I made the mistake of commenting intelligently on a thread populated by very ignorant people…
December 12, 2014, 11:07 AM
…and for that, I am filled with regret. I thought that perhaps these people would be able to respond to some level of reason. I was quite wrong on that point. This time, it was on the “Wilson Memorial Hornets Football” page on Facebook. I don’t remember how I ended up landing on this page, since I don’t really care about Augusta County high school sports, but somehow, there I was.
For those not familiar, Wilson Memorial High School is located in Fishersville, Virginia. The school was built at the same time as Stuarts Draft High School, i.e. where I went to high school, and is identical to Stuarts Draft architecturally. The two schools are traditionally rivals, and play each other every year in football, though now, I believe, as an exhibition game, since the two schools are now in different conferences.
This Facebook page for Wilson football, however, has been a bit controversial. On December 6, the page’s owner made the following post:
Continue reading…Categories: Religion, Social media, Some people
Here’s a blast from the Internet past…
November 20, 2014, 8:28 PM
So for Throwback Thursday, here’s a little blast from the Internet past: my old AOL Instant Messenger away messages! Yes, AOL Instant Messenger, otherwise known as AIM, i.e. this:
I was recently shuffling some files around on my computer, and found these, which I had preserved as a backup in February 2007, when I moved my computer from the Gateway to the Dell. I want to say that I used AIM for about fifteen years. I started using it the summer after I graduated high school, and stopped using it earlier this year, telling the two people that I still talked to primarily via AIM (both in-real-life friends) that I was dropping AIM and for them to use Facebook chat to get a hold of me.
Categories: JMU, Social media
“Not fooling anybody” in DC…
October 31, 2014, 11:50 AM
This past Saturday, I did some photography in Washington DC, but not the usual sort of photography that I do when I head into DC. This time, I photographed repurposed commercial buildings, i.e. buildings constructed with the standard architecture for a specific chain, and now operated by a business other than the one that the architecture would suggest. “Not Fooling Anybody” on Reddit, where people share photos of such conversions, describes it as “former chain businesses that have been converted to other uses, yet still strongly resemble their former use.” Some people might call these bad conversions, but I prefer to call them “obvious conversions”. After all, some conversions can look quite elegant, such as Italiano’s in Baltimore, which is a former KFC, but nonetheless still resemble the former tenant’s distinctive style.
It’s also worth noting that these sorts of buildings have no historical value of any kind, so they’re worth photographing while they’re still there, because they will be demolished when someone comes up with a more lucrative use for the land.
For this trip, I did my research. I had assembled a list of some places that I had spotted over the course of going wherever over the years, and then augmented that with some others that the folks on the DC subreddit brought to my attention, particularly on some corridors that I had never had any reason to travel under normal circumstances, such as Bladensburg Road and Benning Road. I then used Google Street View to visually verify all of the suggestions so that I knew what to look for in the field, plus I also did a virtual drive down a few roads using Street View to see if there were any others, as some corridors tend to be just teeming with them.
Categories: Converted buildings, Maryland, Netculture, Washington DC
“I am always so thrilled when people realize how much better a place can look with just a few simple changes!”
October 12, 2014, 12:07 PM
This past week, I finally finished the work that I’d been doing at my house for the past two months. The way I figured, since there was a period of time while the various processes related to onboarding at the new job were still coming together, I might as well take the time to finish a few things on my to-do list. It’s funny, however, what inspires a person to decorate. Back in July or so, my friend Suzie described my house as “a hot mess”. I thought about that over the next week or so, and came to the conclusion that she was right. And I admit – it was looking a little bit too “lived in” at the time, with a lot of unfinished business all over the place. The closets were not being used to their full potential, I had a pile of stuff on the counter between the kitchen and the living room, the table was full of junk, and there were things in visible locations when they should have been in closets.
I started out on August 5, doing what I called the “demolition” phase. This was where I cleaned out the closets and determined what I wanted to keep and what I wanted to get rid of. It’s amazing how much junk can fit in a one-bedroom apartment. I ended up getting rid of a ton of stuff. I had long-outdated information about the 2008 Democratic National Convention from the Unconventional Action consulta that occurred in January 2008. I had the banner from the black bloc at the National Equality March from October 2009. I had an expired bottle of generic Solarcaine from the time when I got sunburned at Splash Down Waterpark in June 2008. I also had a carton of fabric softener from 2007 that I had never opened, where all the liquid had been absorbed by the carton itself, leaving a blob of whatever solids were in the softener at the bottom. No, seriously. Take a look:
Categories: Fire alarms, House, Mercury Sable, Photography, Power Rangers, Schumin Web meta, Today's Special
When is the Internet going to understand that diabetes jokes are not funny?
August 20, 2014, 6:50 PM
So I was going around Reddit today, and saw this posted to the food subreddit:
Image: Imgur
Categories: Reddit
And this is why I should never be allowed to go to Micro Center unsupervised…
August 14, 2014, 1:27 AM
First of all, I apologize for my silence as of late. I’ve been busy working on various things plus having some computer issues, and that’s caused me to neglect the website somewhat, save for changing the photo features and splash photos.
However, the good news is that I’ve received job offers from a few different area transit agencies (that I’m not naming) for the position of bus operator. I should be starting training with one of them soon, once all of the various onboarding processes are completed. From what I’ve seen, these are not quick processes, but they’re done correctly the first time, and I’m fine with that. In deciding to become a bus driver, I realized over the course of the job hunt that my heart just wasn’t in it for more nonprofit work. I also realized that I wanted a career, and not just another job, and I didn’t really have a passion for the issues that the organizations that I was applying to were about. In looking at my interests, I came to realize that I had a real interest in starting a career in public transportation. And a job as a bus driver is a foot in that door. In pursuing that, I took a commercial driving course at Montgomery College over the winter, and I now hold a Class B commercial driver’s license with passenger and school endorsements, plus no air brake restrictions. So life is good on that front.
I also had a big day on July 26, checking out the new Silver Line stations. I received an invitation to ride the VIP train before revenue service began, and I brought my friend Matthew as my guest. I’m going to do a full-on photo set for Life and Times for this day (along with a few other subjects in the photo set queue), so I’m not going to say much about it now, but we had fun. I got to see a number of congressmen and other various elected officials, I got to talk to former Virginia governor Jim Gilmore, and then Matthew and I rode the first revenue train from Wiehle Avenue to Largo. Then after lunch, we toured the new stations on the way back from Largo.
Categories: Computer, Homestar Runner, WMATA, Work
So I found an app that lets you take stereo photos…
July 16, 2014, 10:24 PM
Last night, I found an app called 3D Camera for my Android phone. The idea behind the app is that you take two photos a few inches apart from each other, you line them up, and then the app makes a stereo image for you to look at. Depending on how you shoot them, they can come out as either crossview or parallel. I tested it out late last night on a Wheelock 7002T, and came up with this:
(By the way, I strongly recommend clicking each of the images on this entry to view them at full size in the lightbox)
Categories: Photography, Reddit, Rockville, Shopping
I completely nerded out on Sunday, and it was awesome…
June 24, 2014, 10:21 PM
I went out on a miniature road trip on Sunday, and I had a blast, taking photos of anything that vaguely interested me. It was more or less spur of the moment, when you consider that for what ended up being a photography trip, I only had my cell phone, and then, I didn’t bring my spare battery along. Thus it was a bit of a continual battle to keep a sufficient charge on the phone with only the car charger, but somehow, I managed, and the results came out pretty well despite my leaving my real camera at home. The way this trip came about is that I wanted to go up to and explore Westminster, Maryland. I’ve been wanting to explore Westminster for a while, ever since my father took an overnight business trip to Westminster a few years ago and I didn’t find out about it until it was too late in the day to go up and visit, because Dad didn’t realize that Westminster was as close to me as it was. That sucked, because I would have totally gone up if I had known. I’ll gladly travel an hour or so on relatively short notice to hang out with family.
So early Sunday morning, I just decided to go up and see what there was. I like doing these sorts of trips, because it’s basically a scouting trip, seeing if there’s anything that I want to explore and photograph in more detail in the future. Getting to Westminster is pretty easy: turn onto Georgia Avenue (MD 97) and take it all the way to Westminster. Seriously, it’s that easy. I got to Westminster just as the sun was coming up. After a quick drive through the main commercial area along Route 140, I located the downtown area.
The downtown area in Westminster has what I consider an unusual feature: a single-track rail line for the Maryland Midland Railway running diagonally through the main intersection in downtown. Main Street goes one way, and Liberty Street and Railroad Avenue (both MD 27) go the other way, and the rail line runs diagonally across the intersection. I would have loved to have seen a train come through here while I was in the area, but unfortunately, I did not get to see that this time.
Categories: Arundel Mills, Baltimore, Baltimore County, Companies, Converted buildings, Driving, Howard County, Howard Johnson's, Photography, Reddit, Sheetz, Vintage business, Westminster
Sometimes you have those weekends where you just have to get out of the house…
June 11, 2014, 6:06 PM
Ever get that feeling of “I just have to get out of the house”? I recently had that feeling, where I just needed a change of scenery for a little bit, and so I planned a weekend trip down to Stuarts Draft to visit the parents, going down Friday, and coming back Sunday. They were, as always, delighted to see me, and on the whole, we had a good time. I also made some extra space in my house, as, on Mom’s request, I brought my sister’s old bicycle back to my parents’ house. Gave me some practice in “beheading” a bicycle by removing the front wheel, and then reattaching it at my destination. But it travels much more easily without the front wheel:
The freshly-liberated front wheel.
Categories: Bicycle, Companies, Driving, Family, Fire drills, Harrisonburg, Middle school, Reddit, Stuarts Draft, Walmart, Waynesboro, Weather
“A room that big and not a single fire alarm notification appliance?”
June 10, 2014, 1:43 PM
Categories: Fire alarms, Social media
Singing about five overbearing and overemotional humans…
February 6, 2014, 11:34 PM
So Tuesday night was fun. I got together with my friend Melissa, and we hung out for a few hours. We did some computer and phone maintenance over at my house, and then headed out for dinner. We went to The Potomac Grill, which is located in Talbott Center on Rockville Pike.
For those not familiar, The Potomac Grill hosts Blinkie’s Karaoke, which is run by my friends Ken and Luisa. I’ve done fill-in work as the engineer for Blinkie’s Karaoke from time to time, but this was my first time going solely as a participant. Melissa didn’t sing, but I did. I sang a karaoke version of the theme to Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Those of you who are familiar with what I’ve talked about know that I’m a bit of a Power Rangers geek (I got into it in high school). This was a new addition to the catalog, and so I premiered it. And to top things off, Melissa filmed my performance:
Categories: Melissa, Power Rangers
Whose opinions are these now? Fix your brand and we won’t wonder…
January 5, 2014, 6:09 PM
One of the most ridiculous things to come out of social media over the last few years is the Twitter disclaimer. I’m sure you’ve seen these things before. They usually look something like this:
(I promise I’m not deliberately singling @AllieB out by picking her profile to use as the example. This is not the only one like this, nor is this the worst offender by any means.)
My understanding is that these things are intended to protect employers from liability if their employees say something untoward, and to say that yes, this is, in fact, a personal account. My view on this matter is that these things are completely unnecessary, and that too many people use these disclaimers as an excuse to be sloppy about how they brand themselves on the Internet.
Categories: Social media
At last, I found a format that I can work with…
November 19, 2013, 11:18 AM
You may remember that a few weeks ago, I discussed how I’m constantly evaluating my website properties, and determining what is the best course of action for each individual property. At that time, I mentioned that while the main website (i.e. what you’re looking at now) and College Life have both taken modern forms, with a content management system (CMS) driving everything, the Today’s Special site and Transit Center still had an older architecture, with no CMS driving everything and making things easy to maintain. The idea with the Today’s Special site was to convert it to a knowledge base about all things Today’s Special, covering the show more deeply and more extensively than I had ever done before. Transit Center was still a bit up in the air, with my being a bit undecided on what to do with the site.
Now, I have updates for you.
Let’s get this part over with first: The Schumin Web Transit Center will be closing at the end of the year. It’s closing because it doesn’t meet my current quality standards, and I believe that the site has run its course. That’s not to say that I’m not still very much a public transportation nerd, but I no longer feel that the separate website is the best way to express that enthusiasm for transit, as I don’t feel that it puts my best foot forward. So take a good look at it now, because it won’t be there when the ball drops for 2014.
Categories: Schumin Web meta, Today's Special
Social media and online privacy and…
October 19, 2013, 6:12 PM
Those of you who have seen me online know that I really get into social media. I do Facebook, I do the Twitter, I do Instagram, and I also do Reddit. And in doing social media, I’ve noticed a few recurring trends, and it begs discussing…
Tell me this hasn’t happened to you before: you’re going down your news feed, and you see a status from a Facebook friend. It says something along the lines of this:
I’m cleaning out my friends list, so if you didn’t make the cut, it’s been nice knowing you.
I’m cleaning my Facebook friends. Let me know if you want to stay.
I find these messages amazingly annoying. Especially when, without fail, people make a zillion replies beneath that say something to the tune of, “Don’t delete me!” followed by reassurances from the original poster that certain people are “safe” from their defriending spree. I personally think it says something about a person’s self-esteem when they feel that they need to post such a self-centered message and then watch people glom onto them like that. It reminds me of the way that Chuck E. Cheese distributes free tickets to kids during the live shows. There, Chuck just grabs up a handful of tickets in his hands (paws?) and throws them up in the air in the direction of the audience. The kids then all then rush the character to grab as many free tickets as they can get their hands on. It seems a bit demeaning for the kids who rush the character going after free tickets, and this seems on the same level, with a little bit of groveling involved on top of it all. In any case, it’s a message I could definitely live without.
Categories: Social media
If you can’t follow a license as easy as mine…
October 9, 2013, 3:21 PM
I am of the view that information deserves to be free, which is one of the reasons that I make my work available under a Creative Commons license. For those not familiar, I provide my content under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States license. In a nutshell, that means that you are welcome to use materials found here for any purpose, including commercially, as long as you provide proper attribution, and share it under the same or similar license as you found it (it’s only fair, after all). I even wrote a guide on reuse of content found here. When I converted the site to WordPress, one of the changes that I made was to make the images available for download at full resolution. That was done specifically to help downstream users get what they need and get creating without assistance from me. That same conversion, with the image restoraton and such that went along with it, also finally allowed me to provide clean images right out of the box. Recall that at one point, I put my logo and URL in the corner of the large-size images for photo sets. Then I stopped doing that in 2005 or so, right around when I introduced the Creative Commons license to the site. The conversion and image restoration work removed all of the remaining tagged images, making every photo “clean” without any extraneous markings.
I like to think that I’m one of the more permissive and lenient content owners out there. Unlike many other entities that do not allow downstream use without explicit permission, I do allow downstream use right out of the box, as long as two things are present: attribution (preferably as “Ben Schumin/The Schumin Web”), and a free license. That’s not that hard to do, and by and large, most people who reuse content found here follow the license. But it really frosts my cookies when people don’t follow that, and because my license is so easy to meet, I take a very dim view toward noncompliance.
It always amazes me how many people think that because something is on the public Internet, that it’s public domain and can be used with wild abandon. It’s quite common. I’ve even had to disabuse my own mother of this notion before. Rather, just like any other medium, just because it exists does not mean that you have carte blanche to do whatever you want with it. Most material on the Internet is not, in fact, public domain, and therefore potential downstream users have to play by the content owner’s rules (or you don’t play). Those rules are up to the content owner.
Categories: Copyright infringement, Netculture, Schumin Web meta