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Playing with the AI image generator…

October 27, 2023, 10:02 AM

Recently, a friend of mine posted some computer generated images from the Bing Image Creator, which uses the DALL-E system as its base.  I enjoyed their posts, so I decided to take it for a spin myself with subjects that were more relevant to me.  My first idea was to have it generate me.  The way I saw it, ChatGPT kinda sorta knew who I was, so it seemed reasonable to see if Bing Image Creator could perform similarly.

The first prompt that I gave it was “Ben Schumin in Washington, DC” and this is what it produced:

"Ben Schumin in Washington, DC" (1)  "Ben Schumin in Washington, DC" (2)

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The group process interview…

October 16, 2023, 9:30 AM

Recently, while I was alone with my thoughts while operating the train, I recalled the weirdest job interview that I ever had.  That was the “group process” day that the Office of Residence Life at JMU did as part of their selection process for new resident advisors, at least back when I went through in the early 2000s.  You spent most of the day in Taylor Hall with the Residence Life people, doing various activities with your fellow candidates so that the hall directors could see how well you worked as a team.  The sense that I got was that it was well-intentioned, but it was a bit misguided, because the dynamic was quite different from what one would experience in real life, and thus the utility was quite limited.

The way that it worked was that they put everyone in groups of about five people, and those were the people that you would be working with throughout the day.  Then they rotated you through a number of different rooms, where they had different scenarios for you to work through as a group.  I don’t remember all of them, but one of the situations that they put us in was where we had to get everyone from point A to point B across what was supposed to be a dangerous moat or something.  One person was not allowed to see, I believe, and another person was not allowed to speak.  I was the no-speak person in that exercise, which was a challenge for me, but we all made it across successfully.

At the end of the day, you were asked to do an evaluation of how the group process interview went, as well as an evaluation of your own performance in their interview.  Then the group process interview was followed by two conventional one-on-one interviews at a later date.  One interview was with one of the next year’s hall directors, i.e. the people who would ultimately be selecting the RAs, and the other was with a member of the full-time staff, such as an area coordinator (i.e. the hall directors’ bosses).  Those were pretty straightforward, being your typical job interview, where the interviewer asks you to share times when different things happened in your life and/or career, and find out how you handled them.

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Categories: JMU, Work

I can’t believe that we went to South Carolina…

October 13, 2023, 5:51 PM

First of all, I have some news for you: I bought a bus.  Elyse had been trying to talk me into buying a bus for a while, and I had consistently said no.  But then one came up on GovDeals, which is a website where public agencies sell surplus property, that had promise, and I said okay.  This unit was a New Flyer D35HF from CARTA, which is the transit agency serving Charleston, South Carolina.  If this sounds familiar, “Biscuit” at Commonwealth Coach is another unit from the same agency, and is the same model of bus.  I won the auction for a surprisingly low amount, as we paid nearly twice as much to get “Biscuit” for Commonwealth Coach.  We then immediately made a deal with Trevor Logan, a fellow transit enthusiast in the DC area who runs the TTMG website, to trade this bus for an Orion V that he owns after he expressed his thoughts about the significance of the unit.  It worked out quite well, because while Elyse and I simply wanted a bus to have as a fun vehicle of sorts to take places and show off, Trevor wanted to fully restore and preserve the bus for sentimental reasons, as he had a close relative who worked for CARTA some years ago, and that relative had operated this specific unit.  So swapping made everyone happy, as Elyse and I would get a bus to have fun with, and Trevor got something of great personal significance that he would restore.

With that said, buying a bus from a transit agency in South Carolina meant going down to South Carolina to retrieve it, because these auctions are typically as-is-where-is, i.e. the agency provides little to no assistance with the removal of the item.  I wanted to line this pickup trip with a three-day weekend that I had later in the month, but unfortunately, with deadlines for removal and such, it couldn’t wait.  So I would spend October 5-6 traveling down to Charleston and back with Elyse and our friend Montigue to retrieve this vintage bus.  The whole week prior to our heading down, I was saying to myself, “I can’t believe that I’m going to South Carolina.”  Then on the way down, I was like, “I can’t believe that we’re on our way to South Carolina.”  And then once we were there, I was saying, “I can’t believe that we’re in South Carolina.”  Seriously.  This was not something that I had anticipated doing this year.

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Categories: Transit, Travel

Apparently, I just have bad luck when it comes to cars…

September 29, 2023, 11:20 PM

Apparently, I just have rotten luck when it comes to cars, as the new HR-V has already made its first visit to the body shop.  Back in July, Elyse and I got rear-ended on the GW Parkway on the way home from work.  We were in a work zone, and I had to stop short after someone stopped short in front of me.  I was successful in not hitting the guy in front of me, because I was maintaining a good following distance, but then the guy behind me wasn’t so fortunate, and plowed into the back of the HR-V.  That was a big jolt.  The car, meanwhile, was on top of things, as it popped up a message on the screen saying something like, “Hey, I think we got hit.  Want me to call 911 for you?”  Turned out, though, that 911, after playing hot potato with me (the accident happened in Virginia, but my phone connected me to Montgomery County, who transferred me to Fairfax County, who then transferred me to US Park Police), wouldn’t send anyone out since there were no injuries and both cars were still drivable.  So we just exchanged information and kept it moving.  Here’s what the damage to my car looked like:

The HR-V immediately after the accident

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Categories: Honda HR-V (2023)

A blank slate for the future…

September 20, 2023, 8:46 AM

From September 13-15, Elyse and I made our usual trip down to Staunton, where we photographed a bunch of stuff, did a bunch of other stuff, and also saw my parents.  On the middle day of our trip, I did what I consider to be a final update on the demolition of Staunton Mall.  The demolition work had been completed some time between our December trip, when I flew the drone around the mostly-demolished facility, and our March trip, but due to scheduling issues, I wasn’t able get out there to actually photograph it again until September.  With demolition completed, I intended to physically go in and photograph things with my DSLR and my phone, rather than go in by remote via the drone.  The idea was that with the demolition work completed, whatever was left should be pretty stable, so I didn’t need to worry about falling debris or anything else, because it was being left for an indefinite amount of time, until whatever new development that is to replace the mall begins construction.  Don’t get me wrong: the drone is a great piece of equipment, but it isn’t able to capture the same amount of detail that one can get by actually going in with a conventional camera and getting right up close to things.  That’s not a fault of my drone by any means.  You really don’t want to take the drone close enough to anything to get that level of detail in the first place, because that comes with an unacceptable level of risk of an accident.  If the drone makes contact with anything, the motors will stop, and it will go down.  The drone, by its nature, is also much faster moving photography than one might do when shooting conventionally, and as such, you’re not usually able to stop and appreciate what you’re looking at when you’re flying a drone, i.e. it’s easy to miss a lot of details in the moment.  With fairly limited fly time (a drone battery only lasts about 20-25 minutes), it behooves you to get in, get your shots, and get out.  By walking in, I was able to slow down and take more time to focus on my surroundings, and I noticed a lot more detail than I would otherwise.

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Two stories about Woomy…

September 8, 2023, 11:33 PM

Recently, while we were driving home from shopping, Elyse asked ChatGPT to tell her a story about everyone’s favorite orange curmudgeon: Woomy.  I don’t know what the exact parameters that she gave it were, but it came up with decent enough material to come up with something at least somewhat heartwarming.  Check these out:

In the heart of Alexandria, Virginia, there lived a curmudgeonly orange octopus named Woomy.  Every day, rain or shine, Woomy would climb aboard the DASH bus, his tentacles a tangle of frustration.  He’d grumble and grouse about the noise, the crowds, and the whole human world around him.

Passengers would stare, amused by this unexpected commuter.  Woomy’s sour expression became a familiar sight, and people began sharing stories of his antics.  But despite the attention, Woomy remained steadfast in his curmudgeonly ways.

One winter’s day, as snow painted the city white, a young child with curious eyes got on the bus.  Ignoring the stares, the child approached Woomy, offering a small, hand-knit scarf.  Woomy’s eyes widened, his expression softening just a bit.  He accepted the scarf with a tentative tentacle.

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No, my mother is not selling concert tickets…

August 22, 2023, 9:30 AM

I don’t understand what makes people send money to random people on the Internet, but I’ve seen it happen, and have recently been put in the unenviable position of being the unwilling spokesperson regarding one of those people, advising people not to give their money to someone who is acting under false pretenses.  I’ve seen it happen with people who are desperate for love, getting scammed under the mistaken idea that it will help them get laid.  Apparently, people looking for concert tickets are also quite vulnerable to being scammed, as I’ve come to find out firsthand when my mother’s Facebook became compromised, and a new person started using the account to scam people who were seeking to buy concert tickets.  What happened was that Mom clicked on something that she had absolutely no business clicking on, and that allowed an attacker to seize control of her account.  They quickly changed the login credentials in order to lock Mom out of it, and then started putting the account to use for more nefarious purposes.  I found out about it by people who saw my name on Mom’s Facebook account, then, seeing that I had a verified account, came to me to find out if I knew who the seller was, and wanted to know when their concert tickets would arrive.  I did some research, and turned up several examples of what was going on:

"I have 8 Savannah banana tickets on 26th August at Des Moines principal park in Iowa for sale, message me if interested."  "Hello 👋, I've 4 Nickelback tickets for sale at cheaper price, send a dm if you're interested thanks"  "Hello 👋, I've 4 tickets to Jelly Roll Concert in Clarkston, MI tonight. PM me if you're interested."

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Categories: Family, Social media

Twenty years of Journal entries…

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:

News of the Week

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.

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Categories: Schumin Web meta

Toronto was fun, and flying… wasn’t bad.

August 11, 2023, 8:09 PM

So the trip to Toronto that I discussed in my earlier Journal entry about going flying again was a whole lot of fun.  I did not know that one could pack that much fun into three short days.  Seriously, this was a really fun weekend trip, where we got to spend time with friends and see lots of interesting things.

First, though, let’s address the elephant in the room: yes, I went through with it and went flying, and no, I didn’t die.  I don’t know if I would necessarily characterize flying as “enjoyable”, but it was at least relatively painless.  This trip was in part a test to see how well I would tolerate flying, with one of two possible results: either my horizons would be expanded greatly, or I would never fly again.  Fortunately, it was the former, as I think that my being much more mature since the last time I flew, plus my doing a little bit of research did me well.  I also had Elyse with me, who is something of a seasoned flyer and knew what we needed to do, so I just had to do as I was told.  We took public transit from the house to Dulles, via the 58 bus, the Red Line, and the Silver Line.  Then security at Dulles was relatively straightforward, throwing all of our stuff on a conveyor belt and running it through this massive machine.  Though I did roll my eyes at having to take my shoes off – but I wore flip-flops on purpose in order to expedite that process.  Once we got through security, it was just a matter of waiting until our plane arrived and then it was time to board and depart.  This whole airport thing was totally new to me, so I was just sort of taking it in.  I’d never been past the main atrium at Dulles before, so there was lots to see.  We took the air train to our terminal, which was pretty straightforward, but seeing as it was fully enclosed, it was no fun for fanning, since there was no real angle to get a photo of the vehicles.  Though with its being fully automated, there was no cab, which meant that you got a great view of the roadway ahead.

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I’m going flying again…

July 21, 2023, 8:07 PM

Remember when I wrote that Journal entry about how I had not flown on an airplane in more than two decades?  That non-flying streak ends next week.  Elyse and I are taking a Wednesday-to-Friday “weekend” trip to Toronto in order to see an exhibit at the Myseum of Toronto about television in Toronto.  As you probably guessed, there are elements from Today’s Special involved in this exhibit.  The exhibit runs through the middle of next month, and so I figure, we’ve got to go see it.  I found out about the Myseum exhibit from Nina Keogh (who played Muffy), and it opened just after we had finished our trip to Ottawa.  I really wanted to go to the exhibit, but I felt like I couldn’t do another trip to Canada so soon after the last one, both for cost reasons, but also for time reasons.  But eventually, I determined that I couldn’t resist, but that the only way that the trip would make sense would be if we flew.  I played with it in my head, and then pitched it to Elyse, and she was supportive of the trip, but was surprised that I suggested flying.  But an exhibit about Today’s Special will mean a lot to me, so I considered it worth it.  I loved the children’s television exhibit when we went to Ottawa, and so I’m excited to see this second take on a similar subject.  If it tells you anything, I heard Muffy’s voice in my head, telling me, “I know you want to visit me, but to do it, you’ll have to fly, you see.”  Damn it, Muffy, you talked me into it.

Once we get to Toronto, we’re staying at the Chelsea again, which is within walking distance of the Myseum and also “The Store“.  My plan for the day is to visit the Myseum and the store, and see what else I can get myself into in that general area.  It all works out because the Chelsea is about four blocks from the store, and then the store is about four blocks from the Myseum.

I suppose that this trip is the logical conclusion of a process that had led me to do a lot of thinking.  For about seven months, from early November to early June, I was working various services that took me past Washington National Airport several times a day.  I would roll up and see all of these people boarding with their little suitcases and going wherever.  I also saw the planes take off and land as I went by.  This happened day in and day out.  And it got me thinking.  It made my flightless life feel quite confining, as I saw people traveling the world, and I was under a self-imposed limitation based on how far it would be practical to travel via road or rail.  I did a whole lot of regional travel, but I started to feel a little constrained, as there were things that I wanted to do but were either unreachable by car or impractical to do with the time that I had available.

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Twenty years out of college…

July 12, 2023, 12:20 PM

This year marks twenty years since I graduated from college, and in seeing all of the people posting stuff about college graduations and such on Facebook these last few months, it’s made me realize that I have a lot to say about my college experience.  It’s one of those things where I wish that I had known then what I do now, and it makes me wonder how things might have gone if I had reached the same present as today, but knowing what I know now.

It’s worth noting that with the passage of time, I have come to view my college years in an increasingly negative light.  In the moment, as documented in my College Life website, which now serves as an archive of what was once a section of the main website, I was having a pretty good time and enjoying life – or at least that’s the public face that I tried to put on about it.  The truth is that I never felt a sense of belonging there, my performance caused me to develop a major inferiority complex while there, and I coped with the stress of the environment in unhealthy ways.  I believe that the root cause of all of my difficulties was a then-undiagnosed case of autism.  However, high-functioning cases of autism like I have still weren’t really looked for and diagnosed like they are today.  I was not formally diagnosed diagnosed with autism until 2022 at the age of 41, when I finally decided to put the question to rest.

First, though, when it came to my deciding whether or not to go to college, that was never really a decision.  My parents had determined, practically from conception, that I would go to college, and that was that.  When it’s been drilled into your head that you were going to college like it was a commandment from on high or something for your entire life, that’s just what you did, largely from not knowing any better, and that you would then get a “college job” after getting that degree.  So growing up, any thoughts that I might have interest in fields that didn’t require a college education were more or less, quashed and any exploration of those fields was discouraged because that conflicted with my parents’ plan to send me to college.  It was also strongly implied that any path that did not lead to a college degree was a failure, because it didn’t live up to my parents’ expectations for me.  It caused me to think that the people who went down the vocational track in school were failures, because they couldn’t get into college.  I understand that my parents wanted what they thought was best for me, and they considered a college education to be that thing, but the mindset that they inadvertently instilled was quite toxic, and it took many years to unlearn.  I suppose that was something of a failure on their part, because with my now being the same age as they were when they were raising me, they almost definitely knew better about jobs that didn’t require a college degree, but that’s not what they instilled in me, intentionally or not.

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Categories: JMU, Myself, Work

Smoke blankets the city…

July 4, 2023, 10:02 PM

Funny how things work out.  The smoke from Canadian wildfires that blanketed the eastern US in a thick layer of haze in early June was not a good thing to have happen for any number of reasons, but putting on my photographer hat for a moment, I was kind of kicking myself for not getting out in it and photographing the haze like I meant it.  All I got were a few phone shots taken from the car, going southbound on I-95 while heading home after taking Elyse to Ramblewood, a campground up in Darlington, on June 8 for an event:

The view at the northern interchange between I-95 and the Baltimore Beltway.
The view at the northern interchange between I-95 and the Baltimore Beltway.

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Categories: Baltimore, Weather

A fun weekend where no photography goals were met…

June 29, 2023, 8:44 AM

From June 21-23, Elyse and I made a weekend trip to Virginia, but instead of centering on Staunton like we usually do, we centered on Roanoke (but don’t worry – we still saw my parents in Stuarts Draft).  We had planned this trip largely as a photography outing, and then the weather didn’t cooperate.  It was raining continuously almost the entire time, which made for a more difficult drive than I would have liked, but the trip was worth it.  I guess that you could say that while we didn’t necessarily do much in the way as far as photography, we laid the groundwork for future trips by identifying potential subjects.  I didn’t want to lay groundwork for the future this time around, as I really wanted to bring home the goods, but such is what happens when the weather doesn’t cooperate.  I brought my DSLR and my drone on this trip, but neither one of them ever left their respective carrier.

The plan was to drive down from the DC area to Lynchburg via US 29, spend the afternoon and early evening of the first day in Lynchburg, and then head over to Roanoke, where we were staying at the Hampton Inn located downtown (the one built on top of a city parking garage).  Then we would spend the entire second day in Roanoke, largely with Commonwealth Coach & Trolley, which is a bus museum that Elyse and I both serve on the board of.  Then on the last day, we would head up to Staunton and Waynesboro, where I had some things that I wanted to get over there, before going over to see my parents.  What ended up happening was pretty similar to plan, but not quite.  Our departure was delayed, because we already knew that much of the day would be a rainout.  The drive down to Charlottesville was fine, making one stop for food at the third (Bealeton) Sheetz.  We made a brief stop at Barracks Road in Charlottesville, and then we were back on the road.  It started raining harder once we cleared Charlottesville, and we saw three different accidents between Charlottesville and Amherst where people had clearly wiped out after driving faster than conditions allowed.  One of those accidents was a police car, which was clearly totaled in its accident.  We took it slowly, especially since I didn’t have that much experience taking the new HR-V in driving rain like this before, plus I wasn’t as familiar with the stretch of 29 from Charlottesville to Lynchburg (particularly from I-64 to VA 151) as I am with 29 north of Charlottesville.

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I feel compelled to weigh in…

June 15, 2023, 10:10 PM

Recently, Reddit has been embroiled in a controversy over the site management’s plan to charge for access to their application programming interface, or API, which would affect the operation of various third-party apps, which previously had free access to the API.

First of all, this is how I browse Reddit.  I have a Reddit Premium subscription, which means that I get an ad-free experience using a web browser or the official Reddit app, along with a few other perks.  When I’m on my phone, I will typically use BaconReader, a third-party app, to access Reddit.  I started using BaconReader before Reddit had an official Android app, and I’ve gotten used to it and have seen no reason to change.  More specifically, I use the paid version of BaconReader, which provides me an ad-free experience on the app.  The free version of the app runs its own ads in an effort by the developers to make some money that Reddit sees no part of, regardless of Reddit Premium subscription status.  So before we get into things too deeply, that’s my situation, i.e. I have a premium subscription to the site, and I use an ad-free third-party app on my phone.

As far as the issue at hand goes, I feel that charging a fee for API access is reasonable enough.  To me, it only seems fair.  Third-party apps depend on Reddit for their content, and so if Reddit were to die, the third-party apps die right along with it.  You profit from Reddit’s content, selling subscriptions, app licenses, and running ads against it, so you need to pay your content provider.  Especially when one considers that Reddit is, in fact, a for-profit company and not a charity.  Just because one has never turned a profit doesn’t make one a not-for-profit entity.  It just means that you’re a for-profit company that has never managed to make a profit.  Consuming server resources through your app but not compensating the operator of said server just makes you a parasite, since you’re not paying for the resources that you consume.  It’s nice that Reddit has offered it that way for a while, but it sounds like the free ride is about to end.  It’s a perfectly valid business decision.  I will say that when it comes to how much to charge for API access, I do not know what the proper amount is.  I am not an app developer, nor do I know how much it costs to operate Reddit.  All I know is that paying some amount for API access seems fair.  And you don’t get to complain when someone who was offering a service for free stops offering it for free, because you weren’t paying for it, and, as my mother likes to put it, “You’ve got to pay to say.”

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Categories: Reddit

A weekend trip to Pittsburgh…

June 11, 2023, 2:25 PM

From May 31 to June 2, Elyse and I made a little weekend trip to Pittsburgh, where we explored around a bit, saw some friends, and got lots of photographs.  Pittsburgh was something that we had wanted to do for a while, after our very fun and productive trip in 2016, but I didn’t want to do Pittsburgh as a one-day trip ever again.  It’s far too much to pull off in one day, even though our 2016 trip was wildly successful as far as accomplishing our objectives.

Our route there was pretty typical for Pittsburgh, going from home to Frederick to Breezewood to the Pennsylvania Turnpike.  We also spotted the point where the turnpike was rerouted in the 1960s to bypass the Laurel Hill Tunnel.  Then we detoured onto I-70 at New Stanton in order to visit Washington, Pennsylvania.  That side trip was for Elyse, as she wanted to visit a hobby shop at the local shopping mall, and she also wanted to visit the George Washington Hotel, where they apparently had a very vintage toilet.  From there, we headed into Pittsburgh.  I photographed in Breezewood and in Washington,

Then the middle day was largely transit-oriented, as we took the buses all over the city to accomplish our objectives.  I wanted to do the inclines during the day, as I had only ever ridden them at night on my previous two visits.  I also wanted to get daytime photos from the overlooks.  We also went back to the Cathedral of Learning at the University of Pittsburgh, meeting up with our friend Patrick Nedz there, and meeting up with our friend Jared Chambers later on.  We saw a few elevators, and rode a lot of buses, and had a good time together overall.  Surprisingly, we never touched the light rail system, aka “The T“, on this trip, other than to purchase our SmarTrip cards for Pittsburgh (which are called ConnectCards) at Wood Street station, and then coming right back out.

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Categories: Breezewood, Pittsburgh, Travel