Looking to make a portal site…
6 minute read
December 25, 2025, 9:59 PM
Lately, I’ve found myself in a bit of a conundrum: what domain to use for a new “portal” website that I am planning. It’s not going to be anything too elaborate, as it’s more or less going to be a self-hosted version of what people use Linktree for, using a content engine called Linkstack. The portal site would contain links to this site, the photo site, my various social media pages, and a contact form. I tested the Linkstack system in a testing environment back in February, and it works very well. The only reason why nothing has been rolled out to production yet is because other projects have taken precedence over this, and that’s understandable.
The endgame here is to have this portal site serve as a landing page for a future business card run. I would put a URL on the card along with a QR code, which would land people at that portal site, and from there, they could go to whichever property that they need to go. Running business cards is not unheard of for me, as I did it once before, back in March 2014. At that time, I was out of work (though I was working on laying the groundwork to begin my career in public transportation), and I was trying to make Schumin Web into more of a business than it was at the time in order to try to monetize the content in new ways. The way that I figured, no one was likely to license my various opinions about things, but the photographic content had potential for use in other contexts, and so that’s what I focused on. At the time, The Schumin Web was my only brand, and so that’s how I marketed it. The front of the business card had the logo on a cloud background:
Continue reading…Categories: Schumin Web meta
An unsupervised trip to Virginia…
15 minute read
December 16, 2025, 4:25 PM
From December 11-13, I took a weekend trip down to Augusta County, completely unsupervised. That was a switch from what usually happens. Normally, when someone is solo traveling, it’s Elyse, and I’m home because I have to work, but this time, Elyse stayed home due to other commitments, and I took a trip down by myself. It was a pretty simple trip, but I had a good time. I stayed at Hotel 24 South in Staunton like I usually do on these trips, and had a good time, going around and photographing things.
The first thing of note, though, is the view from my hotel room. I was in room 513 this time around, and the view left a bit to be desired. Check it out:
Categories: Afton Mountain, Augusta County, Staunton, Stuarts Draft, Travel, Waynesboro
A short-sighted solution?
3 minute read
December 8, 2025, 9:33 PM
Recently, the Maryland legislature passed a law that made a number of changes to vehicle registration in the state. Most of it was fairly mundane, with changes to the fee structures and such, but one change stood out to me. That was changed the requirements for historic vehicles, and I found it to be a bit short-sighted. The memo that MVA put out about the changes describes it this way:
A new definition of historic vehicles (Class L). The current “at least 20 years old” is replaced by “model years of 1999 or older.” This means that model years 2000 – 2005 vehicles that are currently historic vehicles must convert to a standard registration. These vehicles will also be subject to VEIP requirements and if there is no record of a safety inspection by current owner, a safety inspection.
Note that what is considered to be an historic vehicle now has a hard date baked into the law. This to me comes off as extremely short-sighted as time passes. Right now, in 2025, it makes enough sense because that’s where 25 years lies, which is typically the cutoff for “historic”. That’s where you start to qualify for historic vehicle insurance, and so on. The problem will start to show itself as time passes. For instance, five years from now, the oldest vehicles that would qualify for historic tags would still be model year 1999, which would be thirty years ago. And then in ten years, it will still be 1999, i.e. 35 years ago, vs. the previous 20-25 year lookback period that moved with time.
Categories: New Flyer D35HF, State and local politics