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With the World Cup final this weekend, let’s see how my pre-tournament predictions held up! I correctly picked 9 teams in the round of 16, 5 of 8 quarter-finalists, 2 of 4 semi-finalists, and both finalists. I’ll stick with my prediction of Argentina beating France in the final ⚽

I’m loving the beta of Readwise’s Reader app so far. I’m pretty sure I will be moving to it from Pocket and shutting down Read Ruler, my web app for Pocket, soon. Next up: to decide if I should also move all of my RSS feed reading from Reeder to Reader. (Naming things is hard.)

With the start of the World Cup this weekend, I went through every match and made predictions for the entire tournament. I ended up with a semi-final lineup of Argentina vs. Brazil and France vs. Uruguay, with Argentina beating France in the final ⚽

After almost 13 years, Friday was my last day at Bleacher Report 😢 Without a doubt, it was the best job I’ve ever had, but now it’s time for me to take an extended break before deciding what’s next

If you are in San Francisco and need a COVID booster, I highly recommend the Southeast Health Center. I just went there without an appointment and there was no one ahead of me in line. 60 seconds from arrival to getting the shot. Plus everyone there is super nice

As I walked in Glen Canyon Park this morning, I saw a chocolate lab sitting in the middle of a clearing, seemingly admiring the view. The dog slowly walked over, sat down next to me, and I petted it while we both enjoyed the moment. Easily the highlight of my week.

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 😀