Got word this week that a book review I wrote for New Media and Society was approved for publication. It feels so wonderful to have this finalized before the end of the year.

Just bought some Nanoleaf smart lightbulbs for our bedroom lamps. Setup with HomeKit was incredibly easy and the price was reasonable. I really like them.

At my daughter’s physical therapy session and it’s hard to believe she had an ACL repair just over a month ago. She’s moving really well and her leg strength is improving rapidly.

Merry Christmas from Team Wertz. 🎄

I’m intrigued by Keychron’s Alice keyboard releases. I love my current Keychron K2 and I don’t really need another keyboard. But I’m tempted.

For years, our Alexa was incredibly reliable, but about six months ago, accuracy dropped significantly. I bought a new one recently thinking the issue was with the older hardware, but nope. Still bad. We are having better luck with Siri and our Apple HomePod Mini and I think we’ll start using that more.

Had coffee with a friend this morning and was telling him about Micro.Blog. I followed his Mastodon account and he was able to follow me on Micro.Blog, which worked great. I need to polish up my Micro.Blog sales pitch, though, and my explanation of Activity Pub.

The little suburb I live near doesn’t have a historic “Main Street” like a bunch of the other cities around us. (Irmo was founded in the 1920s as a railway stop for nearby dam construction.) The weird thing is that they’ve just decided to insert a new Main Street into the middle of the existing community. I’m not sure how I feel about it. I’m sure it will be nice… but instead of leveraging what’s already in the community, you are creating something that never existed.

📺 Rewatching some Star Trek: Strange New Worlds episodes. Such a great show.

Taking all of my index cards from my planning session this morning and capturing it all in Notion.

Hanging out at a coffee shop today and working on 2023 planning. Trying to settle on some goals and themes for the year ahead.

Hitting the pause button

Time to reset the balance

“I don’t know how you do it?”

I get this question a lot. I balance a full-time job, my family and grad school. I’ve been in grad school part time since I started my Master’s program in 2018 and I’ve become pretty good at carefully planning out and scheduling my time.

In 2022, I never really had a chance to achieve a balance. At work, there was a lot of change. My boss resigned in January and I assumed some of his responsibilities. I took over managing photography and videography staff again. We rolled out a new logo, which was — and still is — a lot of work. All of these things were positive developments, but required increasingly more of my time and attention.

At home, things were challenging. My wife tore her bicep in January and then had to have surgery in the summer, right as she was moving to a different school. My oldest started her senior year of high school and is trying to figure out where she wants to go to college, but then tore her ACL in a lacrosse tournament and also had to have surgery. My two youngest each started a new school, which changed our morning routine significantly. Everyone is doing great, but there is always a lot going on.

And grad school has been fine. I’ve done well. I’ve written lots of papers that I am proud of and had research accepted to a conference. I’m trying to get my papers edited and submitted to journals. Classes have been good, but honestly, I haven’t enjoyed grad school for the last year. And that has been weighing on me.

The balance is off.

I’ve been in grad school part-time for 4.5 years straight at this point — 3 for the Master’s and 1.5 for the Ph.D. With all the changes in my job and life, I wasn’t getting the most out of my Ph.D. studies.1  So I’ve decided to take the spring semester off. It’s a tough decision — I’ve been steadily working on my degrees one or two classes at a time — but it’s the right decision. I need to pause and reset the balance between work, home and school. I’m not quitting, just taking a break. I know I’ll start back up in the summer or fall, fully recharged and ready to continue to the finish.

  1. One of my professors told me that by working on my Ph.D. part time, I had the “gift of time.” Most people have to sprint through their program so they can get a teaching job. By not rushing through my program, I could get the most out of it and enjoy it.

Bob Wertz is a creative director, type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina.

Post Formatting

Testing out how I want to format my longer posts.

I haven’t had this Micro.Blog site for long, but I’ve written at my other site – Sketchbook B – for almost 15 years.1  Over time, my long form blog posts there developed a pattern. I had a basic structure with headers, footnotes, divider lines and a bio at the end. And I want to replicate some of that here and needed a post to experiment with. This is that post.2

I’ve already been using an H2 as a subhead and I like the way that looks. Like many writers, I often want to add footnotes as I write. Over on Sketchbook B, I used asterisks, but since I’m writing in Markdown, that’s kind of a pain in the ass. So I figured I’d go with superscript numbers, which is more conventional anyway.3  I continue to use divider lines to separate the body of the post from the footnotes, and a second divider line between the footnotes and a bio.

I’m not sure what I want to do with the bio. I found that most of my traffic came from Google, so the reader was dropping in on my site with no idea who I was. For now, I’ve decided to go with the shortest one sentence bio that I could and set it at the end in italics.

One aspect that I haven’t yet decided on is images. On my Squarespace-hosted site, each post had a preview image and I’d include a post image. So far on bobwertz.com, I don’t need a preview image, but I do think I want to create some type of standard post image to include under the subhead. I’ll keep experimenting, but I feel good about my basic post format.

  1. I’m going to keep writing at Sketchbook B, but the content will be mostly Adobe Creative Cloud tips.
  2. I’m using a trial of MarsEdit right now. And I really love the preview engine that lets me see how this is going to look, even before I post it. Looks like I’ll be purchasing a license.
  3. I don’t love how the superscripts mess with the overall line spacing. It just feels wrong. I may try to come up with another approach.

Bob Wertz is a creative director, type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina.

📺 Rewatching Hawkeye on Disney+ and I forgot how much fun this show is.

So apparently, 15 years ago, I joined Twitter. They wanted me to post about it, but they didn’t say it had to be on Twitter.

I added some of my own typeface designs to my Micro.Blog site. I’m really getting into the idea of creating all of the assets that I use in my designs… typefaces, illustrations… now I need to build my own template.

I took Monday off to be my “retreat” day to plan and set personal goals for 2023. I’ve done it the last five or six years and I enjoy taking the day to focus on what I want to do – and honestly, what I don’t have time to focus on right now.

“Fruit Quake” flavored Mountain Dew. I’m a sucker for special edition sodas and this one isn’t terrible. Don’t know that I would buy it again, though.

I’m trying out MarsEdit like all the cool kids.

I’m a fan of limited edition candy and sodas, but fruicake-flavored Mountain Dew is a bridge too far.