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February 13, 2007, 4:24 AM

I am pleased to say that I am home safe and sound once again, back from my 87th DC trip since I started doing these things back in 2004. This trip was moved up two days due to an impending snowstorm, and even then, I was fully prepared to abort the trip and return home should the weather have turned sour while I was up there. But thankfully, the weather held, and I accomplished all of my objectives for this trip. The weather in DC was beautiful, too. It was cold, but it wasn’t windy, and the skies were clear well into the afternoon.

The trip home was not so nice, though. I encountered light snow briefly around Front Royal, and then I encountered the heaviest snow from just north of Woodstock to just south of New Market. From New Market to Harrisonburg, it was wet, and then the roads were perfect from Harrisonburg to Stuarts Draft.

I also made excellent time going home despite 25 miles of snow, through which I was going 45 mph on the interstate. I made such excellent time in part because I really blew right through my two stops. Seriously, I was in and out of Sheetz in Haymarket and Wal-Mart in Woodstock in record time. All part of making hay while the roads are clear. Especially when I don’t have the luxury of two off-days back to back this week.

Continue reading…

Categories: DC trips, Schumin Web meta, Street art

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February 10, 2007, 11:16 PM

Sad to say, it appears that I will NOT make my stated goal of having the J27 photo set up before my next DC trip on February 14. However, this is because other factors over which I have no control are acting on my plans and throwing a little monkey wrench into it all.

One word: SNOW.

It’s forecast to snow on Tuesday, and also snow through Tuesday night. Therefore, I’m going to project that the roads will not be in sufficient shape on Wednesday morning for me to safely make a trip to Washington DC. So I’m moving it up to Monday the 12th, before the snow comes. Thus I’m losing two days to work on it, and so completion by my next DC trip seems unlikely. However, finishing it by my intended goal date of February 14 still seems likely. After all, I’m going to have all day on the 14th to work on it. The 12th was originally going to be that work day. So there you have it.

And considering the rapid progress on this photo set, I’ve also rediscovered something about how I work: deadlines. If I set deadlines, I get the material out by that deadline. The Outlet Village photo set sat idle for some time, but then once I set a goal of having that set completed by the time the Outlet Village closed for good, I made the goal. So perhaps I need to become more deadline-oriented with this site.

Categories: DC trips, Schumin Web meta, Winter weather

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February 8, 2007, 3:29 AM

I just finished selecting all the photos for the new J27 set for Life and Times. Now this is still subject to change, but at this juncture, it looks like I’m going to break the size record for photo sets, last set back in 2003 with An Urban Comparison, weighing in at 137 photos. The new J27 photo set weighs in at 140 photos, plus 29 movies, which means 169 things altogether. Wow.

Now of course, all this is subject to change as the photo set nears completion. Right now, while the set has been basically laid out, I still reserve the right to change everything. It’s also still quite incomplete. All 169 things are still on one single page, the photo set still has no title, I have blank blue boxes as placeholders for the video stills and file names where the sizes are supposed to be, and the images themselves simply resized versions of the raw images and have not yet been numbered for the photo set.

The next step involves prepping everything to make it all work. And a few more steps beyond that, and we’ll be finished. I’ll post an update and add it to the menu, and that will be that.

Categories: Schumin Web meta

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November 28, 2006, 7:58 PM

I also had the realization while on Metro that my Transit Center site needs a BIG redesign. Not just a change in color scheme and minor details like in the last update. We realized with that last update that the site was a real pain in the you-know-what to update, and so we’re going to go about changing that with the next crop of photos. Hopefully I’ll find something really workable…

Categories: Schumin Web meta

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November 28, 2006, 12:07 AM

Here’s a page that’s a great candidate for a rewrite: the Introduction page. I just checked it out tonight, since someone had mentioned to me recently that there’s presently nothing obvious for first-time viewers of the site on or linked from the main page. This page was linked from the main page prior to the main page’s last redesign this past July. With the elimination of the menu on that page to support wide images on the photo feature, there’s now nothing to show.

I will be the first to admit that the “center section”, which consists of the main page, that intro page, the contact pages, and the privacy statement, needs some serious reworking due to the current main page’s kind of cutting things off in spots. The question turns on what to do. I’ll have to think about that one.

But the very obvious work that must be done is to write a new introduction page, and link it more prominently from the main page. My goodness… the present introduction page is rather dated. Without going into the update records, it looks like the present page was last revised in 2004, but that most of the writing is older than that. First off, the photo of me is around five years old, taken in December 2001. I don’t wear those glasses anymore, I look younger, and the background is obviously Potomac Hall. It seems a new photo is in order. Then I mention the quote changing with regularity – the quote’s been gone for more than a year and a half. I also mention the Online Store, with “all kinds of nifty Schumin Web merchandise”. Several problems there: First, the store has a more adult-oriented selection of merchandise than it used to. And I mean “adult” as in grown-up, not pornographic, before anyone takes that the wrong way. Then I also mention the shirt I’m wearing in the photo – my “Schumin Out” hoodie. It was one of many designs to get the axe during the recent store revamp.

So yeah, that page is no longer a fitting introduction to the site. It makes me glad that, at this juncture, the page has become somewhat marginalized. Give me an hour or so, and I can turn this page into a beautiful, current, gleaming example of what The Schumin Web has to offer.

Categories: Schumin Web meta

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November 23, 2006, 2:13 AM

Every so often, as you know, I like to give updates on photo sets, like when things have changed. I think the most notable update has to be in my Afton Mountain photo set, where the Skyline Parkway Motel was torched ten months after I did the set.

This time, though, it’s a DC area update. You remember when I did Urban Demolition? That showed 1117 North 19th Street in the process of being demolished. Then when I did If These Streets Could Talk about a month and a half later, the site was simply a hole in the ground. The most recent update on that site that I provided was in Part 2 of my Year In Review photo set. There, it was still mostly a hole in the ground, but new structural elements were starting to take shape.

Now, check this out:

Continue reading…

Categories: Arlington, Schumin Web meta

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October 29, 2006, 12:24 AM

Okay, I’m slightly amused. I’ve launched my new Online Store today, having set all the new mods, and it’s definitely a change. Gone are most of the old designs. Goodbye “Chef Schumin”. Goodbye to the three “Photo” designs. Goodbye to the old “You know you’ve been thinking about fire alarms too much when” design. Goodbye calendars. And most notably, goodbye thongs. The little thong underwear that I’ve offered in the store for four years is officially gone for good.

Only two things were carried over from the old store. The design formerly known as “Traditional” remains as the sole entry in “Logo Apparel” and “Logo ‘Stuff'”. The other is the line of photo mousepads, which are going to get spiffed up a bit when they’re expanded in the future. Then there are some entirely new lines. I’ve started offering my own brand of slogan t-shirts, and new high-quality framed prints of selected photo features.

Continue reading…

Categories: Schumin Web meta

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August 11, 2006, 1:05 AM

My original plan was to offer the entire Web site in “Mobile Web” format suitable for viewing on a cell phone. I am officially scaling that back.

Why, you may ask?

Because the average mobile phone can’t seem to handle the pictures. And by “average mobile phone”, I mean my personal cell phone, which I will have until it’s time to upgrade again.

It seems that my site is strong on mobile phones in its text-based areas. In other words, the Journal, and some parts of the Archives. The photo sets seem to be too “heavy” for the phone to handle. I get “insufficient memory” messages and the photos stop loading. So pooh on that. Of course, that happens on three (that I know of) Journal entries as well. Those would be the three that are the basis for the narratives for the Million Worker March, J20, and A16, since they rely a lot on photos.

So at least I learned something from my experimentation on College Life this evening. I learned that photo sets do not work well in the mobile format. Now I just need to figure out what I want to port over to mobile next…

Categories: Schumin Web meta

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July 26, 2006, 1:18 AM

Mom found out today that our new kitchen counters are going in this Thursday. These new countertops are STONE. Mom actually went to Roanoke to pick out a slab of granite a few weeks ago that would become our new counters.

I am impressed. So on Thursday, they go in. And we had nearly fourteen years with the old counters. The old ones were cheap counters with some sort of laminate on top of them. These new ones are nice. I’m told that if you put something really hot on them, that the worst that will happen is that the surface will get hot for a while.

So that ought to be nice. And so preparing food will be a touch tricky for the next few days while they put it in.

Otherwise, today I ran the first vertical photo feature since the main page was redesigned. And it’s from my very first protest back on April 12, 2003 of a black bloc demonstrator. Boy, oh boy, oh boy… that was an interesting protest. The word “greenhorn” comes to mind to describe how I handled that event. I had never heard of a black bloc back then, and I had certainly never seen masked demonstrators before in real life. But this was real life, and there they were. And I never thought that three years out from that first demonstration, that I would have participated in a black bloc six times.

But seriously, though, if you look at the April 12, 2003 protest and compare it with something more recent, like Night March, you’ll see a big difference. The first one is very much an account of a first protest, while the other one comes from a more seasoned participant.

Categories: House, Schumin Web meta

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July 13, 2006, 12:32 AM

I’m getting the feeling that the recent reconfiguration of the main page to accommodate a horizontal photo feature is going to turn out to be a great thing. I’ve got a lot of horizontally-oriented photos that could be used as features, but that I’d been unable to show due to format limitations. Now I can do it. So far, though, I’ve not used something really new or daring with the horizontal feature. I’m still getting used to how it all looks on the newly-redesigned page. It will be a lot of fun, though.

And there’s still room for vertical features. I figured out how to use the space that was recently by the menu to fill what otherwise looks very empty. That will be visible as of the next vertical feature.

And I figured out how to make it where I can change the page design using a database switch. Part of the page’s design is supplied by the database, which has the HTML to render the filler material for the vertical features, or the HTML to leave it out.

Categories: Schumin Web meta

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July 10, 2006, 7:06 AM

Unfortunately, my vacation is over, and has been over for a few days now. As I write this, I have three post-vacation workdays under my belt, and am going to start another one in less than two hours. However, the vacation did do what it was supposed to do – it left me refreshed, and not feeling like I want to strangle someone by the end of the day.

Otherwise, I’m just tickled about the new Transit Center design that I’m implementing. I’ve already got the section on the rail pages, and I’m getting ready to make the changeover for the buses. It’s got a tan-colored background, and the Transit Center logo is now orange. And you know how I describe the color scheme? I refer to it as the “Breda” color scheme. For those of you who are unfamiliar, I based the color scheme here on Metro’s 4000-series cars, which were manufactured in 1991 by a company called Breda. I was tempted to add “Made in Italy by Breda Costruzioni Ferroviarie S.p.A.” to the page somewhere, complete with horse logo, but I don’t want anyone to think that the page was actually made in Italy by Breda.

And then as far as reconfigurations go, I’m also launching a new main page design. This reconfigures the photo feature so that I can carry horizontal images on the site, and also sweeps the sidebar menu off the main page to make room for it. Losing that side menu isn’t too much of a loss because the main-page menu just carries information that’s linked to the bottom of every page. So we’ll still get along fine if we lose it. I’m just tickled, though, to be able to run horizontal photos in the main-page space.

Categories: Schumin Web meta, Travel

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June 30, 2006, 10:48 AM

I would like to know what I was thinking back in 2003 when I was laying out these “Photo Essay Blitz” sets. Usually, I try to make the final photo numbers go in order down the page, even if the pictures aren’t arranged in chronological order. This, however, is ridiculous. And it makes my current work retrofitting captions onto these older sets all the more complicated since I have to hop all around the database to find the entries for these photos.

This is why the 2003 set A Protest Against the War received an update last night. I decided I couldn’t take it anymore. The numbers were all out of order, plus the navigation didn’t flow logically. I fixed the numbers by renumbering all the photos. Now they start at 1 and go to 122 in exactly the order that they appear on the page. I fixed the navigation by going from the old descriptors (Freedom Plaza 1 and 2, McPherson Square, Farragut West) to straight parts (Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4). The navigation also bugged me because the descriptors were inaccurate, which I noticed in becoming more familiar with DC. The “McPherson Square” section was a block or so away from the square, and then the “Farragut West” section was at 18th and K Streets NW, a few blocks from Farragut Square, though only one block from the Metro station.

I can tell you why I did it that way originally, though. I set it like that because I picked out the photos, numbered them, and put them on the page, and then laid them out on the page like a big storyboard. Thus the numbers ended up all out of order. Compare to now, where I sort them in CompuPic, and don’t pin them up on the Web site until it’s nearly done.

One thing I have to say is that it certainly makes maintenance and updates easy if the numbers go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. It gets to be a real bother if it goes 1, 7, 23, 15, 12, 34, etc.

Categories: Schumin Web meta

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June 28, 2006, 7:13 AM

If you’ve looked at my site updates, I just released a new photo set in Life and Times called Night March. I wasn’t planning on finishing it this morning, but I got to working on it, and I realized that I was very close to completing it, so I just decided to go ahead and finish the set, and get that out there. So now you can view that protest against the World Bank and IMF that I went to on April 22, where a black bloc snaked through the streets of DC. It was fun.

My only issue with the set is that the dark and the rain, combined with the constant motion of the camera, led to pictures that I don’t consider my best work. Of course, Life and Times is there to showcase events, where capturing the action, rather than creating beautiful photos, is the point. Still, I’ve done better. A16 and the Million Worker March are two Life and Times sets that I consider to be really nice photography-wise. On this one, with the camera having water issues during the event and the need to heavily retouch some of these photos to show the action, it leaves me wishing that the photos had come out better. Still, though, I do like the set, and the photos certainly demonstrate the hostile environment in which they were taken.

For the next set to go up, it’s either going to be one about downtown Waynesboro or Breezewood for Photography, or the “No Armageddon” rally in DC for Life and Times.

Categories: Photography, Schumin Web meta

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June 17, 2006, 12:33 AM

June 28, as you may recall, is my first day of vacation. And I can’t wait. What do I have planned? Not much. I’m planning on going to Washington twice during that time – once on both ends of the vacation.

June 28 will be a trip similar to the “accidental” DC trip, where I approached DC from the south (I-95), rather than my usual westerly approach (I-66). This time, though, I’m going to run it on local roads. Instead of I-95, I’m going to take US 1. I believe this will take me close to the Huntington station, which is one that I’ve never originated from before. That ought to be exciting. That would bring the number of Metro stations to which I can confidently drive up to four.

Currently, I can confidently drive to Vienna, West Falls Church-VT/UVA and Franconia-Springfield. And when I say “confidently”, I mean that I could give someone good directions to drive to the station from outside the DC metro area. Now mind you, I can get to a good many stations by walking – more than I want to list. I can follow the route of the Blue and Orange Lines on foot from Foggy Bottom all the way to L’Enfant Plaza, Green all the way from Shaw to L’Enfant Plaza (and Yellow by extension), and Red from Cleveland Park to Judiciary Square, among other little station-to-station walks. But driving is a whole different ballgame, especially with the suburban stations. Trust me here.

Continue reading…

Categories: DC trips, Schumin Web meta, Travel

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May 31, 2006, 11:17 PM

What a wonderful dinner we had at O’Charley’s! Dad met us up there, since it made more sense for him to meet us up there than go back home. So Mom, Sis, and I went up to Harrisonburg in the Sable via Route 11 (the scenic route through several small towns) and then cut through JMU to get to Harrisonburg Crossing.

Everything went well. The only point where things went slightly awry was when all the staff came out to wish some other customer a happy birthday. Sis mentioned how good of an idea it would be to mention it to our server that this was my birthday dinner. Then our server came out, and Sis mentioned it to her. My exact response was, “Don’t even think about it.” It worked out, though. Our server said she’d bring out a cake without the fanfare. And it was a nice cake.

Still, like I need the sugar and calories in a cake.

Continue reading…

Categories: Birthdays, Family, Myself, Schumin Web meta