A bus adventure in Charleston…
18 minute read
September 10, 2024, 3:36 PM
Recently, Elyse and I, along with our friend Kyle, made a trip to Charleston, South Carolina on something of a bus adventure.
However, before I get into the actual story, I have some updates for you, since it’s been a while since anything was discussed about the bus situation. Remember back in October, when Elyse, Montigue, and I went down to Charleston in the HR-V in order to pick up former CARTA bus 3426, a 1996 New Flyer D35HF, which we were then going to swap with Trevor Logan for an Orion V? Since then, things have changed quite a bit. First, the New Flyer needed a lot of work in order to be healthy, including a new transmission, which was more than Trevor was willing to commit to, and so he ultimately discontinued his efforts in restoring the bus. That made all of us sad, because we all wanted to see that bus restored and preserved, and didn’t want to see such a unique model go to scrap. Additionally, at the same time, I was having problems getting insurance for the Orion V, which was former Westchester County Bee-Line bus 700. That was a 2006 model, which was too recent to qualify for historic vehicle insurance (i.e. Hagerty), plus most of the other insurance companies balked at giving me insurance because of the two recent accidents that I was involved in with the old HR-V and with the new HR-V. I really resented that, because in both of those cases, I was ruled to not be at fault, i.e. I am a very safe driver, but they were holding it against me anyway, like it’s my fault that some idiot in a Nissan Pathfinder ran a red light at high speed and plowed into me. In any event, that problem with insurance caused delays in my taking possession of the bus, since I really couldn’t do anything with it until I was able to get it insured. So that’s where things stood for a while.
Then in April, when Elyse and I made our pleasure trip to Charleston, recall that the first thing that we did upon arrival in the Charleston area was to check up on 3426 at General Diesel‘s facility. We were pleased to see that it was still there, and at that time, I remarked, “The estimates have come back in, and while everything wrong with it can be fixed, it’s going to cost a big chunk of change to do. Whether that happens, however, is not up to me. But we at least wanted to say hello.” That was the end of our bus involvement for that trip, because other than Elyse’s riding around on various CARTA routes, there were no bus activities planned. But that visit set off a light bulb in my head. I knew roughly how much it would cost to repair 3426. I also knew that I could afford to have those repairs made. Because of all of the hassle with insurance and whatnot regarding the Orion V, I had also soured a bit on that bus, since I was facing roadblocks to even get into the game. By comparison, insurance for an historic vehicle would have been a snap. To qualify as historic requires that the vehicle be 25 or more model years old, and a 2006 Orion V wouldn’t hit that threshold until 2031, which, for our planning purposes, might as well be forever. So the idea was, why don’t we undo our trade, and let Trevor keep the Orion V, which was former Bee-Line 700, and I would take over former CARTA 3426?
Continue reading…Categories: CFW, New Flyer D35HF, North Carolina, South Carolina, Travel
An overnight trip to Pennsylvania…
14 minute read
August 21, 2024, 10:21 AM
On August 15 and 16, I made an overnight trip to Pennsylvania. The main purpose of the trip was to photograph some things in the Harrisburg area, and also make some stops in Gettysburg, York, and Hanover. Nowhere that I went was new territory for me, and I got everything that I wanted. This was one of those trips where I started out with one idea, and then built a trip around it to justify it. That idea was to fly my drone around a replica of the Statue of Liberty that someone erected in the middle of the Susquehanna River just north of Harrisburg. I had previously flown a drone around this same subject on the afternoon of January 5, and quickly realized something: the lighting was wrong for what I wanted. The statue faced approximately east, and coming in late afternoon, the sun was behind me, which didn’t lend itself to good photography. My photography technique was fine, but the lighting was wrong. See for yourself:
Categories: Fire alarms, Gettysburg, Hanover, Harrisburg, Photography, Travel, York
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
That was darker than I realized…
4 minute read
August 6, 2024, 8:07 PM
Recently, while operating the train, I was singing the “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” opera from Today’s Special to myself in the cab. For those of you who are not familiar, in the episode “Opera“, the main cast put on a short opera telling the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, singing the entire story as befits an opera. The whole thing is really cute, and if you’ve seen it, you probably remember that it finished like this:
Categories: Today's Special
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
If you want us to take you seriously, learn how to write…
8 minute read
July 19, 2024, 7:55 PM
It always amazes me at what kinds of stuff people allow to be published under their name, especially when they’re doing it with the expectation of making money. More specifically, it amazes me at how poor some of the work is that they publish with the aim of furthering their business endeavors. I have always been of the opinion that if you’re trying to market yourself, you should always put your best foot forward. The idea is that when you are selling yourself, you should be on your “A” game, because that’s the best that you’re ever going to be, when you’re trying to woo potential new clients. And if you can’t be bothered to do that when you’re trying to sell your services, what else are you slacking off on?
It’s like what they say about errors on a job application. The conventional wisdom there is that if there is any kind of error, no matter how minor, on your cover letter or resume, be it typographical, spelling, or grammatical, your resume is going in the trash. Let’s take a line out of my own resume from my description of my time as a bus operator:
Safely operated 40’ and 60’ buses on predefined routes, providing scheduled service to the general public.
Looks decent enough. Good spelling, good grammar, and no typographical errors. I’d hire me. Now here’s the same line, but this time, I have deliberately added a typographical error:
Safely operated 40’ and 60’ buses on predefined routes, providing schedueld service to the general public.
Did you see it? “Scheduled” is now “schedueld”. It doesn’t change the meaning of the sentence (unlike, for example, when “public” inadvertently gets shortened to “pubic”), but if I submitted that to someone in hopes of getting hired, I would have no business being upset when I don’t get any calls back, because I didn’t do my due diligence in making sure that I had put my own best foot forward. I couldn’t be bothered to make sure that I got the words all written correctly, and so there is no reason to think that I wouldn’t miss something far more sensitive on the job that could cost the company a lot of money. The company can easily dodge that potential bullet by not hiring the guy who has already provided documented proof of a lack of attention to detail.
Categories: Social media, Some people, Work
The Democrats are playing with fire…
10 minute read
July 8, 2024, 9:08 AM
On the first debate between president Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump during the 2024 election cycle, the biggest takeaway that I suspect most people got out of it was that Biden’s performance wasn’t what many people had expected from a sitting president. That then led to many calls for Biden to step down and be replaced as the Democratic nominee with some other Democrat that is presumably more youthful than Biden. All I know is that by having this kind of discussion, Democrats are playing with fire, and if they continue to go down that path, I guarantee you that it’s not going to end well for them.
First of all, I’m willing to forgive Biden for a lackluster performance at the debate. Every other performance of his that I’ve seen has been okay. Thus I’m willing to take Biden at his word that his poor performace was fatigue-related due to a lot of international travel, and move on. After all, no one is perfect. It sounds like he overbooked himself, i.e. he had been presidenting really hard, and the debate was where things broke down. It doesn’t mean that he’s declining in physical or mental capacity, or otherwise incompetent, and it certainly shouldn’t be taken to define him. Looking at my own job performance, one could conceivably look at the occasions where I’ve flubbed announcements on the train, and use it to paint an unflattering picture of my competence as a train operator that may not be completely fair. For the record, yes, I am a very competent operator. I know every inch of the system. Among other things, I have operated over every mile of revenue track, I have serviced every single station, I know the order of all of the stations backwards and forwards, I know all of the alphanumeric codes for the stations and yards, and I know where all of the interlockings are. But some trips, especially after I’ve been up and down the same line several times that day, I just can’t get my announcements straight, occasionally calling out the wrong next station or the wrong direction of travel. I usually catch myself when I do that, but all the same, some riders might use that as a way to unfairly characterize me as an idiot. Same thing goes for the president. I’m willing to forgive a poor performance if everything else is where it needs to be.
Categories: National politics
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
One of my best years in school…
50 minute read
June 21, 2024, 1:00 PM
Out of all of the school experiences that I’ve discussed in the past, I recently realized while I was out operating the train that I’ve never said a whole lot about sixth grade. That year is a tie with eighth grade for my best year in school, because for the most part, everything that year just worked out really well. It was a year where I learned a lot in new surroundings, and I had a lot of great new experiences.
Sixth grade came on the heels of my absolute worst year in school, i.e. fifth grade. I’ve written about that experience in some detail not once, but twice, but to put it simply, it was an extremely toxic environment where the school was actively working against us, and which we had determined would not get better no matter what we did. Additionally, sixth grade was still part of elementary school in Rogers at that time, so if we had remained, we would have been right back at the same toxic school environment for another year, which have been far less than ideal. I admit that I was a bit wary about wanting to deal with school again, but of course, it wasn’t like dropping out and doing something else was an option. I was absolutely delighted to learn that in my new school district, sixth grade was part of middle school, and not the final year of elementary school. By fifth grade, it was clear that I had outgrown the elementary school format, so moving up to the next tier made enough sense. I was ready to do something new, and I was up for the challenge. It was the perfect stage for a fantastic rebound year after the previous disaster of a year.
On the day that we arrived in Stuarts Draft, we took care of school matters for both my sister and me. She would be starting second grade at Stuarts Draft Elementary School, and I would be starting sixth grade at Stuarts Draft Middle School. And there was another twist: sixth grade orientation was that same night. We all were like, guess we know what we’re doing tonight.
Categories: Fire drills, Middle school, Stuarts Draft
A weekend loop trip…
22 minute read
June 12, 2024, 8:24 AM
From May 30 to June 1, I took a trip down to the Hampton Roads area in Virginia. Hampton Roads is by no means an unfamiliar place, even though I don’t get to go there nearly as much as I would otherwise like, but the way I got down there was a bit unconventional. Instead of going down the west side of the Beltway to I-95 in Springfield heading towards Richmond and then hanging a left on I-64 to go through New Kent, Williamsburg, and the like to get to my hotel in Newport News, I instead went down the east side of the Beltway to New Carrollton, where I got on Route 50 and took that over the Bay Bridge and then continued as far as Salisbury, where I made a right turn at US 13 to head down into Virginia towards the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. From there, I headed through Norfolk, through the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel, through Hampton, and finally to my hotel in Newport News. I was also doing this trip completely unsupervised, as Elyse was going to a bus event up in Hershey that same weekend.
I made a few stops along the way, mostly to do some photography with the drone. My first stop was at a large park on the east side of the Bay Bridge, where I was planning to get some shots of the bridge itself:
Categories: Friends, Hampton Roads, Maryland, Photography, Roads, Today's Special
Raise a glass for ICQ…
8 minute read
May 24, 2024, 5:32 PM
Categories: Netculture, Schumin Web meta
A proper visit to Charleston…
28 minute read
May 9, 2024, 10:14 AM
From April 17-19, Elyse and I made a weekend trip down to Charleston, South Carolina. It’s funny how this worked out. After our visit to Charleston last October, we both were left wanting more. We saw lots of potential in Charleston, and wanted to go back, but we weren’t sure whether we wanted to drive back again, vs. flying. Charleston is eight hours away, which is quite a long haul, and it’s almost entirely through rural areas once you get out of the DC region. In other words, not very exciting. But then when we looked at airfare, we realized that it was really expensive, and that with all of the goings-on at the airport plus multiple flights, we wouldn’t save any time compared to driving, plus we would be limited as to what we could bring with us, and would probably need to rent a car down there. All of that said, that pushed me into driving territory, because then we could bring whatever we wanted, go on our own schedule, and have fun on the way down and back. Plus then we would have the HR-V in Charleston.
On the southbound leg, I tried to keep the trip as close to all-business as I could. I only planned on making four stops: one in the Richmond area, one in Skippers, Virginia (the last Virginia exit on I-95), one somewhere in North Carolina, and then one at the Buc-ee’s in Florence, South Carolina. That would get us to Charleston at a somewhat reasonable hour as long as we kept to it.
Richmond was intended primarily as a food stop. My original idea was to stop at the Sheetz at the Atlee exit, and do Sheetz, and I pitched that to Elyse a few days prior to our trip. It’s funny – when I pitched the idea, Elyse’s response was something to the effect of, “When were you going to tell me about this?” and my response was simply, “What does this look like?” Elyse said that she didn’t want to do Sheetz, because we always do Sheetz, and then suggested we find a barbecue place. I was like, “You had me at barbecue.” Looking it up, I found two places that weren’t too far off of I-95. One was a place called Q Barbeque up in Glen Allen, and then the other one was Oak & Apple right in downtown. I chose Oak & Apple, because it was right in downtown Richmond, and closer to the freeway. More or less get off of the exit, go like two blocks, and boom, there it is.
Categories: Converted buildings, Fire alarms, Netculture, New Flyer D35HF, North Carolina, Photography, Retail, Roads, Ships, South Carolina, Transit, Travel
Where does it go from punishment to exploitation?
8 minute read
May 1, 2024, 9:36 AM
Recently, this post by Nadia Ware came up on my news feed in a Staunton group that I’m in:
Categories: Social media, Staunton
A trip across South Jersey…
16 minute read
April 27, 2024, 9:41 AM
On April 4-5, I went on a solo trip up to New Jersey. It was a trip that I had been looking for a time to do and one that Elyse had no interest in. April 4-5 was where it fit in my schedule, so I planned it out and went. That said, I was certainly crossing my fingers and anything else that I could cross that the weather would hold out. The forecast for my travel dates would be mostly cloudy and rainy, with a possibility for some breaks in the cloud cover and precipitation. I wanted a very productive overnight trip where I came back with a nice, big photo take, and not a trip that got rained out and ended up being a scouting-future-locations kind of trip. That’s the thing about overnight trips and such: they’re planned and booked in advance, so the weather can be a bit of a roll of the dice. Sometimes you win, and sometimes you don’t.
The plan was to go up to New Jersey via I-95 (i.e. my usual route) and then go across South Jersey on the first day, ending up in Egg Harbor Township for the night. Then I was going to go down to Cape May and take the ferry across to Delaware on the second day, returning home via US 50. Elyse and I tend to call this sort of trip profile a “loop trip”, since we are more or less constantly covering new ground, and doing almost no backtracking. These sorts of trips are fun when they work out, since it eliminates the return-trip blahs, where it’s clear that the fun is largely over, and we’re just retracing our steps back home. On a loop trip, almost no road is traveled on twice.
This one was a little unusual in that I had a doctor’s appointment at the hospital in Olney first thing, so I attended to that and then left straight from the hospital. However, the ride up didn’t exactly inspire confidence in my ability to have the productive trip that I wanted, since it was raining more or less the entire way up to New Jersey. My first planned photo stop was the Church Landing Fishing Spot in Pennsville Township, where I planned to try some different angles of the Delaware Memorial Bridge with the drone, but due to bad weather, I skipped it. I’m not worried about it, though, because we visited this area once before in 2022, and I don’t expect that it’s going anywhere any time soon, i.e. I can do that on a future visit. Fortunately, the rain stopped not long after I got into New Jersey, though the cloud cover would persist for most of the day.
Categories: Delaware, Family, New Jersey, Ocean City, Photography, Ships, Travel
“Autism acceptance” means all autistic people…
9 minute read
April 23, 2024, 10:20 AM
For those not aware, April has been designated as Autism Awareness/Acceptance Month. I tend to fall more on the “acceptance” side of things, since it’s not so much about making people aware about autism and autistic people as it is to accept us for who we are, and for them to not infantilize or otherwise behave patronizingly towards us. I also feel as though there are a lot of misconceptions about autism, and the activities that various organizations have put on in recognition of autism have not done anything to help dispel these misconceptions. The biggest thing that I’ve noticed is that the focus is often entirely on children, which makes me think that too many people seem to believe that autism is something that just affects children, and that it’s not something that adults also deal with. In other words, autistic children are all well and good and all, but they eventually grow up to become autistic adults. Autism is not something that you outgrow as you get older. You don’t just stop being autistic once you reach adulthood. Autistic people may become very adept at hiding it, also known as “masking”, as they get older, but beneath it all, they’re still autistic.
That said, I take great issue with people’s focusing solely on children when discussing autism, because it is a lifelong condition. In my case, I am very high-functioning, and so while growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, my autism went undiagnosed. That meant that I got no autism-specific support as a child and as a teen. That’s not the fault of anything specific to my situation, though, since autism wasn’t as well understood back then, and high-functioning cases like mine weren’t typically diagnosed. I admit that I have mixed feelings on that, as I’ve heard about some of the interventions and other alleged “help” for autistic people at the time. So while it might have been helpful for me to have had some autism-related support, remembering the ham-handed way that the school tried to address my toe walking when I was in kindergarten, I don’t necessarily know if I would trust them to help me out with that.