Blog on chrispederick.com Microblog Posts

We have a birdbath in our yard and love to watch the birds drinking and bathing in it. However, recently it has been taken over by crows who bring their food to wash in it, and today I found a half-eaten mouse in there. In related news: we no longer have a birdbath in our yard.

I woke up this morning to find out that the kitten had chewed through the wire between our thermostat and furnace. I had to do some wire stripping and patching to get the heating working again before I even had any coffee 😾

I captioned my best nine of 2019 with “An incredible year of travel in 2019. Let’s keep this going in 2020!”. So I’m sorry for jinxing it and won’t make the mistake of offering any predictions for 2021 this time

I finished The Mandalorian season two and immediately canceled my Disney+ subscription. I’m ready for Disney+ to have more shows in the future to keep me a subscriber. (I think The Mandalorian is good, but not great, and season two is better than season one)

I have been quiet because right now people should be listening to more black voices and fewer old, white men. However, let me be unequivocally clear that #blacklivesmatter ✊🏿✊🏾✊🏽✊🏼✊🏻✊

I went outside to water the backyard and by the time I came back inside travel from Europe to the US was restricted, the NBA was suspended and Tom Hanks announced that he tested positive for coronavirus 😳

A combination of being busy at work, a weekend vacation and the return of a couple of twice-weekly podcasts (The Totally Football Show & My Dad Wrote a Porno) means that September is the first month this year where I haven’t finished an audiobook.

Alongside 1364 other people from 99 different countries I became a US citizen today. It was genuinely heartwarming (particularly in contrast to the depressing news cycle) to see so many people from all over the world celebrate the milestone with their friends and family.

We’ll see if I will remain active on Twitter. I will say that my experience over the last week has ranged from good to not so fun, but unfollowing people and particularly disabling retweets has made a big difference. At this point I’m cautious, but hopeful.

The way that I will be posting to Twitter has changed. My tweets will now originate on my own site and are syndicated/cross-posted to Twitter. I am still active on Micro.blog and I hope to make my Twitter experience feel more like the community there.

18 months after unfollowing everyone and deleting all of my tweets I returned to Twitter a week ago 😬 I’ve spent the last week following people and then being aggressive about disabling retweets or just unfollowing people who for me are too frequently negative or outraged.

I’ve finally worked out why voicemail transcription has never worked on my iPhone: I had my Siri language set to English (UK). Voicemail transcription starts working when I change it to English (US). Time to Americanize after living here for twenty years I guess 😀

I installed the iOS 13 beta on my iPad to test it out, but was planning on waiting to update my iPhone. However, I edited a shortcut on my iPad and now it won’t work on my phone unless I upgrade. I might have to pull the trigger on updating there as well now 😬

Just had my first Impossible Burger at the Gott’s in SFO and I have to say that it was really good! If I didn’t know, I wouldn’t have guessed that it wasn’t a “real” burger.

I’m in the middle of the Amazon rainforest with WiFi only via satellite and my phone in airplane mode…and I’m still getting spam calls! 🙄

I set up an On This Day page and a custom images archive page last night. It’s great for these to be on my own site rather than on a content silo.

It’s less than a week since I reduced my podcast consumption and I’ve already finished my first book: Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives. I’m excited to keep this going and I’m immediately starting another book. 📚

Last night I reduced the number of podcasts I’m subscribed to from 34 to 15. I’m hoping to replace the repetitive tech discussions with a combination of audiobooks and Pocket’s listen feature.