One thing about going back to grad school in your late 40s… everyone thinks you are a professor.
Getting back in the habit of writing one of my elected representatives every day.
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.
Spring is finally coming to campus.
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.
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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.