Forgot how much I like the “Relics” episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. A nice send off for Scotty. 🖖

Retiring “International Bob is Grumpy Day”

March 3, many years ago, my mom died unexpectedly. In perhaps one of the greatest understatements ever, I struggled with her loss. Some days, I still struggle with her loss. I discovered that on March 3, every year, I was grumpy. Kinda pissed off. And in general, not a fun person to be around. So I declared the day “International Bob is Grumpy Day.” Gave it a silly name. Explain to people how I’m feeling.

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Tina Roth Eisenberg (aka Swissmiss) commented over on Threads that she misses the in-person office culture. I agree completely. I understand why others don’t miss it, but I think we lost something that can’t be replicated by Teams or Zoom.

The end of the Apple Car: This isn’t the revolution they thought it was…

Apple has canceled its decade-long program to build an electric car. And while I think it’s probably the right call to end the program, I do understand why Apple tried. Ten years ago when Apple started the project, it was the perfect moment to rethink the automobile. With the change to battery powered electric powertrains, many of the traditional constraints of car design were no longer relevant. You no longer need a motor, or a gas tank.

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Today, I learned that Tim Hortons has locations in the United States. Had coffee this morning at a location near our hotel in Atlanta.

Picture of a Tim Hortons coffee cup on a table.

My first guess in Wordle today eliminated all but one word. Solved in two.

The Apple Sports app for following games in progress is so much better than using ESPN’s web site. Simple, but really well done.

Just thinking … @manton … would it be possible build a Facebook import into Micro.Blog, similar to how the Twitter import works? I shared family memories when my kids were little, and I’d love to have it on my site. Facebook allows an export, but I don’t know how challenging it would be to import.

I’m really glad I was able to export my tweets and move them to Micro.Blog. It gives me a record of all of my activity on Twitter on a site I control, but it also discourages me from going back to Twitter because I know the listing at bobwertz.com/tweets/ is complete.

The price of taking yesterday off is seven meetings today.

One irritating thing about working on your PhD at the same university that you work at… If you take the day off to do school work, and you need to email someone a school-related question, you see all of your work email that you were trying to avoid.

South Carolina Women’s Basketball just beat #11 UConn by 18 points, without leading scorer Kamilla Cardoso who is off this week playing for Brazil in Olympic qualifying. This team is incredible. I think it’s the best team Dawn Staley has assembled, and that’s saying something.

My daughter was in the student section 1.5 hours before the start of the South Carolina/UCONN women’s basketball game. Colonial Life Arena is going to be hopping today.

I changed my Micro.Blog avatar to my little fish logo. I change the logo on the top of my site based on my mood and I would change my avatar, too, but I think the avatar is too small to see what expression the fish has…

The Church Sign Problem: An extended metaphor for many things in business and life.

An established church in a small town has a simple sign by the side of the road. The town is growing and the road in front of the church is getting much busier. A new church down the road installs a large sign. Not wanting to fall behind the times, the established church installs a new sign, too. This sign allows the church to add custom messages to the sign by manually arranging letters.

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Trying out a new Starbucks that just opened. This location was clearly designed to primarily be a drive thru and pick up location. It looks tiny from the outside, but actually has a lot of seating.

I like the way that @manton has improved crossposting in Micro.Blog.

So happy that Project Tapestry is funded. Congrats to @Iconfactory@iconfactory.world and let’s keep going until we reach the stretch goal!

In a crowded Starbucks. I glance up to see if they’ve called my name. I didn’t hear them, but it’s been a while. A woman waiting for her drink looks at me and spells my name with sign language. I nod and then realize what she did. B-O-B is pretty easy in sign language, but it was still pretty cool.

We Asked A.I. to Create the Joker. It Generated a Copyrighted Image. - The New York Times

I don’t have an issue with the concept of AI, but especially with imagery, how you train the model matters. The most popular generative systems were trained on copyrighted material and that’s a problem.