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
Refreshing an older photo set…
8 minute read
October 7, 2025, 4:32 PM
Recently, I gave a refresh to the “Afton Mountain: Victim of Progress” photo set from 2003. That’s the original Afton Mountain photo set, when all of the buildings were still largely intact (compare to the later “Afton Mountain: A Modern Ruin” from 2011). I gave a refresh to that set because I didn’t like the photo processing work on those images, and thought that I could do it better in the here and now.
For some history, I shot those photos on September 10, 2003, and the set was released on November 3. Then in 2012, as part of the conversion of the entire site to WordPress, I reprocessed the photo set from the originals, along with all of my other photo work that was done prior to 2008. This was done in order to create production masters for those older sets, remove the watermarks that I had previously placed on those older photos, and also improve on my hideous editing work. However, for the Afton Mountain photo set, I inadvertently ended up making the new version of the photos a bit dark, and they ended up with a slightly blue cast on them. The originals had a slight yellow cast to them, so apparently I overcompensated when I tried to correct for that. Hey – nobody’s perfect.
Here’s a comparison using the lead shot in the set, showing the previous iteration of the photo set from 2012, and the refreshed version:
2012 revision.
Categories: Afton Mountain, Photography, Schumin Web meta
There is no honor among thieves…
6 minute read
June 6, 2025, 9:00 AM
As some of you may know, I am a moderator on Reddit for a few retail-related subreddits, where people post news, photos, and other things related to retail. Recently, on /r/retailporn, this message came through from /u/dinosaurdracula:
Hi there, this user stole content from me and edited out my watermark.
Post in question: https://www.reddit.com/r/retailporn/…
My original post: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=…
I spend a great deal of time and money finding these old catalogs — it’s a real pain when people want to karma-farm and can’t even be decent enough to credit. I’d appreciate it if you could remove this post. Thank you!
Categories: Copyright infringement, Netculture, Reddit, Schumin Web meta
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 on to 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
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
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
I wasn’t expecting that so soon…
5 minute read
September 22, 2024, 1:05 PM
It figures. Not even twelve hours after I posted the Journal entry about my trip to New Jersey and Long Island, which included coverage of the Kmart store in Bridgehampton, New York, I saw a post on Reddit that indicated that said Kmart store was closing, and shared the following image of the store:
Photo: Reddit user LordRavioli29
Categories: New York, Reddit, Retail, Schumin Web meta
That post certainly aged like milk…
4 minute read
August 16, 2024, 8:12 AM
It’s funny… I know when I write some Journal entries that they will not necessarily age well, but some become dated a lot faster than others. Usually, when it comes to entries about politics and current events, I know that they will become dated more quickly than something else that isn’t related to politics or current events. Multiply that by a zillion when it comes to posts about elections and political candidates that aren’t primarily civics lessons. Those posts tend to become dated fairly quickly, often once the election is over.
However, I don’t think anything has aged worse than a Journal entry that I wrote a few weeks ago called “The Democrats are playing with fire…” talking about the Democratic Party’s circular firing squad, where they have this tendency to devour their own people at the slightest hint of anything, and that they had, at that time, turned their sights on President Biden. In that entry, I suggested that the Democrats not devour the president, with the idea that they needed him in order to win in November, and I made a whole bunch of arguments in favor of sticking with Biden. As it would turn out, the party devoured him, as Biden dropped out of the race a little more than a week after my entry published, which rendered my entire Journal entry moot.
So on one hand, I’m kind of salty about the loss of my entry’s relevance. It now goes down in history as the entry that became irrelevant and/or moot the fastest. This one became moot even more quickly than my “I believe that we have finally reached the other side of this thing…” entry from May 2021 where I was declaring all of the pandemic nonsense over, and then officials reneged on their all-clear and reinstated a lot of the nonsense all over again. At least we got to have the summer on that one before everyone started screaming “delta, delta, delta” and made my entry moot. Even more so than regular datedness that comes with Journal entries about elections, such as “Petty tribalism has no place in the 2020 cycle…” that became dated as soon as the primaries ended. But it at least was relevant for a little while.
Categories: National politics, Schumin Web meta
Say hello to Piwigo…
16 minute read
July 27, 2024, 3:45 PM
Beginning on Friday, July 26, you might have noticed that the website looks ever so slightly different. There is a new camera icon in the header, and a new link at the bottom of the pages called “Photography Portfolio“. This is for a new photography site that I recently launched:
Categories: Copyright infringement, Photography, Schumin Web meta
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
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
It’s time to refresh things, but what to do…
6 minute read
December 27, 2023, 9:30 AM
Those of you who have been familiar with this site know that it has looked largely the same since the fall of 2012, when I introduced the “Modern Blue” design of the site. That design was refined about eleven months later, creating “Modern Blue 2.0”, which smoothed out some rough edges of the original design and eliminated some stylistic holdovers from the previous design. Since August 2013, there have been minor modifications to the design here and there, but no substantial reworking of the design has occurred since then. That means that the site has been on Modern Blue in some form for more than eleven years – longer than I’ve had any site design. If it tells you anything, the longest-lived site design prior to this was the “Blue Squares” theme, which lasted for four years and three months. This blows that right out of the water.
The reason I want to change is twofold. First, the design feels like the work of a much younger man. I launched that design when I was 31 years old. I am now 42. It reflects what 31-year-old me thought was state of the art design, but now it feels a bit long in the tooth. There were also design choices made back then that I don’t think that I would do today if I were to do it all over again. Right offhand, the main page has some odd gaps in it that are the result of the way things of different lengths fit together. The main page has always been a launch page for the rest of the site, but it’s also not very tight in its design, and those flaws are baked right into the site’s design. Additionally, besides a design that is dated in appearance, the site’s theming is also a bit dated as far as things go under the hood. WordPress has changed considerably in that time, going from the TinyMCE editor to a new one called Gutenberg, and WordPress has also adopted blocks in a major way. I still use TinyMCE to write for Schumin Web, and my theme does not support blocks in any way because it predates their introduction.
All that said, Schumin Web is in need of a new theme, not only to update the look of the site, but also to extend its functionality. There is so much that I’m missing out on by not having a block theme, and I can’t help but think that my existing theme is now holding me back. Plus it’s time for a visual refresh, because while the whole content-in-boxes look is nice enough, its time has passed.
Categories: Schumin Web meta