I realize it’s been ten years, but I still think about it…
5 minute read
September 30, 2009, 10:59 PM
One of the more memorable things I did in high school was The East Coast Price is Right. We followed the rules as they existed in Season 27 (the current season at the time), and I had that set that emulated the classic green, purple, red, and orange colors on the turntable. It’s now been a decade since I did that show, but it’s still something I think about.
Right before I left for Philadelphia, I did a bunch of ironing. Usually, when I iron, I turn on the television and pop a tape of something in, in order to spice up an otherwise boring task. This time, I popped in a tape of old episodes of The Price is Right, from Season 27. That’s when I start thinking about my own version of the game that I did a decade ago. In the intervening ten years, I’ve thought about the games I did, and what I might have played if I could do it all over again. Recall that for that game, I did (in this order) It’s in the Bag, Dice Game, Push Over, Grand Game, Switch?, and One Away.
I think if I were to do it all over today, I would have swapped out two games. I think I did too many cash games, playing both “It’s in the Bag” and “Grand Game”. Additionally, as I messed up “Dice Game” a little bit, I would have done a different car game for the first half of the show. For that, I’ve often thought that Lucky Seven would have been a game that would have fit my production better. All you do for that is have them guess numbers, reveal the correct number, and then take the amount of dollars that comprises the difference (e.g. if they guessed a seven as the second digit and the correct number was five, the host takes two bucks back). Then they just need one dollar to buy the car. That’s the game that stands out most in the would-have-done category. Now as far as the cash games went, I basically had to do “It’s in the Bag” first, because setting it up on stage with the audience in place would have revealed the prices. That game was set up before the show started. But “Grand Game” was too similar to “It’s in the Bag”, and so I probably should have dropped that one, and considering how close I cut it on time, a quickie game like Danger Price or Most Expensive would have fit the bill quite well.
Continue reading…Categories: High school, Schumin Web meta, Television
What an odd coincidence…
2 minute read
May 23, 2009, 12:47 PM
What an odd coincidence that all these new anti-war photo sets end up hitting the site on Memorial Day weekend of all times. That’s just slightly awkward, but it’s right in line with my policy on photo sets. They are published as soon as they are finished. I do not hold sets for a certain pre-designated “street date”.
Still, this brings a few things together. For one, it explains why there have been few Journal entries this month, as I took production of these sets into high gear. It also explains how MPDC Captain Jeff Herold knows me, plus lends context to a Journal entry I wrote from home between the two G20 events. Then I also kind of went silent about Funk the War 7 and ANSWER’s alleged march on the Pentagon, which I referred to as the March on Crystal City. I did that partly because we spent more energy in Crystal City than at the Pentagon, and partly because I just don’t like ANSWER all that much, and calling it what it was drew attention to ANSWER’s off-the-wall march plan.
Still, I believe I’ve outdone myself with this. 218 photos and seven pages in the Crystal City set still just amazes me. This is why record-breaking photo sets are few and far between, with a few years between record-breakers. After all, from mid-2003 to February 2007, An Urban Comparison was the largest set, a distinction it held for nearly four years. Then on Valentine’s Day 2007, J27 became the largest by a small margin. Now today, March on Crystal City blew that distinction clear out of the water, as I broke that record by 77 photos (J27 has 141, and Crystal City has 218).
Of course, just because this project is finished doesn’t mean my work is done. I still have lots more waiting to be posted in photo set form…
Categories: Schumin Web meta
And this is why we don’t normally write Journal entries in the early morning…
2 minute read
March 18, 2009, 11:09 PM
So I was reading over the previous Journal entry, and I remembered why I don’t normally write Journal entries in the early morning. Yeah, I was a bit scattered, as my writing was kind of all over the place, there. I don’t even remember writing about the conservatives being back on their meds, for one thing, but there it is, and then I kind of went off on a shoe tangent at the end.
Lesson to take from this: Writing Journal entries while still half-asleep is bad.
But nonetheless, I’m excited for tomorrow. Funk the War ought to be fun, as long as I’m smart about my cameras. It’s supposed to rain on and off, and after losing Big Mavica in a rainstorm, the policy is that as soon as it begins raining, Duckie becomes the active camera immediately, even if it means I am denied use of the Canon at a protest for the second time in a row. So we’ll see what happens on this final day of winter, as we, like, rock out in the streets and denounce the war.
Categories: Anti-war, Schumin Web meta
Well, easy come, easy go, I suppose.
< 1 minute read
March 1, 2009, 4:46 PM
Well, that was a short-lived feature. I have officially reversed my position on use of Lightbox on Schumin Web. It’s going away. As seems to be so often the case with fun enhancements, the feature worked well in testing, but then fell apart in production use.
What happened is that when using Internet Exploder, and only Internet Exploder (no surprise there), pages that included it were getting an error that said, “Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site [URL]. Operation aborted.” Clicking “OK” would then switch to an error page. And this would be after the browser had already completely loaded the page. So it would be like, “Here’s the site, oh, ha ha, just kidding.” A little research indicated that it was indeed a problem with Internet Exploder, but since most of my visitors use IE (but ought to try Firefox), a new feature is not worth locking people out over.
So as a result, I removed the Lightbox feature from Schumin Web, and retrofitted Midnight March with the older display-page enlargements that have been demonstrated over countless photo sets over the last seven years to work very well.
So yeah, stuff happens. Let this be a lesson to me about jumping for something overly fancy on this site, I suppose.
Categories: Schumin Web meta
Why is it that I always seem to finish photo set projects at two in the morning?
2 minute read
March 1, 2009, 2:49 AM
Yep… it’s almost 3 AM on a Saturday night/Sunday morning, and in the last hour or so, I finally finished Midnight March, which is about a protest against the World Bank and IMF during their fall 2008 meetings.
This set was more challenging than most protest sets I’ve shot. I’ve done plenty of protest marches before, both in daylight, as well as at night. I believe my most recent nighttime protest photo before that one was October Rebellion, specifically the Georgetown march. That was shot in some of the worst weather conditions that I had ever experienced during a protest march. After all, it was raining hard, and it was cold. Plus everyone was on edge due to the way that march was promoted. But for Midnight March, I had the weather on my side, as the skies were completely clear. And it was only slightly cool outside, much to my delight. Very comfortable protest weather. But the camera was something of an unknown quantity. I had barely done any shooting at night with the Kodak, with most of the nighttime shooting consisting of two Anon raids, and a day out with Katie. And all those were cases where I could carefully line up my shots. Can’t do that at a protest march, unfortunately. You have to go with the flow and keep up with the crowd.
Categories: Photography, Schumin Web meta, World Bank
Presenting the newest display function for photo sets…
3 minute read
February 25, 2009, 9:51 PM
Yes, I found the coolest new feature for the photo sets. It’s called “lightbox”, and basically, it allows you to enlarge the photos on the page without going to a separate page. What I usually do for photo sets, you may recall, is if you click an image, you go to a separate page where you are presented with an enlargement of the image and the caption. Thus it usually looks like this in this excerpt from the Weekend with Katie photo set:
A Red Line train to Glenmont arrives at Metro Center on the Shady Grove platform.
Categories: Schumin Web meta, WMATA
So, wait, what happened to…?
2 minute read
January 25, 2009, 12:19 PM
In case you haven’t heard, I recently brought back The Schumin Web Transit Center from what had turned into a year and a half long slumber. Looking around, though, you might be asking me, “But Schumin, where are the Alstom photos? Where are the bus photos? Where are the videos?” Well, they’re coming back, but just not right away.
Realize that the big reason for the delay was because while the site looks visually similar to the old site, it is a completely new Web site under the hood. The database was rebuilt in MySQL from scratch, and all of the pages had to be rewritten in PHP. This all goes back to the July 2007 server failure, which was on a Microsoft server (figures, doesn’t it?). That was the inspiration to complete my planned conversion of the whole site to PHP and MySQL, as I was already in the process of changing hosts when that happened. This just sped the process up. Since the new server isn’t a Microsoft server, the existing site was unusable, and had to be converted over. It took me a month to get the main Schumin Web site going again, a few weeks to bring College Life back online, and then Today’s Special resumed last summer.
With Transit Center, I knew I could just straight-convert my databases like what happened with the other sites. But I didn’t want to. I realized as the Transit Center site grew that updates had become a colossal pain in the butt. So I was planning to scrap the existing database anyway and build a new one. That new one is designed and was made ready for a release, but I’ve not entered everything into it yet.
Categories: Schumin Web meta
Transit Center?
2 minute read
November 16, 2008, 3:15 PM
It’s been a frequently asked question for a while about when The Schumin Web Transit Center will reopen. First of all, let me restate: I am fully committed to bringing Transit Center back to the Internet.
However, I continue to state a time frame as “eventually”. The main reason for this relates to plans already in the works at the time that the site went down. In the last year before the outage, updates had become fewer and further between because it had become increasingly troublesome to make updates. This was due to flaws in the site’s original structure design. The old design was very hierarchal, and everything was numbered within those hierarchies. In short: Lots of folders, and the file numbering was specific to the individual folders. I was already devising a plan to address this when the site went down by doing the back-end over again. The images would be pulled from a single large pool, and the database would reflect that. The idea was to create the new structure in the background and then cut over to it when it was all finished.
Categories: Schumin Web meta
So this will be an interesting summer, I’d say…
2 minute read
June 24, 2008, 10:48 PM
I’m looking at what’s coming down the pike for this summer, and I can tell right now that this is going to be a great summer. First of all, look at Schumin Web! It’s all refreshed for the summer as we’ve gone “square” with this new background. No more fades here as it’s been for nearly four years. The color gradient is gone, and we’ve moved on to a pattern. Hopefully this will make things look a little more festive.
And then I’m going to be busy in July, with two Anon events – July 12 and July 19. By then I ought to have something really cool figured out for a costume, since here’s the thing – the “black bloc” look doesn’t seem to work at Anonymous events. When I hang out with the anarchists, yes – black bloc is the style. For Anonymous, it’s more like a masquerade ball, since many people really get into the dress of the event, and dress in wild outfits while including the all important mask (don’t want to get fair gamed, after all – or R2-45’d for that matter). And as I learned on June 14, the Guy Fawkes mask is too warm for the summer. However, we must admit – I had fun at Operation Sea Arrrgh with my Guy Fawkes mask and all:
Categories: Katie, Project Chanology, Schumin Web meta, Travel
Schumin Web turns TWELVE today!
< 1 minute read
March 23, 2008, 5:39 PM
Wow. It’s been twelve years to the day since I started this site. I was fourteen years old when I started this site. I am now 26. I had a full head of hair when I started this site. Now, well… let’s not go there.
And at the twelve year mark, we find the site in a bit of transition. Two subsidiary sites – Transit Center and Today’s Special – are still awaiting restoration from a server crash that happened eight months ago, and I’m currently in between digital cameras after Big Mavica was unceremoniously destroyed during heavy rain at an anti-war protest.
However, in the last year, lots has happened. After hanging out in the DC area for three years, The Schumin Web formally moved there last May, plus I feel like I’ve been adding more photos to the Journal since making that move. Of course, that might just be me.
And to think next year, my site enters its teens…
Categories: Schumin Web meta
Two days until Stuarts Draft…
< 1 minute read
March 10, 2008, 2:33 PM
Two days and counting until I leave for Stuarts Draft! And how exciting, since Sis is coming to visit! I haven’t seen her since December when we went to Chicago. Me, I’m close enough to the parents that I can go see them just about any time I want, but Sis is a little further flung, way out in the midwest and all. I’m excited.
Otherwise, though, I’m looking to update Schumin Web’s appearance. It’s not going to be major, but it will involve updating the various section headers, a few page redesigns, and possibly a new background across the whole site. I’m testing what I like, and we’ll see what we come up with. I want something that will look smart, but not something that looks too trendy. After all, the current look has lasted three and a half years, and I don’t want to screw up a good design with something cheesy. So we’ll see. It was a testament to the existing design, however, that I put the same interface back in place with very few modifications when we had that little meltdown last summer.
So yeah, I’m excited on all counts. And Schumin Web celebrates its 12th birthday in a little less than two weeks (March 23).
Categories: Family, Schumin Web meta
So how does this look?
< 1 minute read
February 25, 2008, 9:12 PM
How does this look to you?
Categories: Schumin Web meta
I’m drained!
2 minute read
November 18, 2007, 11:31 PM
Let me say this: I’m drained! Tonight, I completed and published three photo sets in Life and Times. Since the September 15 protest, the weekend with Katie, and the October Rebellion protests happened so close together, I decided to do the photo sets for all of these as one giant project. That’s something that will drain you by the time everything’s said and done. Everything that I would normally do for one photo set was done in triplicate. Three times writing. Three times picking photos. Three times watching movies. Three times the photo prep work. My goodness, I’m glad to be done.
That’s not to say, however, that these were not great experiences. Now you can finally see my first serious moves with radical cheerleading, as well as my usual black bloc stuff. So yeah. Plus Katie and I had a blast, as we kind of wandered around Washington and thereabouts, going from Chinatown to Metro Center to Dupont Circle to McPherson Square to Rosslyn to Georgetown to Foggy Bottom to Pentagon City and back to Silver Spring.
Categories: Schumin Web meta
Does anyone know how to set up an RSS feed for a custom design?
< 1 minute read
October 5, 2007, 5:20 AM
Welcome to my world, where I’ve wanted to have an RSS feed on my Journal for at least eight months or so. Yes, eight months. In moving that direction, as well as making all kinds of other site upgrades, I changed hosts and converted to PHP, for one.
So now I have this snazzy mySQL database and my little custom design, and I’ve been having the darndest time trying to get a working RSS feed. And before anyone asks, yes, I’ve tried the various content management systems out there, and for purposes of Schumin Web, hated all of them. The Journal does not run under Blogger, WordPress, etc. It’s my own design.
My previous attempts at setting up an RSS feed for the Journal came from my attempts to follow directions from here and here. In the end, what did I get? A pile of unusable code, lots of errors, and some very bad words out of me.
So I am obviously having issues with getting this to work. So… can anyone help out? An RSS feed for the Journal is one of my most-requested features, as it turns out, so this is kind of important. But I’m kinda stuck…
Categories: Schumin Web meta
I get this feeling I’m going to be backed up to my fiftieth birthday…
2 minute read
October 4, 2007, 1:36 PM
I get this feeling that I’m going to be backed up to my fiftieth birthday with the Web site at the rate I’m going. Seriously. Right now, I have five projects going on, and a sixth will be added soon. I have the restoration of Transit and Today’s Special (these are more than restoring the status quo), and I have the Borf show, September 15, and my recent weekend with Katie. The last three are all going to be part of Life and Times. Then add “October Rebellion” to the list, which is about the upcoming World Bank/IMF march that I’m going to be attending, also for Life and Times. So that ought to be interesting.
Right now, only the Borf show is in any advanced state. The new Transit Center is still “vaporware” at this point, and then as far as Today’s Special goes, I’ve gotten MediaWiki set up, but not much else. For September 15, the narrative is totally written but that’s all there is so far, and then the weekend with Katie narrative is in a very early stage. Then of course “October Rebellion” is vaporware, as the event hasn’t even happened yet. That last one is going to be a logistical challenge for Big Mavica, since it’s going to need to be recharged possibly faster than I can feasibly recharge it. We’ll see. Maybe I’ll have to make use of that electrical outlet like I found on Rohr 1297 (if this makes no sense to you, I go into more detail on it in a yet-unpublished photo set narrative).
So, yeah, I feel like I have lots still to do. But one way or another, we’re going to get through it. Hopefully it will all work out in the end. After all, a lot of it is Life and Times, and that’s a LOT of fun…
Categories: Schumin Web meta