SC State Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey on redistricting:
“Crushing the minority opposition is not a demonstration of strength,” Massey said. “It’s an admission of fear and a show of weakness, and I don’t think it’s successful in the long term.”
I found 11 images on Flickr that pre-date my use of Instagram and any of my blogs.1 I downloaded them and moved them to this site, preserving the original captions. My favorite from this bunch was actually the oldest… a shot from 2008 of a neon sign in a rain storm taken with my original iPhone from my car. I’m pretty sure I’ve reached the beginning of my public online presence with the addition of these images. I’m guessing that before these pictures, I used Apple .Mac galleries to share family pictures online — and those galleries are long gone.2 I did have a couple of portfolio sites — including one built in Flash — that are also not accessible, thankfully.
So why is it important to me to bring these all in one timeline? Because when I look at the complete picture — the blog, the early iPhone images, my tweets — I can get real snapshot of how I felt about things in that moment. This consolidation process is all about my desire to have a complete record of my online digital life, in one place. It’s a lot of work, but it makes me happy to have everything brought together. It feels like the digital equivalent of my Mom’s photo albums.
I still need to move a bunch of posts over from Sketchbook B. I’m wondering if I can automate some of the more time consuming parts of the process. We’ll see.
Bob Wertz is a type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008.
On August 12, 2026, a solar eclipse will appear over Greenland, Iceland, and Spain. Many shady vendors will sell incredibly tacky shirts to commemorate the occasion. Instead, order something a little more classy. Available on Cotton Bureau.
Happy Mother’s Day, Lizzy.
Learned from my teenage son today that hacky sack has become popular again.
Three walk-off wins in a row for the Cubs. What a wild season so far… now if we can just keep our pitchers healthy.
Three sports videos I will stop and watch whenever they pop up: Javy Baez “stealing” first, Jadeveon Clowney’s hit against Michigan, and Kamilla Cardoso hitting a three in the SEC tournament at the buzzer to beat Tennessee.
I think this is a particularly insightful post… Emotional regulation is a dying art:
Phones reward a specific kind of nervous system, twitching first and thinking later. The dopamine architecture that hooks you on slot machines hooks you on outrage, and the platforms have figured out that a regulated person is a bad customer. The regulated close the app, but the dysregulated person scroll until four in the morning, bleeding cortisol and efficiently monetized.
Pluralistic: In praise of vultures:
Monopoly is to capitalism as gerrymandering is to democracy, a way to strip out any meaningful choice.
Do cell phone bans in schools work? The NY Times reports on a new study looking at school cell phone bans. Kids used their phones less, but no real shift in student engagement or test scores.
From Cal Newport’s blog: On Bottlenecks and Productivity. This is the second time recently that I’ve come across the “Theory of Constraints.” I like how Newport translates the concept to personal productivity.
Watched: Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Season 2. Enjoyed the second season of Monarch on Apple TV. I don’t know if there will be another season, but if not, I’m happy with how they ended things.🍿
I’m intrigued by the idea of using Bluesky PDS as a social enabled database for academic publication. But I’m afraid that technical possibilities are blinding people to how entrenched the traditional academic publishing ecosystem is…
Prom 2026.
Great Sprint Qualifying run for Lando. Hopefully this newfound quickness will translate into race pace this weekend.
Just paid more than $4 a gallon for gas. First time I’ve ever paid that much. 😩
The NY Times 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters story is wonderful. Lots of names I expected to see, but some that I didn’t know or didn’t think of. Complete with a playlist of hits for Spotify and Apple Music. Gift link if you want to check it out…
Older operating systems would just save files on a spinning hard drive any where there was space. Sometimes, large files would be split up and the segments scattered all over the drive. If this file fragmentation became bad enough, then it could hurt your system’s performance. If that happened, you’d run a utility to defragment your hard drive and reassemble those scattered files.
Well, I’m in the process of defragmenting my digital life. Since 2022, pretty much everything I’ve written or shared is here on bobwertz.com. But before 2022, my posts and images are scattered across the web on different sites and services. I want to have them in one place. Thanks to Micro.Blog’s import features, I already have a full archive of my Twitter posts and have moved more than 1,400 images over to this site from Instagram. I’ve been working on manually migrating my Sketchbook B blog posts to this site as well. I still need to figure out how to import Facebook posts, but I already have the assets downloaded.
So many people view online posting as ephemeral, but I’ve always viewed my online posts as permanent. Each is something that I intentionally wanted to share and remember. Once I finish the process of gathering everything, I’ll have a single, reasonably complete collection of my online life since December 2007 when I joined Twitter. I don’t really expect others to join me on this defragmentation journey. It’s a time consuming process. However, if you care about the stuff you’ve posted over the last few decades, you might want to start thinking about how to archive and preserve what you’ve shared.
Bob Wertz is a type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008.
There will be THREE players on next year’s South Carolina Women’s Basketball roster who can dunk: Watkins, Tournebize and Edwards.
I’ve recently rediscovered my love of tea. I bought a small electric kettle for my office, ordered some outstanding Goddess Gray loose tea from Full Moon Tea Company in Asheville, and I’m using my ceramic Tea Forte Kati cup with an integrated infuser basket. A great mid-morning routine.