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
Twenty years of Journal entries…
21 minute read
August 14, 2023, 1:48 PM
I’m a little bit late with this (because I remembered the wrong date – sue me), but I feel like I still need to mark the occasion: July 23 marked twenty years of the Journal on Schumin Web. Yeah, I’ve been doing this specific incarnation of blogging for over two decades now. Though truth be told, blogging has been a part of Schumin Web since day one. It originally started out as a weekly feature, aptly called “News of the Week”, and it had this very nineties-looking logo to go with it:
I’m pretty sure that took me about five minutes to make, and I probably made it in MS Paint or something. I also don’t remember what font that is, and I’m fine with that, because some things should probably remain in the past. Unfortunately, most of the News of the Week content has been lost to time, as it was retired before I began actively archiving content, and the Internet Archive can only do so much.
Categories: Schumin Web meta
A missed (or ignored) opportunity to really do some good…
16 minute read
May 9, 2023, 8:39 AM
I’m sure that you all are familiar with how terrible my seventh grade year was at Stuarts Draft Middle School. I’ve written about it at some length, and also discussed it a little bit more after my autism diagnosis last year. Recall that during seventh grade, I had a large problem with bullying, both from the students and from the staff. In fact, that year was unusual because of heavy bullying from fellow students as well as staff. Most of the time, the bullying largely came from the staff, and bullying from fellow students was less so (though it did happen), but in seventh grade, it came from all over pretty consistently (Michael Stonier was just the most memorable of many), and I was miserable for it.
Frank Wade, the chief bully on the staff side that year, had referred me to guidance for my alleged “problems”, and I would visit with Jan Lovell, the guidance counselor, on a weekly basis for the remainder of the year. I didn’t mind going to guidance, because while they were terrible in their own right with their continued attempts to gaslight me into thinking that I was the problem rather than the victim, it meant that I wouldn’t have to deal with my bullies for a time. In hindsight, though, this was just exchanging one bully, i.e. Mr. Wade and all of the kids that he enabled, for another bully, i.e. Mrs. Lovell the guidance counselor, but one bully was easier to handle than multiple bullies at once, though it was still crappy no matter how you sliced it.
Recently, I was thinking about one thing that I brought to Mrs. Lovell towards the end of the year, and I realized that she either missed or deliberately chose to ignore a tremendous opportunity to look into a bullying problem in the school. It really made me think that while I don’t know how much they were paying her to be the guidance counselor, whatever it was, it was probably too much. At that point in the year, I recognized that things were very bad, and I also recognized that the chances that things would improve before the end of the year were slim to none. To that end, I had already mentally written seventh grade off as irreparable. In other words, I was just doing my best to make it through it, and looked towards the future. To that end, I had prepared a list for the guidance counselor of all of the kids that I did not want to be in homeroom with the following year, with the idea’s being that since guidance was the entity that did student scheduling and such, I was submitting this request to the correct department. It was not a large list, mostly because homerooms were done alphabetically by last name. Therefore, I only had the chance of being in homeroom with people with last names starting with P through Z. So out of about 300 kids in a grade, I only had the possibility of being in homeroom with about 75 of them, and my list was limited to that subset. And considering that students were arranged in three different “teams” in middle school, each belonging to a group of teachers who all worked together with the same kids, what I was really asking was that I be on a different team than these kids in eighth grade.
Categories: Autism, Middle school, Schumin Web meta
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
A look at Lakeside dining past…
8 minute read
June 23, 2022, 12:56 PM
While I was rounding up all of the material for the photo set about Zane Showker Hall, I dug through a lot of old photos of JMU in order to make sure that I had captured all of the relevant material. Generally speaking, whenever I’m doing a photo set for Life and Times that requires rounding up historical photos or otherwise tells a story that is not in chronological, such as Staunton Mall, which included photos taken over multiple days and also a hefty dose of new material, presented in a very different order than it was originally shot, after I gather it all into a work folder, I sort it all out by subject and place the subjects in the order that I intend to present them. In the case of a smaller, non-chronological set like Showker or Staunton Mall, I will usually write and place photos at the same time. Compare to a travelogue photo set like Toronto or North Carolina, where I will do all of the writing first, and then add photos only after the entire narrative has been written. Regardless of how it’s assembled, though, after I complete the first draft, I will typically start cutting things out, as I tend to load things on pretty heavily in my first draft. Sometimes, I’m cutting things out that are extraneous to the story. Other times, I’m trimming the number of photos down to a more manageable amount.
When I was doing the Showker photo set, I originally planned to include photos of some of the dining attractions that were around the building, and actually did a decent amount of writing related to them. One thing that I planned to include was a little bit about Mrs. Green’s, which was a dining operation in nearby Chandler Hall. I also planned to include some discussion of a small food truck that JMU operated in the mornings in front of Showker that I called the Chuckwagon. I ended up cutting both of those, but for different reasons. As far as Mrs. Green’s went, I originally opted to include it because it was in Chandler Hall, which was demolished to make way for Hartman Hall – thus it was something of a “before” for Hartman Hall. However, considering that I only spent about fifteen minutes in Hartman Hall, tops, it came off as extraneous. So I cut it, which created a tighter photo set. For the bit about the Chuckwagon, I realized that I was devoting a large chunk of space to what was essentially a failed test concept, and it had very little to do with the subject other than its being parked in front of Showker. Ultimately, it took the discussion off on a pretty long tangent, and so in order to keep it on subject, it was removed. And for a photo set that was primarily about architecture, anything not about architecture just didn’t fit.
Categories: JMU, Schumin Web meta
It’s kind of like being in the shower for eight hours a day…
6 minute read
May 16, 2022, 8:16 PM
It’s interesting how jobs work sometimes. As many of you know, I work as a train operator, operating a subway train in passenger service. This is a job that I had imagined myself doing for a long time, and it still amazes me that I actually get to do it. But no one ever tells you what the experience is like when you’re in the train cab all by yourself in a tunnel underneath the city.
When I was in class learning how to be a train operator, our instructor told us that it was an easy job, but that it was also a boring job. However, all throughout training, an experienced operator is always in the cab with you, and as such, you’re never alone with your thoughts. There is always someone nearby to interact with, plus, since you’re just learning the job, you’re thinking about the mechanics of the job a lot because it has not yet become second nature. So that “boring” aspect never really comes into play. Even in my case, where one of my instructors said that I was a natural in regards to my ability to operate the train, I still had to think a lot about what I was doing because I had not yet internalized it all. It wasn’t just a matter of sitting down and going to town like it is for me now, six years later. The mechanics of the job are pretty simple: fire up the train, move the master controller to control your speed, monitor the radio, scan the tracks for any hazards, make good announcements to the passengers, and open and close the doors at the stations. It’s really not a hard job by any means.
Once you get comfortable in the job, and the movements come more naturally, that’s when you really get to experience what it’s like to operate a subway train. And it’s also when you learn what your mind is capable of doing when it is left alone for long periods of time with minimal distractions. It’s kind of like being in the shower, in that you are alone with a task to accomplish, and that task is all that there is to do while you’re in there.
Categories: Myself, Schumin Web meta, Work
In case anyone noticed a pattern this year…
3 minute read
December 5, 2021, 10:10 AM
I’m wondering if anyone noticed a pattern with the splash photos in 2021. Here’s what I did all year:
January
Categories: Schumin Web meta
Woomy has his own website…
2 minute read
July 2, 2021, 3:59 PM
So Elyse and I recently went hunting online, discovered that woomy.info was available, and snagged it. This is the result:
Categories: Netculture, Schumin Web meta, Woomy
Schumin Web turns 25…
3 minute read
March 15, 2021, 11:15 PM
March 23, 2021 will mark the 25th anniversary of this website. I’ve been doing this for a quarter of a century. If it tells you anything about how long I’ve been doing this, Schumin Web has been around longer than Blogger, Etsy, Facebook, Flickr, Google, Reddit, Twitter, Wikipedia, YouTube, and a whole host of other online properties. And in that time, things here have kind of gone on and on, as we’ve all grown older and matured together.
I suppose that nothing is a better indication of the leng th of time that Schumin Web has been around, and the amount of growth that has occurred during that time than the recent Journal entry about the new scooter. I like to think of that as “Schumin criticizes Schumin,” as I discussed things that I had written in the site’s fifth year in light of more modern developments in the site’s 25th year. The whole thing felt a bit strange, because it felt as though I was criticizing what someone else had written. I know that it was me, because I still remember the events and remember writing that page, but that look back really reminded me of how much I have changed in the past twenty years. My writing style is completely different now compared to then. My writing from back then looks and feels like the work of a much younger man. My attitudes about things are different now, too, as back then, I clearly felt that I was invincible, throwing caution to the wind and riding my scooter on a wheel that I knew was faulty, just because I needed to get two more days out of it, and nothing bad had happened in the past. Nowadays, I would never have done that, because I know that I’m not in invincible, and that getting hurt and not being able to go to work has real-life ramifications that affect more people than just me. All of that said, I’m not the same person that I was back in the early days of this website. That’s not a bad thing by any means, and I like the person that I’ve become.
Meanwhile, I feel like the 25th anniversary of Schumin Web should be a quiet celebration. There is no big compilation photo set celebrating the anniversary waiting in the wings like I did in 2016 with the “Twenty Years” set in Life and Times. Truth be told, the site’s 25th year was a relatively quiet one. This was the first time in the site’s history where no new photo sets were released in the span of a year. The last new photo set to be released was “Planespotting at BWI“, which came out on January 31, 2020 as a 2019 set. I’ve mentioned before that it’s not that I’m not producing new material, but rather, it’s that other projects have hindered my getting things out of the door. There will be 2020 photo sets, but don’t expect them for a while, because they will span longer time periods, and those require more work to assemble than ones that are shot in a single event. Therefore, it makes sense to tackle them along with the backlog of photos from the past year.
Categories: Schumin Web meta
Storytelling and the value of context…
5 minute read
February 24, 2021, 6:40 PM
Lately, I’ve been thinking a bit about how my photography tends to present itself in the various places that I post my work. This is on the occasion of a nearly yearlong backlog of photography that is sitting in my queue just waiting to be published. In other words, this is why there haven’t been any Photography or Life and Times sets published from 2020 as of yet (they’re coming, I promise). 2020 was a banner year for me as far as photography went, as I was more productive in that year than I have been for the last several years. I’ve just not gotten much of it out the door, with only a relatively small amount’s being published as the photo feature on the front of the website, as well as in the Journal. The rest of it is still waiting to be published.
The reason for the delay in publication is because of a giant Flickr project that I’ve been working on since around April or so. What I want to do is to use my Flickr as my main photo library, i.e. most stuff that I publish goes on Flickr. The ultimate goal with this project was to take everything that I had previously published on Wikimedia Commons and ensure that it was duplicated on my Flickr. I called it “putting Wikimedia Commons behind me”, because I’m essentially moving on from the platform, and making it where I never have to refer back to it again. But I didn’t just do a straight sweep of Flickr and copy it all over. That would be too easy, and if I’m publishing something on a new venue, I want it to look good by my current standards. Thus I go in and locate the original photos in my archive and process them according to my current techniques as if they’re new material. Sometimes the cut is a little different, and sometimes the lighting comes out a little differently than before, but I think that it’s a much better end result. Recall that I did the same thing when I converted Schumin Web to WordPress back in 2011-2012. I went back and reprocessed all of the photos from the originals, and they looked awesome.
This situation was made a tad more complicated by the way I did things back in 2013 when I first started getting serious about my Flickr. In that case, I went through things from the beginning, but I was very conservative about what older material I published to Flickr. I didn’t publish a lot of older material when I did that initial upload. Who knows why. So for this project, I did two waves. The first was a second dive through the archives up to 2013, looking for stuff that was worth publishing as a standalone work. That took several months to do, and resulted in about 17 pages’ worth of new uploads to Flickr. Some of that was stuff that had previously been published other places, and a lot of it was new. I figured that I would catch most of the stuff that was on Wikimedia Commons that way. While I did catch quite a bit of it, I knew that I wouldn’t catch all of it. Thus my second wave was to sweep through my contributions to Commons directly, and catch everything that I’d missed. I figured that I would probably catch about 100 photos and put them up on Flickr. Oh, how wrong I was. When I finished my sweep, I ended up having 528 all together. Made me think of Strong Bad when his computer got a virus, and he said, “That is not a small number! That is a big number!” I located all of them, edited all of them based on my current standards, and now I’m in the process of uploading them all. Thankfully, the process has gone fairly smoothly.
Categories: Photography, Schumin Web meta
Twenty years ago, Schumin Web started to get noticed…
10 minute read
September 7, 2020, 9:37 PM
It has now been twenty years since Schumin Web really started to get noticed by people. My first four years doing this site, I was having fun, but I always assumed, in those very early days of the Internet, that very few people were actually looking (though I had no way of measuring it at that time). But that was okay, because ultimately, it gave me an outlet to express myself, and I was having fun doing it.
Then, in the summer of 2000, things started to change. I was featured as “Geek of the Month” in the June 2000 issue of the now-defunct magazine Front, a men’s lifestyle magazine from the UK, i.e. a “lads’ mag”. Check it out:
Categories: Netculture, Popular culture, Reddit, Schumin Web meta
Changes in the area of photo licensing…
3 minute read
October 1, 2019, 12:00 AM
I have a few changes to announce in the area of photo licensing. First and foremost, Schumin Web Photo Licensing, my in-house photo licensing site, is no more. I had been running that site for about three years, and while it did a respectable amount of business, I felt that it didn’t justify the amount of resources that it consumed, and it also didn’t justify the amount of time spent to maintain it. There was also always a bit of an uncomfortable interaction with Pixsy. The idea was that there was a very real possibility that someone could use my licensing site in an attempt to circumvent a Pixsy case for an unauthorized use of an image, and that could be a sticky situation to get straightened out. Yes, I had policies stating that use of the licensing site to circumvent Pixsy was not permitted, and that any licenses purchased in an attempt to circumvent Pixsy’s process would be cancelled, but good luck trying to prove that. All it really did was make the site look prickly to potential users by having to put that in the fine print, even though its inclusion was necessary. So in the end, the site is gone.
Otherwise, my philosophy for photo licensing is changing based on experience. Licensing on the front end didn’t do as well as I might have hoped, but pursuing Creative Commons violations has been quite lucrative over the last few years. I like to say that Pixsy furnished the house when I moved to Montgomery Village back in 2017. Thus my stance on licensing has evolved from a traditional licensing model towards just letting people use the material under a free license that requires attribution, i.e. Creative Commons, and then aggressively policing compliance through Pixsy and DMCA takedown notices. In other words, follow the rules, and it’s free. Don’t follow the rules, and it’s going to cost you.
The Content Licensing page has also been revised to jive with this new stance on licensing. It now again explicitly states that anything published prior to February 20, 2014 is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States license. This was always the case due to the way that Creative Commons works in practice, but after February 2014, it was not stated explicitly. Additionally, it directs users to my Flickr page to find Creative Commons content posted after February 20, 2014. Explicitly listing every Creative Commons image on Schumin Web would require going through more than five years’ worth of material to mark stuff, and I can think of a hundred other things that I would rather do besides that. So Flickr it is, especially since that site has very powerful Creative Commons search tools.
Categories: Schumin Web meta