018, 10:50 AM

So I was recently on Reddit and looking at /r/blunderyears, which is a board where people post old embarrassing photos of themselves, and came across this guy’s old photo from 2005:

This guy from /r/blunderyears

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Categories: Asbury Park, Reddit

Five years since I left the nonprofit world…

July 20, 2018, 2:34 PM

Yesterday marked five years since I left Food & Water Watch, where I worked for a little over six years.  I had not been happy there for a while, and the deterioration of things in my last three months or so was the final push that I needed in order to do what I knew that I needed to do, i.e. leave the organization.  Looking back, I suppose that what ultimately happened was the logical conclusion to my work there.  I was hired into a very generalist position back in 2007.  I was that guy who “did everything”.  One day I would be doing accounting work.  One day I was building furniture.  One day I was fixing computers.  One day I would be working in fundraising.  You name it, and I probably did it at some point.  Over the years, my job evolved and changed as the organization grew, and people with more specialized roles were added as various functions of the organization became too large for a more generalist position.  Eventually, there became less of a need for a position like mine, but so rather than promote me to a new role, they opted to unload me.  Suit yourself, I suppose.

In any case, the next fifteen months were an interesting time in my life.  I was reminded of exactly how much job hunting sucks, but I also remember not really feeling any of the positions that I was applying for.  More nonprofit work after just having been chewed up and spit out by one didn’t exactly ignite my passion.  Especially when there was that nagging thought that in a few years, I would probably be searching for a job again, since most people tended to only stay somewhere for two or three years before moving on.  By October, I had given up on nonprofits, and focused on transportation.  I got a CDL, and I was applying to driving jobs.  I was more excited about the work than sitting in an office all day, that’s for sure.  I knew I was in the right place, because I felt like the passion and the fire were back.

It’s funny, though, what makes you realize how much you’ve grown and changed in five years.  I redid my resume about a month ago for a few internal positions that I am pursuing with my current employer, and based the new resume on the one that I had used in 2013 and 2014.  That old resume was trying to be a lot of different things, and focused on how well-rounded I was as a candidate, focusing on technical abilities, writing, and work experience.  It was two pages (front and back), and probably had too much on it, as it had this big, flowery “skills” section, plus a section on volunteer work which covered all of my writing on Wikipedia, and also showcased the various skills developed through Schumin Web.  I thought it was great in 2013 and 2014, but in 2018, I saw a whole lot of fluff.  I condensed that puppy down to one page, as a lot of that was irrelevant to an internal move in a transit agency.  My Wikipedia writing experience went right out the window, as I hadn’t done that in quite a few years, and thus it was less relevant.  Schumin Web is now listed as a real job, as the business side of things (i.e. licensing photos for third party use) has actually become a real revenue stream in the last few years.  And then my Office on Youth internship, which I did in the summer of 2003, is gone.  It didn’t provide any new insights that other positions didn’t already provide, and was for such a short duration that it could disappear and no one would miss it.  Kind of weird to think about, though, since that internship defined my summer that year.  But then again, things change.  No one from when I interned there still works there.  I don’t recognize a single face on their staff bio page.

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Categories: Myself, Work

Nothing like tackling some rewriting projects to make you realize a few things…

July 12, 2018, 4:00 PM

You know, there’s nothing like undertaking a rewriting project to make you realize that you’re a much better writer than you used to be, and also that fluff for the purpose of filling space isn’t helping anyone.  For several years, I’ve had a list of pages that I want to redo, and recently, I finally started knocking a few of them out.  I’ve already completed the new About Me page, and the main page for Odds and Ends also got a rewrite.  Cars and Quote Archives were substantially reworked recently, though those pages were not full rewrites from scratch.  Then I’m also planning on doing full rewrites on the main pages for Archives, Life and Times, and Photography, as the writing on all of those pages is at least a decade old, likely dating back to the 2003 or 2004 redesign.  The photos on those introduction pages were last changed in 2012, when I converted the site to WordPress (six years ago!).

If the two completed rewrites are any indication, this will be a beneficial and much needed upgrade.  The new About Me page replaced a page that was written in 2007 during a site conversion that left the reader with the impression of a person that I no longer am.  The new page corrects that, reflecting new perspectives on things.  The new version also intermingles the history of the website with my own personal history, acknowledging that I’ve had the website for the majority of my life, and that as such, our histories are very much intertwined.  I’ve also linked to different Journal entries and pages throughout, with the idea of providing an overview while not trying to reinvent the wheel by duplicating material that I have already discussed in detail elsewhere on the site.

Then the Odds and Ends rewrite was extremely straightforward, replacing a longer three-paragraph page with a single paragraph.  There’s not much to say about what is essentially a “miscellaneous” section, and the new writing reflects that.  It’s not quite “here it is”, but it avoids droning on for paragraphs just to fill space in order to make the page appear full.  It’s not afraid to be succinct, and to be shorter than the section menu to its right.  I suppose that the new Odds and Ends page’s having blank space beneath while the sidebar continues downward is a flaw in the current site design, but I’m willing to tolerate that for now.  The current site design is nearly six years old at this point, and the site as a whole could probably benefit from a redesign, but one thing at a time.

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Categories: Schumin Web meta

So now what do I do?

June 27, 2018, 8:30 AM

This exercise thing sucks.  I recently came to the realization that I’m never going back to Planet Fitness, and therefore I’m cancelling my membership.  No sense in spending $20 per month on something that I’m not going to use.

I can’t say that I didn’t try, though.  I signed up, and I went as I planned, i.e. after work, during the overnight hours.  I tried all of the equipment, and while the elliptical and the recumbent stair climber seemed like possible winners, the whole Planet Fitness environment intimidated me too much.  How ironic for a company that markets itself with a slogan of “No Gymtimidation”.  I got the specific feeling that they were more interested in their “No Gymtimidation” and “Judgement [sic] Free Zone” image than they were about fitness (and a few people seem to agree with me).  The presence of that stupid “lunk alarm” gimmick also sent off the wrong vibe, and I never even touched the free weights, nor did I have any intention to ever use them.  It’s allegedly the judgment free zone, but they’re constantly watching and judging everything that you do, and that made me feel less at ease with it than I preferred.  I just want to go in, do my thing, and leave.  Too much emphasis on individual conduct makes me uncomfortable because it makes me feel somewhat on edge, and that creates a sense of hostility, like I’m being micromanaged.  Perception is reality here, and that perception negatively affected my enjoyment of the club.

Additionally, I couldn’t find a location that I liked.  I found out that some locations were de facto closed on Sunday nights because they dismantled the entire facility to clean it on those nights.  However, because one of Planet Fitness’s big selling points was being open 24 hours, they couldn’t actually close the facility to clean it.  They had to remain open, even though none of the equipment was available.  So on more than one occasion, Elyse and I got dressed and went out, only to be turned away because all of the equipment was offline for cleaning.  That just speaks of poor planning on the facility’s part, since they could easily split the work and clean in sections over the course of a week in order to maintain full access at all times.  Other locations were better, but too far from my house.  I halfway liked the downtown Silver Spring location, but it was just too far away to be practical.

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It has been twenty years since my trip to England…

June 19, 2018, 12:50 PM

This week marks twenty years since my family went to England.  That trip, from June 14-21, 1998, was our last real family vacation, where we spent about a week doing all of the various touristy things, mostly in the greater London area.

Interestingly, this was a trip that I had been dreading for quite some time.  TWA Flight 800, which went down a few years prior due to what was determined to be a malfunction, was still fresh in my mind, and I was convinced that I was going to die on this flight.  Thus I didn’t want to go.  But they made me.  And as things turned out, I got there and back in one piece, but nonetheless, I still am not a fan of flying.  Every little bump, I’m wondering what’s going on.  I guess that I’m a bit of a white-knuckle flyer, though I wasn’t as a child.  In hindsight, I consider my concern to be rational enough, but I was forgetting that for every incident that makes the news, there are thousands of flights that take off and land uneventfully every day.  It also didn’t help that my last flight prior to that, from Dallas-Fort Worth to Fayetteville on American Eagle in 1992, was one where they had aborted the takeoff due to a mechanical issue.  After aborting the takeoff, they parked the plane somewhere to run a test to determine what was wrong.  The test involved the entire plane’s shaking violently on the tarmac.  After the shaking stopped, they announced that the problem “had corrected itself”.  That was not exactly reassuring.  I would have preferred that they had swapped the plane after that for one where they hadn’t told us of any issues.  I wanted off of that plane, but there was nothing that I could do about it.  Every single bump in that flight, I thought, we’re going to crash.  Not a good feeling.  I was so glad when we finally were on the ground again at the end of that flight.

In any case, we flew from Charlottesville to Philadelphia aboard US Airways Express, and then flew US Airways flight 98 from Philadelphia to London Gatwick.  The Tube was on strike the week that we were visiting, so we did much of our travel via London black cab.

The first day was basically a rest day.  We were jetlagged and knew it, and so we did a lot of sleeping that day, ate dinner at our hotel the Novotel Waterloo), and then took a walk around the area.

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Categories: Family, Travel

Finding my old fifth grade teacher on Facebook…

June 4, 2018, 2:30 PM

Recently, a very familiar name came up in my friend suggestions: “Sharon Payne Bradley”.  In other words, this person:

Sharon Bradley in August 1991, posing with me on the first day of school

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I’m pretty sure that I now have the modern equivalent of TXL…

June 1, 2018, 3:50 PM

Over the last month or so, Elyse and I created a network of smart speakers in the house. Elyse has had a Google Home Mini since early January, and I expanded it, first to three, and then to seven speakers when I realized the capabilities of the devices. With speakers throughout the house, we can use the “broadcast” feature as something of a home intercom system, and we’ve also created speaker groups in order to play music on multiple speakers in various sections of the house, or throughout the entire house. I love these things, because I can, for instance, just ask the system what the weather is, or what time it is, and it will tell me. I can even make phone calls on them and control the lights, though I don’t typically use the phone feature because of audio quality issues, and I’m not willing to spend money on the lights at this point in time (but maybe in the future). Right now, I use them most often for music, and for the home intercom function. And then if I ever get various Nest products, I will be able to connect them to the system as well. Pretty neat.

All in all, I can do a lot of things that TXL could do on Today’s Special. I can talk to it and it gives me information back, I can place phone calls through it, and I can make it control various building systems. I still don’t know how to get it to play “Yo He Ho” at the most inopportune times, though one day I might figure out a way to make it do that. Only thing about this system that I’m not a fan of is that you have to activate it by saying, “Okay, Google,” or “Hey, Google.” If I could customize the phrases that it responds to, I would make it respond to “TXL”, to make it complete. Considering that it does a lot of things that TXL could do on Today’s Special, it seems rather fitting.

Those of you who have used the various smart speakers also know that Google has built some Easter eggs in them, like if you ask what the answer is to life, the universe, and everything, it will tell you that the answer is 42. Using custom routines, I built in a couple of Easter eggs of my own, related to Today’s Special. I wanted it to respond to “How many size 9 shoes are for sale in the store?” with “There are ten pairs of size 9 shoes for sale,” (from “Boxes and Boxes“) but for some reason, it couldn’t comprehend that one, try as I might.

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A walk down an abandoned road…

May 24, 2018, 5:40 AM

On May 17, 2018, I took a solo trip up to Centralia, Pennsylvania.  For those not familiar, Centralia is something of a modern ghost town, having gradually been abandoned due to a coal mine fire that’s been burning uncontrolled beneath the town since 1962, likely caused by deliberate burning of trash in the town’s landfill, which was on top of a former strip mine.  As of 2013, the town had only seven residents remaining, and when those remaining residents pass on or otherwise leave the town, their properties will be seized via eminent domain.

I had done some research about the site, but was a bit iffy on whether it was going to be good or not.  I was concerned about its being a bust, but it was still intriguing enough to make the trip.  And as it turned out, it was pretty cool.  The biggest “attraction” at Centralia is an abandoned section of road known as the “Graffiti Highway”.  That road came about when Pennsylvania Route 61 began having subsidence and visibility issues due to the coal mine fire.  The state built a new alignment for the route on more stable ground in 1993, and the old alignment was abandoned.  Since then, many people have come by and left graffiti tags on the road, which gave the road its nickname.  Besides the road, there are also several cemeteries in Centralia, as well as one remaining active church, Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.

When I went up, I wasn’t quite sure how it would work out.  Based on my research, as well as a little Google sightseeing, there were the roads of the former town surrounded by empty land and a few houses, and the possibility of seeing steam from the mine fire rising from the ground.  The Graffiti Highway was most intriguing.  I’d heard mixed reports about how accessible the Graffiti Highway was, though.  When it was still under state ownership, my understanding was that police tended to chase people away on a routine basis.  I didn’t want to travel that far just to get chased out.  But last fall, the state vacated their easement, i.e. they gave up the right of way, determining that it will never again be used for a road, and ownership of the land reverted back to adjacent property owners.  So I believe that the old road is now on privately owned land, and as such, the heavy enforcement went away now that the state no longer owns the land.  In any case, no one bothered me on my visit.

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Another room transformed…

May 19, 2018, 10:40 PM

A second room in my house meets the paintbrush.  As you may recall, I painted Elyse’s bathroom a few weeks ago, and now, while Elyse was out on a trip to Japan, I painted her bedroom.  This was a much-anticipated paint job, because the basement bedroom was, to put it nicely, the only weird room in the house.  While the rest of the house had white trim, the trim in the basement bedroom was a blue color.  That color, along with the wall color and the ugly chandelier, worked with the previous owner’s furniture, which involved muted colors.  With my furniture in it the color scheme doesn’t work.  So I fixed it.

The color that we chose was Behr “High Speed Access”, which is a medium gray color, in satin finish.  I strongly recommended that Elyse go with a neutral color for the walls, because she intended to put lots of different things on her walls, and that would avoid having colors on the wallhangings clash with the walls themselves.  And then the trim was getting painted white.  That part was non-negotiable.  The rest of the house had white trim, and Elyse’s room was getting that, too, to achieve a consistent design language.  I have a few other “design language” issues with the house that I want to correct as well, such as doorknobs and light switches, but this was a relatively easy one that I knew how to do.

I started the morning after Elyse left, getting “before” pix:

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Categories: House

When you just hate recognition that much…

May 15, 2018, 11:05 PM

People are always amazed when I tell them that I hate receiving recognition.  I just don’t like it.  I don’t find it enjoyable.  In fact, I find it incredibly awkward all around.  I don’t know what it is, but it just isn’t a fun thing.  This came to mind recently because of two discussions that I had with colleagues in the last few weeks.  One was about an operator competition that my employer was having, and another was about an employee of the month program that my specific division has.

In the case of the former, where train operators go out and demonstrate their skills for judges, I couldn’t see any way to get a satisfactory result for myself as a participant.  If I don’t place, I’m kicking myself for not doing better.  If I place, then I have to deal with a whole bunch of unwanted recognition.  Not participating at all seems to take care of both concerns, and I have no problem attending as a non-competitor and watching others compete.  I’ve done that before at a similar event for the bus, where I was there but didn’t compete, and I had a blast.  Besides, I have the most fun just being myself while operating the service.

In the case of the latter, a coworker brought up the idea of it, and how I would possibly be a good candidate for the employee of the month award.  I was honest about it: if I ever were to get the award, I believe that my response would be, “Thank you very much, but please give it to someone else.”  In other words, I would probably decline it.  I just want to do my job and call it a day, and a whole bunch of unnecessary attention just gets in the way of my being awesome.

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Categories: Birthdays, JMU, LPCM, Myself, Walmart, Work

Reliving the nineties, one adventure game at a time…

April 30, 2018, 2:25 PM

Lately, I’ve been reliving the computer games that I used to play in the nineties through the magic of YouTube.  I was a Sierra gamer for the most part back in the day, mostly playing in the Space Quest franchise.  I used to love exploring around the worlds that the game created, hoping to make some sort of breakthrough in the game to advance the plot.

Interestingly enough, my first introduction to Sierra was not through an adventure game.  I played Hoyle’s Official Book of Games, Volume 1, which consisted of six card games: Crazy Eights, Old Maid, Hearts, Gin Rummy, Cribbage, and Klondike solitaire.  The game introduced the player to various Sierra franchises, as well as some other folks, via the various characters that you could play against.  You could play against Princess Rosella and King Graham from King’s Quest, Roger Wilco from Space Quest, Sonny Bonds from Police Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry from the series of the same name.  There were also a few real people, such as Jerry Moore, who was one of the animators, and Warren Schwader, who programmed the game.  Jerry and Warren’s kids, Devin and Christina, respectively, were also in the game.  I learned a lot from that game.  I learned how to play several card games, plus I learned about a number of other Sierra franchises by playing cards with their characters.

At the same time as the Hoyle game, I also had King’s Quest IV, which featured Princess Rosella, whom I knew from playing cards.  I didn’t do too well with that game, though, because I didn’t know that it had a text parser interface – and who reads instructions?  I thought it was all point-and-click like Hoyle was.  So I would just wander around aimlessly and eventually either get bored with it or die, either by falling off one of the cliffs, or by getting caught by one of the trees.

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Categories: Video games

Two projects completed…

April 22, 2018, 1:44 PM

I always enjoy that feeling of accomplishment.  I recently had a vacation from work, and knocked out two home improvement projects: counter-height chairs for the kitchen, and painting Elyse’s bathroom.  Both of these were long in progress, and several days off of work meant that I could finally complete them.

The kitchen project probably had the most impact on me.  Since moving in, Elyse and I had been using chairs that were the wrong height:

Chairs of the wrong height in the kitchen

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Categories: Furniture, House

They listed the color as black…

April 2, 2018, 2:23 PM

In the time since the Soul burned a little less than two months ago, Elyse and I had been wondering what happened to it afterward.  We knew that it had been taken to Terry’s Body Shop in Purcellville immediately after the fire, and then the insurance company moved it to a facility in Culpeper in order to do their investigation.  The sequence of events that I described and the photos of the fire itself pointed to a fuel fire, i.e. that fuel started leaking out near the engine, and then, presumably, once the leaked fuel hit the hot engine, it ignited, and the rest was history.  However, the results of the insurance company’s investigation were inconclusive, as the fire had burned everything so thoroughly that their experts were unable to formally determine a specific cause that triggered the whole sequence of events.

Elyse had wondered if the car would end up on one of those auto salvage auction sites, and went hunting online to see if she could find it.  Her search came up empty.  Then, a few weeks later, I put the Soul’s VIN into Google to see what came up.  I didn’t expect to find anything, so I was a bit surprised to hit pay dirt.  I found a page from Insurance Auto Auctions with photos of my former car.  The listing indicated that the damage was “total burn”, with a black exterior and a black interior.  The black interior was correct, though I imagine that they weren’t thinking of the one that I remembered, but rather the one that existed after the fire.  The description of the exterior color as “black” amused me, because most of the body was no longer green following the fire.  Considering that, it’s pretty hard to argue with that description of the color.

Right front view.  I imagine that this side, with its heavy smoke and fire damage, is what led the auction site to list the car's color as "black" instead of green.
Right front view.  I imagine that this side, with its heavy smoke and fire damage, is what led the auction site to list the car’s color as “black” instead of green.

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Categories: Kia Soul

Now working out on land…

March 25, 2018, 1:39 PM

My exercise regimen has, for the past year or so, been a matter of fits and starts.  I resumed going to the pool before work last July, and ended up discontinuing it in October.  Now, I’m going to Planet Fitness a few nights a week in order to regain my boyish figure.  So far, so good, though admittedly, I’m still trying to figure out my groove.

It’s a shame, though, that I’m hanging up my speedo, at least for the time being.  When I went back to the pool, I intended to go in, do my hour, and then get ready for work.  However, I think that it was a combination of factors that doomed it.  I work nights, and that meant that the time that I used to work out some years back was now spent at work.  With the pool’s closing at 9:00, that meant that if I wanted to go, I had to go in the morning.  It is hard to get up first thing in the morning to go exercise.  That also stuck me in with what I called the “Leisure World crowd”, which was typically an older set that swam slowly.  When those people reached a certain level to where we started swimming three to a lane, it directly impacted my ability to complete my own workout.  That becomes frustrating when it happens on a regular basis.  I also felt rushed through the whole process because of a hard timepoint, i.e. getting to work on time, right afterward.  Get in, swim, get out, go to work.  I don’t like rushing, because that just sucks the fun out of the whole endeavor.

Additionally, at Montgomery County swimming pools, as a lap swimmer, you quickly learn where you stand on the totem pole of swimmers.  You are right at the bottom, down where the dog lifts its leg.  Swim team is at the top of the heap, and then you have aqua aerobics classes, swim lessons, SWIMontgomery (the pre-swim team program), and even open recreational swim (i.e. kiddie playtime) that takes precedence over lap swimming.  The management has no problem giving a full lane to a swim lesson group of five preschoolers and one instructor that will never leave the shallow end, and which requires a special platform so that the kids can even touch bottom, while cramming eight or nine people into two lanes for lap swimming.  Good luck trying to get a good workout under those circumstances, with that many people stuffed into a lap lane.  Likewise, the management won’t return lanes if a class has low attendance.  I have seen many occasions where an aerobics class is given four lanes (i.e. half the pool) for about five participants, while the lap lanes are crowded.  It’s ridiculous.

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