If you want us to take you seriously, learn how to write…
8 minute read
July 19, 2024, 7:55 PM
It always amazes me at what kinds of stuff people allow to be published under their name, especially when they’re doing it with the expectation of making money. More specifically, it amazes me at how poor some of the work is that they publish with the aim of furthering their business endeavors. I have always been of the opinion that if you’re trying to market yourself, you should always put your best foot forward. The idea is that when you are selling yourself, you should be on your “A” game, because that’s the best that you’re ever going to be, when you’re trying to woo potential new clients. And if you can’t be bothered to do that when you’re trying to sell your services, what else are you slacking off on?
It’s like what they say about errors on a job application. The conventional wisdom there is that if there is any kind of error, no matter how minor, on your cover letter or resume, be it typographical, spelling, or grammatical, your resume is going in the trash. Let’s take a line out of my own resume from my description of my time as a bus operator:
Safely operated 40’ and 60’ buses on predefined routes, providing scheduled service to the general public.
Looks decent enough. Good spelling, good grammar, and no typographical errors. I’d hire me. Now here’s the same line, but this time, I have deliberately added a typographical error:
Safely operated 40’ and 60’ buses on predefined routes, providing schedueld service to the general public.
Did you see it? “Scheduled” is now “schedueld”. It doesn’t change the meaning of the sentence (unlike, for example, when “public” inadvertently gets shortened to “pubic”), but if I submitted that to someone in hopes of getting hired, I would have no business being upset when I don’t get any calls back, because I didn’t do my due diligence in making sure that I had put my own best foot forward. I couldn’t be bothered to make sure that I got the words all written correctly, and so there is no reason to think that I wouldn’t miss something far more sensitive on the job that could cost the company a lot of money. The company can easily dodge that potential bullet by not hiring the guy who has already provided documented proof of a lack of attention to detail.
Categories: Social media, Some people, Work
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
A proper visit to Charleston…
28 minute read
May 9, 2024, 10:14 AM
From April 17-19, Elyse and I made a weekend trip down to Charleston, South Carolina. It’s funny how this worked out. After our visit to Charleston last October, we both were left wanting more. We saw lots of potential in Charleston, and wanted to go back, but we weren’t sure whether we wanted to drive back again, vs. flying. Charleston is eight hours away, which is quite a long haul, and it’s almost entirely through rural areas once you get out of the DC region. In other words, not very exciting. But then when we looked at airfare, we realized that it was really expensive, and that with all of the goings-on at the airport plus multiple flights, we wouldn’t save any time compared to driving, plus we would be limited as to what we could bring with us, and would probably need to rent a car down there. All of that said, that pushed me into driving territory, because then we could bring whatever we wanted, go on our own schedule, and have fun on the way down and back. Plus then we would have the HR-V in Charleston.
On the southbound leg, I tried to keep the trip as close to all-business as I could. I only planned on making four stops: one in the Richmond area, one in Skippers, Virginia (the last Virginia exit on I-95), one somewhere in North Carolina, and then one at the Buc-ee’s in Florence, South Carolina. That would get us to Charleston at a somewhat reasonable hour as long as we kept to it.
Richmond was intended primarily as a food stop. My original idea was to stop at the Sheetz at the Atlee exit, and do Sheetz, and I pitched that to Elyse a few days prior to our trip. It’s funny – when I pitched the idea, Elyse’s response was something to the effect of, “When were you going to tell me about this?” and my response was simply, “What does this look like?” Elyse said that she didn’t want to do Sheetz, because we always do Sheetz, and then suggested we find a barbecue place. I was like, “You had me at barbecue.” Looking it up, I found two places that weren’t too far off of I-95. One was a place called Q Barbeque up in Glen Allen, and then the other one was Oak & Apple right in downtown. I chose Oak & Apple, because it was right in downtown Richmond, and closer to the freeway. More or less get off of the exit, go like two blocks, and boom, there it is.
Categories: Converted buildings, Fire alarms, Netculture, North Carolina, Photography, Retail, Roads, Ships, South Carolina, Transit, Travel
Where does it go from punishment to exploitation?
8 minute read
May 1, 2024, 9:36 AM
Recently, this post by Nadia Ware came up on my news feed in a Staunton group that I’m in:
Categories: Social media, Staunton
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
How’s that for gratitude…
11 minute read
March 19, 2024, 9:23 AM
Some people, I just don’t understand. I had been involved in a Facebook group called “You know you’re from Gaithersburg, Maryland if”. The group’s purpose was to share nostalgic content about Gaithersburg, Maryland, which is the town right next to Montgomery Village, where I live. However, the group had extremely lax moderation, and by “extremely lax”, I mean “none”, as there was no one keeping an eye on things to make sure that good posts were getting through and off-topic or spam posts were being removed. As a result, most of the group’s content consisted of advertisements for moving companies, air duct cleaning, gutter replacement, furniture cleaning, carpet cleaning, and car detailing. In other words, it was spam city. The only reason that I stayed in the group was to maybe get a piece of historic Gaithersburg content. After all, I was in the group in the first place because I was interested in getting a bit of local history from the perspective of locals. I’ve only been familiar with Gaithersburg since 2007, and have only lived in the Gaithersburg area since 2017. So as far local history goes, I’ve only been around to witness a small slice of it. I rely on other people to provide the rest.
Then one day this past December, while Elyse and I were out having lunch, I got a notification from Facebook saying that they wanted to promote me to admin of this group because the group had no active admins. In other words, what I had suspected was true: the existing group admins had taken a permanent lunch break, so Facebook picked someone from amongst the membership to run the group. I just had to tap “accept” on my phone, and they handed me the keys to the castle. All of a sudden, I was in charge of a group in which I had been a somewhat passive participant for several years.
Categories: Gaithersburg, Social media, Some people
Thinking about various church experiences…
22 minute read
March 9, 2024, 8:30 AM
Recently, I found myself discussing the Vacation Bible School that my sister and I attended in the mid nineties while I was in middle school. It came from a post on /r/exchristian on Reddit, asking, “What do you still have memorized?” My first reaction was to cite the offertory song that this program had us sing while they passed the plate around. In thinking about it, I was struck by how misplaced the priorities were when it came to what this offering was to be used for (more on that later). But then it also led to my recalling various other church experiences that I had while growing up, and how much of a mixed bag these things were. Some experiences were quite good, while some them were not exactly all rainbows and sunshine.
For some background, I attended church from 1989 to 2003. I was never that much of a “religious” person to begin with, having spent the first eight years of my life without it. My father grew up Jewish, and has practiced no religion of any kind for most of his adult life, i.e. he is ethnically Jewish, but does not follow the religion. Meanwhile, Mom grew up in the Presbyterian Church, and attended church regularly until she began college, and then did not attend church at all from 1969 to 1989. Thus my early formative years contained no significant religious indoctrination, short of attending a Baptist preschool during our first year in Rogers, and the religious side of things in that program was super light. I don’t remember doing much religious stuff there short of a few trips to the sanctuary and the “God is great, God is good” prayer before our daily snack. Outside of this, Mom would occasionally discuss religious subjects with me, though nothing too deep, but even then, I was kind of a skeptic. When Mom would try to explain this “God” person, the way that he was described defied everything that I had observed in the world, and so I was like, okay, sure, and not really buying it, even at a very young age. Likewise, I saw no purpose to the prayer that Mom and I did each night before going to bed for some time, because I never really thought that we were speaking to anyone other than ourselves.
Then in 1989, Mom finally found a church that she liked. As I understand it, when we first moved to Arkansas in 1985, Mom had First Presbyterian Church in Rogers pegged as somewhere that she had wanted to go from the outset, but she was unimpressed with the minister that was there at that time. By 1989, that guy had left and a new person had taken his place, and Mom liked the new guy a lot more. We typically went to church on Sundays, we did the after school program that they did on Wednesday afternoons, and then we also did the Vacation Bible School week during the summer.
Categories: Arkansas, Reddit, Religion, Stuarts Draft
When your photo of Giant becomes popular, and you don’t quite understand why…
3 minute read
February 6, 2024, 9:54 AM
Recently, when skimming around the Internet, I found a large number of YouTube videos using this image:
Categories: Copyright infringement, Giant Food, YouTube
If you want me to take you seriously, do your research, and don’t play the victim card…
12 minute read
November 17, 2023, 2:10 PM
Recently, while I was checking for copyright violations, I turned up a tweet by Twitter user @alx. The tweet, from this past September, showed my photo from 2004 of a Simplex fire alarm at Taylor Hall with the caption, “Any idea what this does?” I assumed, based on the date, that it was supposed to be commentary on the recent incident where Democratic representative Jamaal Bowman pulled a fire alarm in the Cannon House Office Building. Yes, Bowman is an idiot for doing that, but that’s beside the point. Looking the tweet over, I did not see the attribution that is required per the terms of the Creative Commons license under which that particular image is offered, so, per my usual practice, I submitted a DMCA takedown request to have that unauthorized usage removed. Then the folks who process these things at Twitter removed the image about twelve hours later. That speed is typical for Twitter, since they’re usually really good about processing DMCA notices, even following Elon Musk‘s acquisition of the platform. In other words, for as much of a cesspool as the Twitter has become these days, if there’s one thing that they still do right, it’s copyright enforcement. So as far as I was concerned, our transaction was complete. The image was removed, and we all went on with things.
Then the next day, I got an email from the folks at Twitter, telling me that Alexander Joseph Lorusso of Worcester, Massachusetts had submitted a DMCA counter-notice against the tweet that I had reported earlier, and that, as per the usual process, they would restore the content in ten business days unless they receive notice that I’ve filed an action seeking a court order on it. Here is what Lorusso said in his counter-notice when prompted for a reason:
This picture is a picture of a fire alarm and is on WikiCommons stating it is free “to share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work”
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Simplex_pull_station.jpg#mw-jump-to-license
This person is weaponizing DMCA against me
Categories: Copyright infringement, Social media
Playing with the AI image generator…
22 minute read
October 27, 2023, 10:02 AM
Recently, a friend of mine posted some computer generated images from the Bing Image Creator, which uses the DALL-E system as its base. I enjoyed their posts, so I decided to take it for a spin myself with subjects that were more relevant to me. My first idea was to have it generate me. The way I saw it, ChatGPT kinda sorta knew who I was, so it seemed reasonable to see if Bing Image Creator could perform similarly.
The first prompt that I gave it was “Ben Schumin in Washington, DC” and this is what it produced:
Categories: Afton Mountain, Artificial intelligence, Baltimore, Fire alarms, Honda HR-V (2018), JMU, Kia Soul, Mercury Sable, Stuarts Draft, Today's Special, Toyota Previa, Washington DC, WMATA
Two stories about Woomy…
3 minute read
September 8, 2023, 11:33 PM
Recently, while we were driving home from shopping, Elyse asked ChatGPT to tell her a story about everyone’s favorite orange curmudgeon: Woomy. I don’t know what the exact parameters that she gave it were, but it came up with decent enough material to come up with something at least somewhat heartwarming. Check these out:
In the heart of Alexandria, Virginia, there lived a curmudgeonly orange octopus named Woomy. Every day, rain or shine, Woomy would climb aboard the DASH bus, his tentacles a tangle of frustration. He’d grumble and grouse about the noise, the crowds, and the whole human world around him.
Passengers would stare, amused by this unexpected commuter. Woomy’s sour expression became a familiar sight, and people began sharing stories of his antics. But despite the attention, Woomy remained steadfast in his curmudgeonly ways.
One winter’s day, as snow painted the city white, a young child with curious eyes got on the bus. Ignoring the stares, the child approached Woomy, offering a small, hand-knit scarf. Woomy’s eyes widened, his expression softening just a bit. He accepted the scarf with a tentative tentacle.
Categories: Alexandria, Artificial intelligence, DASH, Woomy
No, my mother is not selling concert tickets…
8 minute read
August 22, 2023, 9:30 AM
I don’t understand what makes people send money to random people on the Internet, but I’ve seen it happen, and have recently been put in the unenviable position of being the unwilling spokesperson regarding one of those people, advising people not to give their money to someone who is acting under false pretenses. I’ve seen it happen with people who are desperate for love, getting scammed under the mistaken idea that it will help them get laid. Apparently, people looking for concert tickets are also quite vulnerable to being scammed, as I’ve come to find out firsthand when my mother’s Facebook became compromised, and a new person started using the account to scam people who were seeking to buy concert tickets. What happened was that Mom clicked on something that she had absolutely no business clicking on, and that allowed an attacker to seize control of her account. They quickly changed the login credentials in order to lock Mom out of it, and then started putting the account to use for more nefarious purposes. I found out about it by people who saw my name on Mom’s Facebook account, then, seeing that I had a verified account, came to me to find out if I knew who the seller was, and wanted to know when their concert tickets would arrive. I did some research, and turned up several examples of what was going on:
Categories: Family, Social media
I feel compelled to weigh in…
13 minute read
June 15, 2023, 10:10 PM
Recently, Reddit has been embroiled in a controversy over the site management’s plan to charge for access to their application programming interface, or API, which would affect the operation of various third-party apps, which previously had free access to the API.
First of all, this is how I browse Reddit. I have a Reddit Premium subscription, which means that I get an ad-free experience using a web browser or the official Reddit app, along with a few other perks. When I’m on my phone, I will typically use BaconReader, a third-party app, to access Reddit. I started using BaconReader before Reddit had an official Android app, and I’ve gotten used to it and have seen no reason to change. More specifically, I use the paid version of BaconReader, which provides me an ad-free experience on the app. The free version of the app runs its own ads in an effort by the developers to make some money that Reddit sees no part of, regardless of Reddit Premium subscription status. So before we get into things too deeply, that’s my situation, i.e. I have a premium subscription to the site, and I use an ad-free third-party app on my phone.
As far as the issue at hand goes, I feel that charging a fee for API access is reasonable enough. To me, it only seems fair. Third-party apps depend on Reddit for their content, and so if Reddit were to die, the third-party apps die right along with it. You profit from Reddit’s content, selling subscriptions, app licenses, and running ads against it, so you need to pay your content provider. Especially when one considers that Reddit is, in fact, a for-profit company and not a charity. Just because one has never turned a profit doesn’t make one a not-for-profit entity. It just means that you’re a for-profit company that has never managed to make a profit. Consuming server resources through your app but not compensating the operator of said server just makes you a parasite, since you’re not paying for the resources that you consume. It’s nice that Reddit has offered it that way for a while, but it sounds like the free ride is about to end. It’s a perfectly valid business decision. I will say that when it comes to how much to charge for API access, I do not know what the proper amount is. I am not an app developer, nor do I know how much it costs to operate Reddit. All I know is that paying some amount for API access seems fair. And you don’t get to complain when someone who was offering a service for free stops offering it for free, because you weren’t paying for it, and, as my mother likes to put it, “You’ve got to pay to say.”
Categories: Reddit
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