Today is Liz and my 27th anniversary. We’ve been married for over half our lives at this point, and we’re old enough to have two kiddos in college now. Time flies, especially when you are married to your best friend.

Jilly is all moved in to her residence hall.

A young woman is sitting on a bed in a cozy, decorated bedroom with string lights, posters on the wall, stuffed animals, and various snacks on a table underneath.

This fall, four of the five members of Team Wertz will be students at the University of South Carolina. My wife and I are both working on Ph.D.s. My oldest is starting her senior year and my middle child will be starting her freshman year.

First day of high school. (College-bound sisters in the background will share their own first day of class shots sometime next week.)

A boy wearing a CAROLINA t-shirt, glasses, and a backpack stands smiling on a porch while two people peek out from behind a partially open door.

The Cubs are the fifth best team in baseball, but are still FIVE games back in their division.

Attending high school orientation for my youngest. A little hard to believe he’ll be a freshman this year.

Quick trip to NYC

I had a good trip this weekend to New York City for the NCURA conference. Learned a lot, and still had plenty of time to enjoy the city.

A view of an airplane wing flying above the clouds during a vibrant sunset.A bustling crowd fills a city square surrounded by tall buildings adorned with numerous colorful electronic billboards and advertisements against a partly cloudy sky.A tall, slender skyscraper is framed by surrounding buildings and tree branches against a clear blue sky.A large Apple logo is displayed on a glass structure with a reflection of surrounding tall buildings in the shiny surface below.A storefront with a green awning displays the name BAGEL BOB'S above a window that also has the store's name and additional text.A crowded street scene in Times Square, New York, features vibrant billboards, skyscrapers, and a large inflatable hot dog among the bustling crowd.A lively diner is filled with customers sitting in booths, while a waitress joyfully interacts with guests from an elevated platform.A busy city street at dusk is lined with tall buildings, illuminated signs, and cars on the road.A stone archway bridge is surrounded by lush green trees with a pathway running beneath it, while a person in a red outfit stands on top of the bridge.

Thoroughly enjoyed Spider-Man: Brand New Day 🍿

That episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds was intense.

I’m playing around with Semble.so, a bookmarking app built on top of the AT Protocol. It’s pretty impressive, even at this relatively early stage of development.

Seth Godin on the impact of AI on human expression:

When new creation technologies arrive, they make the best a little worse and the bad a lot better.

I’ve used Ulysses for long form writing since 2015, but completely forgot that I can post to Micro.Blog directly from inside of the app. (I even have a folder set up with the Micro.Blog icon.)

Over the last two days, my son and I watched all three Lord of the Rings movies. (Theatrical cuts, not the extended versions.) It has been a long time since I’ve seen them, and honestly, they were better than I remembered…

After Lando’s win this morning, I thought I needed a “papaya” shirt. Alas, I don’t wear orange, so this papaya shirt also comes in grey. Available on Cotton Bureau.

An orange T-shirt features a design with the word PAPAYA repeatedly printed in a grid patternA gray T-shirt featuring the word PAPAYA repeated in a checkered flag grid pattern.The word PAPAYA is repeatedly written in bold uppercase letters in black and white colors on an orange background, arranged in a uniform pattern.

Fun race this morning. F1 is best when lots of teams are competing for the win. Congrats Lando on the win! 🧡

My next digital housekeeping project: sorting out my email situation.

My digital consolidation is complete

I’ve finally finished the process of moving my old posts over to this site, hosted on Micro.blog. A couple of notes on the finishing touches:

And so now, I have everything in once place. Almost everything I’ve written on the web and every picture I’ve shared is here on bobwertz.com, gathered from Squarespace, Twitter, Instagram and Flickr. At some point soon, I’m going to write more about the changes in my philosophy over the years that drove me to this point, and where I want things to go. This was a significant amount of work and I’m glad to be done. I also completely understand why people abandon sites instead of migrating posts.

Bob Wertz is a type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008 and all of those posts are finally gathered on a single site.

  1. The microblogging posts that I was struggling to move where all replicated in my Twitter archive. So I didn’t have to move them over. ↩︎

  2. Fun fact: Single page sites don’t have to be single pages. ↩︎

Lando Norris! Pole position. Glad to see the new McLaren upgrades work.

Enjoyed the first episode of Star Trek Strange New Worlds Season 4. Warning: Stay spoiler free on this episode.

This visualization by Reuters of the drone kill zones in Ukraine is incredibly well done, and depressing. Drone use in the Ukranian War has changed warfare, and I’m sure every military strategist in the world is currently trying to understand this new drone-based reality.