Bob Wertz

I still have Facebook, primarily to check my memories. Usually, it’s something funny that the kids said, or some family pictures. But today was different:

“Just left Columbiana in a stampede. Rumored shooting. Scary.”

We’d gone to Columbiana Mall near our house to do some shopping and stopped at the Red Robin near the exit to get some dinner before heading home. After dinner, we stepped out of the restaurant into a stampede of people running toward us. A woman yelled “Go! There was a shooting!” as she ran past. We darted back inside Red Robin and left through their exits. I had Norah and Jill, and we got briefly separated from Ryan and my wife, Liz as we left through different doors. We found each other, ran to the car and got the hell out of there as police and first responders poured into the parking lot from all directions.

That is...

It’s been a long week, y’all.

They are about to start work on the riverfront trails near my house, eventually connecting to 27 miles of riverfront trails. They’ve been trying to make this happen for as long as I can remember. Would be fun to ride a bike from the suburbs along the river to downtown Columbia.

I attended a lecture tonight at the University of South Carolina with Helen Armstrong, professor and researcher from NC State. The talk was well attended… mostly students with a handful of professional designers sprinkled in. I didn’t take notes, but figured I’d share some quick impressions.

• Designers need to learn to use AI. Think of artificial intelligence as a tool that we can wield to design more effectively. The point isn’t that AI will do the whole project, but that we can choose how to implement AI tools most effectively.

• Designers need to partner with data scientists to maximize the impact of AI tools. Helen talked about the importance of partnering with data scientists to understand the tools and help focus AI products.

• Designers can craft the interface to AI. Right now, we think of most AI tools as text prompts, but designers can work to help build the interfaces that allow people...

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Long day ahead of me today. A couple of important meetings, a 3-hour grad seminar, more meetings… and then if I have the energy, I’m going to try to go to a talk on campus about AI and art.

I’m taking an asynchronous class on survey development. The professor’s comments on assignments are constructive and helpful, but her grading rubric is massively complex. We’re talking fractional points with varying weights. I’ve been a grad student for a really long time and I’ve never seen a grading scale this complicated. I’ve read over my last assignment several times and I can’t figure out for the life of me how I got an A.

I’ve pretty much stopped posting to Instagram. I have issues with Meta, but that wasn’t the driving factor. In fact, it wasn’t really an intentional shift… I just stopped enjoying Instagram. Now I’m posting images to Micro.Blog and cross posting to Bluesky and Threads.

Shots from last night at Craft and Draft in Irmo. Lizzy was very entertained by, well, everything.

It’s easier to destroy than to govern.

Proud of Jilly. Honorable mention in the district science fair.