Today, we are thankful for protective lacrosse goalie gear.

Great game, Gamecocks! So much depth. Looking forward to the National Championship game on Sunday. 🏀🐓

Google’s AI Overview has already declared that South Carolina defeated UCLA on Sunday for the National Championship.

A Google search results page shows information about the 2025 NCAA Division I women's basketball tournament, with details about the championship game, teams involved, and broadcasting.

Spring is finally coming to campus.

McKissick Museum at the University of South Carolina stands in the background, surrounded by lush greenery and a pathway, with a flower bed in the foreground.

As a South Carolinian, I’m happy to see Cory Booker break Strom’s record.

Looks like the Women’s Final Four will be South Carolina + the three teams that beat them during the season… Texas, UCLA and UConn. I think these are the four best teams in the country. And while I’m a Gamecocks fan through and through, Paige Bueckers looks like she’s on a mission.

Saw this last week and I’m still thinking about it…

Procrastination is not a time management problem. It’s an emotion management problem.

Jill vs. the science fair

Took the modular numerals from the 2025 McLaren F1 livery and built a font on Fontstruct.

I’m ready for an F1 race that doesn’t take place in the middle of the night where I live. I want to watch the Chinese Grand Prix tonight, but 3 am is… inconvenient. I love that this sport travels the world, but varied start times is one of the consequences of that.

Writing became secondary.

Dave Winer writing about the “the Writer’s Web”:

The web was initially designed for writers. Styling, links, paragraphs, titles (at all levels). The ability to edit. No character limits. That’s what we had to work with when we started blogging in the mid-late 90s.

What happened to the writer-centric web I loved in the late 1990s? Building a regular readership is challenging. In the earliest days, sites linked to other sites. Bloggers shared work from other bloggers. RSS provided the ability to subscribe to sites, but after Google killed Reader, the focus turned exclusively to search engines and social media. The competition to be at the top of the search results reshaped writing on the web. The ever-changing social media algorithm provided an audience for writers, but maintaining that audience changed the nature of writing on the web.

Blogs became about ad revenue. Search engine traffic and optimization. Building a “side gig.” Success became about building an audience on each proprietary social media platform. Increasing your follower count. Becoming an influencer. Writing click bait headlines to maximize engagement. Getting subscribers for your newsletter. Blogging became “hard” because it wasn’t about writing anymore. It was about marketing.

Writing became secondary.

So how do we bring the emphasis on writing back to the web? The good news is that great writing is already all over the web. It’s just overwhelmed by all this platform-siloed, revenue-focused, engagement bullshit. It’s hidden among the sea of SEO-laden posts that flood the web. It’s bottled up on Medium or Substack, and other platforms that promise the exposure of social media.

If we value writing on the web, we need to link to good writing and thoughtful commentary. Share what we find through our own sites. Read independent writing and respond. Encourage others to share their thoughts outside of social media silos. I’m glad Dave specifically asked for people to respond to the concept of the “Writer’s Web” because it spurred me to write this post. And hopefully, others will keep this conversation going as well.

Bob Wertz is a type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008.

Today was disappointing. Tomorrow will be better.

I’ve settled into a morning routine of playing Apple News+ games in the morning: Quartiles, Mini Crossword, Soduku. It’s funny that I play these games more than I play Apple Arcade games, which are also included in my Apple One bundle.

I accidentally started listening to an old playlist that is much happier and more upbeat than my normal playlist. And wow, that makes a difference.

Stayed up late last night to watch the Australian Grand Prix. Rainy races are so incredibly stressful.

Reflections on a DIY Dryer Repair

Our clothes dryer died on Thursday when my wife Liz was home sick trying to get some rest. She searched the web and diagnosed the problem right away — a broken belt. After finding a YouTube video showing how to fix it, she decided that we could fix it on our own.

This dryer is old by modern standards — 14 years old. We bought it before our youngest child was born. The store we purchased it from, H.H. Gregg, has long since closed.1 The washing machine that we bought to go with it died years ago. I wondered if it was even worth repairing, but I watched the video and agreed that it looked pretty straightforward. Our local Lowe’s had a compatible belt in stock and it was only $16.99. I figured if we couldn’t make it work, we’d invested less than $20 in the repair.

This afternoon, we watched the video together on the Apple TV and got to work.

The disassembly process wasn’t too hard, but was made more complicated by the limited space to work in the laundry room. We got the dryer disassembled and Liz kept track of all the parts and screws and where they went. This was critical, because some of the screws in each step were different.

The amount of lint and dust inside the dryer was a little insane. We took the time to vacuum in the inside and wipe down all of the surfaces. And in the process, we found 94 cents and a couple of small Legos.

We reassembled the dryer, remembering to reconnect all of the electrical connections and slid it back into position. It started right up. Total elapsed time was less than an hour.

Liz and I couldn’t have done it without working together. When we were first married, I was trying to fix some blinds in the apartment. It wasn’t going well until Liz started working with me. And from that point forward, we decided that we needed to work together on things like this. Better together. This repair was definitely a two-person job, especially getting the belt around the drum. We could have called an appliance repair person, but chose not to. I haven’t had great luck getting appliances fixed. The cost to repair is usually as expensive as purchasing a replacement.

We tend to live in an era where appliances like these are simply disposable. So I’m glad we were able to do a DIY repair. We couldn’t have done it without YouTube. It really does help to be able to see the process. I need to remember to think repair first, instead of mindlessly replacing something that still has life left in it.

Bob Wertz is a type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008.

  1. In fact, the whole chain declared bankruptcy in 2017 and closed all of its stores. It lives on as an online retailer. ↩︎

I’m curious how font foundries are structuring licenses for web apps like Canva or Adobe Express, especially when implemented at an enterprise scale.

Sitting in the lobby of the Alumni Center waiting for Jill to finish her finalist interview for the South Carolina regional science fair.

Is it unusual that Columbia doesn’t have an Apple Store?

Back in 2016, I had a blog about retail developments in the Columbia, South Carolina area. And one of the most popular topics was why there wasn’t an Apple Store in Columbia.

Yesterday I was at Columbiana Mall and realized that the large Forever 21 is closing.1 I’m always interested in Apple Store-sized vacancies in Columbia and I thought back to an analysis that I did almost 10 years ago2 and wanted to see if anything has changed. Is it odd that Columbia doesn’t have an Apple Store?

Comparing MSAs

I needed to look at some population data and decided to start by looking at Metropolitan Statistic Area (MSA). An MSA is a way of classifying an urban core and its surrounding population. It’s better than using city population because it includes suburbs and outlying areas that are closely connected to the urban core.

For 2025, Columbia is the 70th largest MSA in the country. For context: Greenville-Anderson-Greer ranks 57; Charleston-North Charleston is 71; Augusta is 92. You can see the full list at Wikipedia.

I cross referenced all of the MSAs with the Apple Store list. In the top 75 MSAs in the country, only two do not have an Apple Store: Columbia (70) and McAllen-Edinburg-Mission, Texas (65).

McAllen-Edinburg-Mission is a geographically large area in South Texas that has a slightly larger population than Columbia but is spread out over a wider area.

Many MSAs that are smaller than Columbia have Apple Stores: Boise, ID (74); Greensboro, NC (78); Colorado Springs, CO (79); Little Rock, AR (80); Akron, OH (85); Madison, WI (87); Toledo, OH (97); Lexington, KY (109); and many more.

I looked at Combined Statistical Areas (CSA), too. CSA is similar to MSA, but includes a wider geographic area. Columbia-Sumter-Orangeburg CSA ranks 58th and is the largest CSA without an Apple Store.

So what does this mean?

Yes, it’s strange that Columbia doesn’t have an Apple Store. Most cities similar in size to Columbia have Apple Stores. Lots of cities smaller than Columbia have Apple Stores.

But why?

I don’t know for sure, but I think it’s a combination of three factors:

  1. There isn’t an ideal location for an Apple Store in Columbia. In most markets, Apple locates in established shopping malls. That leaves Columbiana Mall as the only option right now, but Apple’s had plenty of opportunities to locate there and they haven’t. I assume that it’s just not centrally located enough… Maybe someday, Bull Street or whatever is taking the place of Richland Mall will be an option, but it isn’t today.

  2. Greenville, Charlotte, Augusta and Charleston all have stores. These stores are a drivable distance from Columbia. Apple may assume that Columbia customers are covered by these stores.

  3. Apple isn’t adding new markets any more. Apple will occasionally put an additional store in a market they are already in. Or remodel an existing store. They will build large flagship stores in international metropolitan areas. But they aren’t really adding new stores in the U.S. markets they aren’t already in. Columbia simply missed the initial expansion rush and is now just out of luck.

Columbia is big enough to support an Apple Store. We’ll see if it ever happens. I think a future location near downtown — Bull Street or Forest Acres — makes the most sense.3

Bob Wertz is a type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008.

  1. If I’m wildly speculating, that really strange mall Barnes and Noble that opened before Christmas might move to the Forever 21 space which would give them a more space and an external entrance for extended hours. ↩︎

  2. That analysis isn’t online anymore, so I figured it would be worth updating and republishing here. ↩︎

  3. Random aside… I kinda miss blogging about retail in Columbia. ↩︎

Slightly melted

We’ve been visiting a new Lutheran Church since Christmas. Today during the children’s sermon, Pastor Emily was discussing the changing of the paraments to purple for the Lenten season. She then mentioned that the cross on the altar had changed, too. I noticed the paraments, but hadn’t noticed the different cross. It was black and very slightly warped on the right side. Turns out that the church had burned down in the 1940s, and this altar cross survived. During Lent, the blackened, slightly melted cross replaces the shiny cross that’s on the altar the rest of the year.

I love this. I love that they didn’t throw it out, or try to “fix” it. The cross was changed, and they found a new, appropriate use for it. I love how our worship space changes with the liturgical season, but this felt especially poignant.

We’ve been through a lot over the last decade or so. And I feel often like I’m changed. Different than I was. Slightly melted? And I’m not always sure where or how I fit in. This cross is a reminder that sometimes, after the drama and trauma, we are changed. Maybe we have a different purpose and place. Still valuable, but no longer the same. And that’s something to celebrate.

Bob Wertz is a type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008.