So I decided to talk and drive again…
July 8, 2010, 2:19 PM
So on Wednesday evening, I decided to talk and drive again. I set the cell phone in the GPS holder once again, and started talking. I started at approximately 16th and T Streets NW, heading north on 16th Street:
Continue reading…Categories: Anti-war, Driving, Movies, Power Rangers, Ride On, Television, Today's Special, Video games, Video Journal, WMATA
So we went from box to parts to bike…
July 6, 2010, 10:50 PM
So I finally finished the birthday present process. My parents got me an exercise bike for my birthday, and the monthlong process of actually getting it ready for use is finally complete. It wasn’t supposed to take a month, but you know how things happen. But yeah, about a month ago, we ordered the exercise bike from Sears – a ProForm recumbent cycle. A couple of hours later, it was ready for pickup at the Sears in White Oak.
As a side note, by the way, the Sears in White Oak is the biggest Sears store I’ve ever seen, and the only standalone Sears I’ve ever seen. It’s got a footprint the size of a large grocery store, and it’s two stories. If that building used to be something else, I would be surprised, because it looks like your typical mall-based Sears with multiple exterior entrances, but without the mall attached to it.
So I headed over to Sears, and picked the thing up. The gentleman in the store helped me get it in the car (it’s things like this that make me glad I have a station wagon), and I took it home. However, getting this massive thing up the stairs was another issue altogether. But I somehow managed, and ended up with this:
Categories: Furniture
My favorite phrase in the evening…
July 2, 2010, 7:12 PM
My favorite phrase in the evening is definitely “51 NORBECK P&R“. That’s my bus, and it means I’m going home. And it looks like this:
“We’ve got a store that I explore when the customers aren’t here anymore…”
June 27, 2010, 12:14 AM
Tonight I learned some very disturbing news. G20 protesters in Toronto broke windows at The Bay’s Queen Street store on Saturday. Fans of Today’s Special will know this place best as simply “the store”. I was shocked, and it actually briefly brought tears to my eyes. But they did:
Photos: Karen Liu/Toronto Life
Categories: Black bloc, Today's Special
Welcome to the new site!
June 25, 2010, 7:46 PM
Welcome to the newly-redesigned Schumin Web! Since February, I’ve been busy at work on the site, reworking the code and generally cleaning the site up, and now it’s finished and launched.
The main thrust of this redesign was to finally get away from using tables for layout, and do the layout entirely in CSS. I also pledged to do everything “right” this time, and not do anything kludgy. If I didn’t know how to make something work the way I wanted, then by golly, I researched it to find out how to make it work as intended.
However, the site still generally looks like the old site, since I admit – I really like the layout, and I saw no reason to make major revisions to that at this time. Why fix what’s not broken, after all? But that doesn’t mean I didn’t take the time to do a lot of smaller changes.
Let me give you a quick rundown on some of the stuff that’s new…
Categories: Schumin Web meta
So I tried my hand at video blogging today…
June 23, 2010, 10:36 PM
So I tried my hand at video blogging on the way home from work today. I used my phone, setting it up it in the holder clipped on my air vent that I usually use for the GPS while I was stopped at a red light. Then I started it recording and just started discussing things:
And there you go, I suppose. It’s a first try, and so I kind of want to know what you think. Did I plan out what I wanted to say? No. I just kind of discussed it as I thought of it. And I managed to go on for just about ten minutes. So what do you think? Like it? Hate it? Think it’s got potential but needs to be refined? I want to know.
Categories: Driving, Shopping, Video Journal
The Sable’s all mine!
June 21, 2010, 2:45 PM
Categories: Mercury Sable
Now I understand why Randi Rhodes says that the news has been cancelled…
June 15, 2010, 9:25 PM
I recently had a request for an interview by Kathryn Blaze Carlson of the National Post. It’s a Toronto-based newspaper, and according to its Wikipedia article, has a conservative-leaning editorial section. I was asked for an interview about black blocs due to my having participated in more than a dozen black blocs. I figured that since this was a news article and not an opinion piece, that some journalistic integrity would be in effect here, and my comments would be quoted truthfully. Not so, I’m afraid. As political pundit Randi Rhodes has so eloquently put it many times in the past, “The news has been cancelled.”
Now I’ve definitely done interviews with the media before. I was interviewed on WHSV back in 1996 about Virginia’s Standards of Learning, I had an interview in 2001 about Schumin Web in Turf (a short-lived supplement to JMU’s The Breeze newspaper), and then I was interviewed in 2006 by The News Virginian about the Skyline Parkway Motel at Rockfish Gap. This was my first interview about political issues.
What I found out after reading the final story, called “Black Bloc & Blue“, is that I could have said anything, and the story would have come out the same. Seriously, I could have said that when a black bloc forms at a demonstration, the sky turns yellow and people all start singing “La Marseillaise”, and it wouldn’t have made a difference. Carlson seemed to have it already set in her mind that “black bloc” was a movement and a defined group, and despite my best efforts at talking her down from it, it seemed that my assertions that the whole thing was a tactic and not a movement fell on deaf ears.
Categories: Black bloc
Here’s some advice: Don’t eat a five-day-old salad…
June 14, 2010, 11:48 PM
That’s my advice for you, because on Saturday, I wasn’t feeling too well, and I blame it on Friday’s lunch. You know how it is – you wake up feeling icky and with a fever, and then by the end of the day, the fever has broken, and all is feeling well again. I have a feeling it was food poisoning on Saturday. At least that was my theory until recently.
Except now I don’t know what to think, since I started feeling bad again on Monday, too, and I’d not eaten anything else that I could pin down as questionable. I hope I’m not getting sick. That would be really unpleasant. But as of right now, I have a fever, and my chest hurts from all the coughing I’ve been doing. I really don’t want to have to call out at work tomorrow, because I’ve got stuff I need to do down there, so hopefully I’ll be in a state where I can make it in tomorrow.
Meanwhile, now I’m trying to figure out where I caught this. It’s been two weeks since Boston, so for all I know, I might have caught something up there, because after all, that was a perfect breeding ground for colds, with people sharing rooms and coming together from all sorts of cities. I consider that most likely, because since coming back, I haven’t done anything, other than the aforementioned salad that was a shade past its prime, that would have made me sick.
Actually, I take that back. We got all of our summer interns in recently at work, and I wonder if I didn’t catch something from one of them. That would certainly be unpleasant, wouldn’t it?
Either way, it certainly shot my weekend. I was planning to go out, and ended up staying in all weekend. That did, however, do wonders for the Web site, where I got a lot of work done on new content (by the way, look for the CSS version of the site to go live around July 1 with at least two new photo sets at launch).
Categories: Food and drink, Personal health
You know, driving is starting to look really attractive…
June 7, 2010, 2:37 PM
Well, Metro announced its fare increase, and it’s now going to cost me $11.00 round trip for work. Multiply that by 22 workdays per month on average, and you’ve got $242 in commuting costs per month. By comparison, the cost of a monthly parking pass at my building is $230. Transit still edges out driving when you factor in the cost of gas and increased car maintenance, plus that early-evening nap that I like to take on the Metro going home. Plus I’ve made friendships on the bus, and I would miss those folks if I started driving to work every day. It’s those little intangibles that are keeping me on transit, even as the costs are coming close to being a wash.
But with this new fare increase, one really has to start wondering if Metro isn’t starting to price itself out of the market. For folks like me who commute from the suburbs and have a choice between driving and commuting, if driving becomes cheaper than public transportation, I’m driving. I don’t care that I’m a public transportation buff. If it’s more expensive than driving and parking, then the hell with it. I’ll add one more car to the road, spewing noxious fumes out its tailpipe.
Categories: WMATA
Fun with bubble wrap…
May 27, 2010, 9:25 PM
So I was shipping a computer monitor today, and after locating a box and breaking out the bubble wrap, I decided to show the intended recipient (a coworker in another office) that I was getting it ready, since I needed to locate a box before I could ship it. And so here’s the proof:
Categories: Work
It was always a little kludgy, but it worked…
May 25, 2010, 9:26 PM
Yeah, I’m almost to the point in my redesign where it’s time to design the Journal section. Right now, before even one line of code has been written for it, it makes me nervous. See, I am worried about how many Journal entries will break. After all, I code Journal entries on the fly, and do whatever comes naturally to me. And full CSS layouts are not something I’m accustomed to. So it makes me a little nervous.
But I’m almost there. I’ve done the redesign in this order: the basic page templates, Major Areas, Archives, Odds and Ends, Photography, and most of Life and Times (still working on that last one). That leaves the Journal and then the unnamed “center section” still to do. It’s okay, though. It’s coming along quite well, and with the photo sets mostly done, that’s one less thing I have to worry about.
However, it’s going to be really weird to have done the Journal correctly for a change. Right now, it’s a bit kludgy in places. I cut a lot of corners on the current design, which dates from 2007, to make it look right regardless of whether it was also done correctly. If you look at my code for the Journal, there are a bunch of little invisible graphics that are there just to get the spacing correct. After all, I kind of did the 2007 redesign under a bit of duress. The site had gone down, and I was determined to convert it from ASP to PHP and get it back up as quickly as possible, and the hell with doing it the right way. According to my update log, the Journal was the first item to be restored. Thus not only was I racing to get it back up and running, but I was also perhaps doing most of the learning on a new HTML editor and a new platform on that section. So a few kludges were inevitable, I suppose.
Categories: Schumin Web meta
You know, that’s a really personal matter, and I didn’t want to join you for it…
May 17, 2010, 11:45 PM
Tonight, while I was on the phone with a friend who shall remain nameless, I was traumatized. I’m going grocery shopping at Giant, and I’m talking about whatever on the phone with this friend, and then I heard this sound in the background:
*flush*
I asked her, “Are you in the bathroom?” Turned out that we’d been talking in the bathroom for the entire time up to that point. That was a lot more than I wanted to know, unfortunately. The term “oversharing” came to mind. Now mind you, this friend and I are pretty close, and I admit that this friend has seen me in a speedo before (yes, I own one, get over it). But nonetheless, taking the phone into the bathroom is a little bit beyond my comfort zone.
I don’t know about you, but I consider it a shade impolite to take calls in the bathroom. I’ll be in a public restroom and hear someone chatting away while they’re in a stall with their pants around their ankles. What I’ve always wanted to do is to go around the restroom and flush every toilet in there, just to underline the fact to whoever’s on the other end of that call that they’re having that call in the bathroom. You know, President Lyndon Johnson used to take meetings into the bathroom. I’d rather think that this kind of practice stayed in the 1960s, but apparently it’s alive and well with cell phones, where people will take a call just about anywhere. I would have been more than understanding if my friend had not taken my call and then called me back once they were off the commode.
Categories: Friends, Some people
So let’s review: Solicited attention, good. Unsolicited attention, bad.
May 13, 2010, 2:19 PM
With my birthday coming up at the end of this month, the love-hate relationship I’ve had with my birthday has come up, and we’ve again discovered that the emphasis is more on “hate” in that love-hate birthday relationship. Really, I don’t look forward to it anymore, since I get a bunch of well-intended but unwanted attention. To me, it’s like, okay, it’s a number change, big deal, and so okay and let’s move on.
Really, it’s all a matter of attention. If I am seeking it, I will gladly accept it. However, if I don’t want it, even if it is positive, I will try to escape it, or deliberately ruin it. I escaped my college graduation, where, if I didn’t get my way, I would have gotten undesired attention while at the same time not enjoyed myself. And the hell with what family members want when it comes to me celebrating milestones in my life. If I want to celebrate a milestone with everyone, then great. Let’s all be happy together. If I want to celebrate in my own way, or choose not to celebrate at all, that’s my prerogative. Nothing wrong with that. And if celebration in my honor is forced on me against my will, I will make sure to spoil it. I remember in 2005, my mother was all gung-ho about my birthday, and wanted to go all out for it, and I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. If I recall, I turned the phone off and just left for a while. Then when I got back home, I threw my unwanted birthday cake in the trash right along with the unwanted birthday card. I don’t understand what makes people want to spend money to celebrate something where the person whose thing it is being celebrated doesn’t want it to be celebrated in the first place. I tell people not to buy me a card, and they don’t listen. I tell them not to buy me a cake and they don’t listen…
Categories: Birthdays
We may have only had three people, but those three were something…
May 11, 2010, 2:34 PM
Yes, on Saturday, May 8, Anonymous DC held its monthly raid from 3-8 PM, protesting the abusive practices of the Church of Scientology. This was also our smallest monthly raid yet, with all of three people in attendance. Those three people were MaidofWin, Sparrow, and myself. Sparrow wore a Guy Fawkes mask. MaidofWin had a stars-and-stripes bandanna and big movie-star sunglasses. I wore my zentai for the first time this season.
It’s funny about the zentai, though. I was actually late to the raid on account of not being sure what I wanted to wear with it. As you know, when I raid, I’ve always used the zentai as a base layer under other clothes. Remember that in 2008, the zentai look was tie dye and funny hat. Then in 2009, I went with black-on-black-on-black as the zentai look. This time, I wanted to do something different, but at the same time, make it fun. I tried a number of different combinations, and nothing seemed to work. I eventually resigned myself to the fact that I was unable to properly accessorize things, and ended up packing the 2008 “look” to change into once I got down there.
However, once I got down there and started putting on the zentai, I got the suit on, and then decided to go out with only the suit. I’d always been a little concerned about doing that in the past, specifically about whether I’d look too “lumpy” under there (“lumpy” in this case referring to the love handles and what have you that I sport). As it turned out, though, I looked fine, as the zentai smoothed out all the lines. After getting up the nerve to actually go out wearing the zentai by itself (never did that in public before), it seemed to work. And then when I got to the raid site, I put the hood up and the “windshield goggles” on (they fit over my glasses), which completed my anonymity, and I got out a stack of You Found The Card cards. I’d say I was ready to raid.
Categories: Project Chanology