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Enjoying this home brew Belgian Witbier with Coriander and Orange Peel that my friend Garrick gave to me. Refreshing. Tastes like summer. 🍺

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Hit a new 60-min PR in Matt Wilpers Power Zone Endurance Ride this morning! 653 kJ, a 10% jump over previous 591 kJ. It was a Zone 2 / 3 ride but I felt my zones were a little low so I rode more Zone 3 / 4. Should do a new FTP test. 🙌🚴🏼‍♂️🏆

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Mazie cross country meet today In Chanhassen. Running 5k. 👏

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Sous Vides Brisket

Trying Sous Vides brisket for the first time. Trimmed down the flat. Simple salt and pepper. Texas style. Cut in half to vacuum seal for the bath. In the 155 °F water bath for 36 hours. Will finish on Big Green Egg for 3-4 hours for smoke and bark on Saturday.

24 hours into the Sous Vides and all proceeding well!

37 hours of Sous Vides complete. Pulled the brisket out and leaving it in bags to cool in the fridge. Will smoke for 3-4 hours to finish this afternoon. 🤤

After a few hours cooking in the refrigerator I pulled the brisket out of the bags. I put the juice aside to use for something else. Second application of salt and pepper rub, and onto the Big Green Egg to smoke for three or so hours.

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Tyler defeated Monk Maz Koshia and got the Master Cycle Zero in Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It is amazing to me how far the story goes in this game.

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First time we’ve had a full unplanned Xfinity service outage during remote work and school. Switched everyone to use their phones as hotspots. Hopefully service is restored soon. There is major construction a block away that I suspect is related.

Update: Service came back after only about 15 min. Wonder what the issue was… 🤔

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Rosalia

A few days ago we happened to go to Rosalia on their very first night open to the public. Rosalia is the newest restaurant from Daniel del Prada, and is right behind one of our favorite restaurants in town, Martina. Rosalia is counter service pizza and our first visit was a great success. We had Pepperoni, Bianca, and Margherita pizzas. The pepperoni was perfect. The Bianca had a surprising kick from the chilis. The Margherita was very well prepared. We tried a slice of the Tomato Fugazza and it tasted good but ours wasn’t heated up enough. Opening night issue?

If you are looking for another great option for delicious pizza, make Rosalia your next stop.

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My Octopus Teacher

We enjoyed watching My Octopus Teacher tonight. It is a touching story capturing the year that Craig Foster spent visiting this octopus every day. My favorite scene was toward the end when he captures the octopus playing with a school of fish. Beautifully filmed, with great underwater scenes. 🍿

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Hit a new 45-minute PR on Peloton this morning in Jenn Sherman’s class. 553 kJ. Not sure about Yacht Rock for spinning though. 😬 Helped to a PR with byteCoder, YukonJack, coppel87, and AreBurns. 🙌 #FitByFifty

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Updating firmware is one of my favorite things. 🤓 Updating the new IntelliConnect.

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The hand washing feature in watchOS 7 seemed a bit silly but I turned it on and I’ve actually liked it. It is good at detecting washing, and it has already resulted in me washing for longer. I even get a graph! I also like the nudge to wash your hands when you get home.

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I have wanted folders in Shortcuts since it was called Workflow. It is a huge help to have that in iOS 14. I rediscovered shortcuts I had forgot about because they were lost in the flat library! I also love that I can group project specific shortcuts like the Weekly Thing.

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iOS 14 is sharing an insight with me that it is using more battery. Neat insight, how about a fix? 😬

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Saddened to hear of the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She has been a historic justice on the Supreme Court. She gave everything to the movements she believed in, and our country. 😢🇺🇸

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The final thing we needed to do for our pool project was replace the septic system at our cabin. I think it’s good that I wasn’t there when they did it and cut through gas and water lines, irrigation lines, and even low voltage lines. I just checked in at times on the NestCams. Hard to dig a giant hole out and put a big thing in it without disturbing a bunch of stuff.

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Slalom Presents: Realizing Racial Equity

Many thanks to Slalom Consulting for their Slalom Presents: Realizing Racial Equality program. Hearing the more complete story from Ruby Bridges in her school desegregation experience, Dr. Condoleezza Rice and her views on race and education, and a musical closing from Leon Bridges was a good backgrounder on the work we are pursuing to address racism in our society.

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Last night as we were getting ready to go to sleep I noticed that a helicopter had been circling overhead for a while. It was circling large swaths around Highway 62 and France Ave, just a few blocks from our house. Tammy found out via NextDoor what as up, and we quickly heard what turned out to be a mugging attempt that turned into a shooting at Fairview Southdale. We later learned the victim survived despite a gunshot to the head, but the suspect fled on foot and was “at large”. The helicopter was searching. The police asked everyone to leave their exterior lights on which we did. They didn’t catch the suspect, and still haven’t.

Links to local news coverage:

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It was great to be on a panel today as part of Twin Cities Startup Week talking about Managing Global Teams During a Pandemic. Many thanks to the organization and fellow panelists Shivani Stumpf, Teddy Bekele, Jadee Hanson, and Amy Patton!

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Two Second Test

I spent a lot of my career in media and publishing on the web. During that time one of the things that I came to appreciate more completely was the unique journalistic voice that news organizations have. Being responsible for the websites of a number of these sites, I felt it was absolutely critical that whatever Content Management Systems (CMS for those in the business) and other publishing systems we had must allow the journalists to express that unique voice to the reader, via the website. To this end I coined something that I called the Two Second Test.

The Two Second Test is simple. You should be able to show any person the front page of a news website for just two seconds and they should be able to have a feel for what is happening at that moment. Is there big news? Did something great just happen? Something bad? You should be able to intuit it from just those two seconds.

I was reminded of this concept recently when Larry Kramer shared How 9/11 looked on a newly created Internet on that day. His article includes pictures of two framed screen grabs of the MarketWatch page from that day.

I looked at those in Two Seconds you knew something big was happening.

This might seem easy, but the vast majority of news websites even today fail this test. Pick your favorite sites and go to them, look for two seconds, and see what you know. Ask yourself if you know anything? Mostly you don’t.

Most organizations fail this test because of the constraints of their content management system. In order to make their sites work, they have dozens of templates, and they flow articles and blurbs from their CMS into various templates. They change the template for what is going on in the world, but they are always working in a template.

In order to pass the Two Second Test you have to give your newsroom a canvas to work on, not a color-by-numbers template. Along with that power comes risk. The newsroom could put something on the site that has a technical flaw of some sort. Having a strong operational connection between the newsroom and the technology team limits that risk though.

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Eagle Bluff Environmental Learning Center

Before leaving the Lanesboro area we stopped at Eagle Bluff Environmental Learning Center and did a casual hike on their trails. We hiked down to the Root River on a forested loop.

We had the place all to ourselves, plus a lot of bugs, two snakes, and some frogs and toads.