Peaceful Protest and Tammy's 23andMe Results

My 4-month-old MacBook Pro faltered on me a week ago. I noticed it was taking an unusually long time to boot-up and also the Touch ID was no longer working. I worked with Apple support and they determined it was likely a hardware issue. I brought it in to the Apple Store at Mall of America on Friday and got it back Tuesday afternoon. That was quick I thought. They replaced the motherboard and it's functioning fine now but for whatever reason, they reformatted the SSD (Solid State Drive). I spent most of yesterday getting it back up to speed. I still have a ways to go.

We've been with Verizon since before the advent of flip-phones but our relationship with them has come to an end. We've switched cellphone providers and are now with Google's Project Fi. I'm especially liking my Pixel XL phone and its ability to stay connected to wifi—a problem that continued to plague my LG G4 for the nearly 18 months I had it. Rachel is traveling in South Dakota this week so I'll be interested to see how the phone performed in the more remote places along her way. I think I'll continue to use my LG phone as a camera on my rides.

Tammy and I attended the Tax March last Saturday at the state capitol in St. Paul to draw attention to the need for Trump* to show the world his tax returns. Transparency for this sort of thing has never been more important considering the potential for conflicts of interest Trump* has. It was a nice crowd of people (see the video below) and a peaceful protest. I read in the paper that they estimated the crowd size at around 500 but I would've guessed there were considerably more people than that.

I did my first long ride of the year on Monday. I left the house intent on doing somewhere between 40 to 50 miles but didn't arrive home until 98 miles (158 km) later. I needed that. I've got my sights set on the Lutsen 69er race in late June and I was in need of a longish ride.


I enjoy riding outdoors but there's no better way for me to maximize my time in the saddle than when I'm on my CompuTrainer and using Zwift, an interactive program that pushes me like no other. I rode in Zwift's "workout" mode today and felt good about my effort. Workout mode is a structured workout where I plug in my FTP number (Functional Threshold Power—a measure of how strong I am on the bike based on the number of watts I can maintain over a set period of time). My FTP number is then used to assign blocks of time at specific watts over the course of the workout. The image to the right shows just some of the data collected during my workout. The red line across the top is my heart rate and the colored segments beneath my heart rate are the watts I was producing for the two hours and ten minutes I was riding. I love that I'm able to incorporate the geek in me along with my workouts.

Tammy received her 23andMe results a few days ago. I sent my DNA sample in a week ahead of her but their website says my results are still pending. She found out that she's 99.8% Western European with the breakdown being:

58.1% Scandinavian
19.2% British and Irish
0.3% Finnish
22.2% Broadly Northwestern European

The results also show that she has a 25% chance of acquiring late-onset Alzheimer's disease, just as her mother is now experiencing.

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