Chipotle_mexican_grill_Chesterbrook__PA_19087___Yelp

The news has been really bad for Chipole over the last 6 months or so: food safety issues, a 26% decline in sales, and then safety measures which killed the taste of the food. I’ve been a HUGE Chipotle fan for a very long time. On average I ate Chipotle 3-5 times a week for a long period of time spending thousands of dollars on Chipotle every year.

I virtually stopped eating Chipotle almost a year ago long before the crisis. My local Chipotle in Wayne, PA was so bad, I just stopped going. Every time I went there it was dirty, and ingredients were always missing due to bad employees and non-existent management. If you look at Yelp reviews for Chipotle locations they will tend to have 2-3 stars on average, and this was long before the outbreaks. 5 years ago, your typical Chipotle location would have a 4-5 star review average.

Chipotle has a customer experience problem. If I had to identify a root cause, their employee quality has gone way downhill, and management oversight has become very lax. 10 years ago your average Chipotle employee was a much higher quality employee than a typical fast food joint. Over the last five years, the employee quality has drifted into fast food territory and that is what ultimately led to poor sales and probably the multiple outbreaks too because the onsite hand prep of food at Chipotle necessitates a higher quality employee.

#1: Ops is becoming more tactical

Ten years ago the goal for systems management was to use one set of tooling to manage a diverse set of platforms for the entire lifecycle of a server. There are still some organizations who have such a model, but most have dropped the ambition to use one tool to rule them all. Many shops are moving towards tactical tooling that is “best of breed” and keeping a siloed approach to automation use cases.

#2: Infrastructure is less important

Infrastructure is becoming less important from an investment perspective and is being viewed as a commodity. This trend started with virtualization and is accelerating with cloud. Ironically configuration management problems only get worse with the ability to easily provision more resources but organizations are tackling those problems in silos.

#3: DEV is driving DEVops

In most organizations operations is still being viewed as an obstacle to business progress. That has been the driver towards external and internal cloud. The whole devops trend is being driven by DEV and not ops so the typical value achieved by say server automation is nice, but time to market of releases is what’s driving IT spend.

#4: IT is already lean

One of drivers for server automation 10 years ago was increasing operational efficiency. Are OPS teams running at high efficiency? No, but from a staffing perspective they are running so lean that there is no headcount to reduce. In an environment where server count is growing it’s still very easy to justify a big automation project, but if server count is going down and headcount stays flat it’s hard to justify a large automation spend.

#5: Outsourcing

Depending on how the outsourcing arrangement is setup, it can either be a driver or a roadblock for automation. In a lot of deals the outsourcer needs to invest in automation to meet their SLA’s but many times it can also be the opposite. I’ve seen many cases where the outsourcer resists automation because they are financially rewarded for operating in an inefficient manner.

I haven’t seen a lot of information posted about how to do software updates with Shimano Dura Ace 9070 DI2. Here is a quick howto:

  1. Download the latest version of the E-tube Software
  2. Install the software on Windows (Mac users can use VMWare Fusion or Parallels.
  3. Launch the application.
  4. Connect the SM-BCR2 to the charging port on the junction box. The cover might be difficult to open, I had to use a screwdriver.
  5. Plugin the SM-BCR2 to your computer

From there is pretty straightforward. The software will update itself and then detect if there are updates for firmware on the various components. Below are a series of screenshots.














We all know what time of year it is in the USA, its indoor training time for much of the country. Most cyclists avoid using the trainer like the plague. Trainer sessions are usually very boring, and its very difficult to gauge your efforts. In the past people used TV or cycling training videos like Spinevervals to make trainer rides bearable, but even that didn’t help too much. When the Spinverval guy said do a 9/10 effort, what does that equate to for me? Even if you knew, it was easy to cheat yourself in a training session by just going slower. There was no real record of your efforts.

Trainerroad.com

In the past two years a few products have come out that have transformed indoor training for me. The first product is TrainerRoad.com, which is a software tool that allows you to execute structured workouts and display real time performance data including an accurate estimate of power, even if you don’t have a power meter. TrainerRoad connects your computer to ANT+ devices via the Garmin ANT+ USB dongle. You can pick up a Garmin ANT+ stick for $25 on Amazon. It picks up the data from your heartrate monitor and ANT+ speed/cadence sensor.

If you have a powermeter it will pick that data up as well, or you can use the calculated power which is very accurate on the trainer. On real road rides, power calculation is notoriously inaccurate because there are multitude of variables that a power calculator cannot take into account, most notably factoring in wind resistance. There are less variables with an indoor trainer, when I go 20mph on my Cyclops trainer, TrainerRoad can make an accurate assessment than I’m pushing X amount of watts.
Trainerroad.com w/ sufferfest

Sufferfest Videos

The Sufferfest is a great collection of downloadable videos which feature footage from protour races. Its way more entertaining than the old Spinverval or CTS vids of looking at people ride trainers. Plus TrainerRoad has complete integration with Sufferfest workouts.
Sufferfest videos

Strava Premium

Strava has finally listened to some of my earlier gripes, and has introduced better power metrics and visualization tools. Once you complete a ride in TrainerRoad, you can export it to .TCX file which is importable via Strava.
Strava Premium Power Analysis

AppleTV

Why is AppleTV on this list? People generally like to display TrainerRoad on a larger display such as TV. Dealing with cables and wires to share your screen can be a pain in the ass. AppleTV has a technology called Airplay Mirroring which allows you easily share your laptop screen and sound with your TV.

Like many avid cyclists, I’m a huge fan of Strava, the social training tool which keeps track of cycling performance via cycling computer data and phone applications. Strava has been around for a few years now. It started out as a pay service with limits on uploads for free users, but last year they introduced a “Premium” offering and removed the free upload limit.

The premium offering gave cyclists some addtional features. Probably the most notable was SufferScore, a feature which gives your ride a numberic score of effort based on a number of factors. There were also addtional power visualizations and the ability to sort leaderboards by weight.

Many loyal Strava users went for the premium offering just to show support for the service. The addtional features were not very compelling, but people wanted to support Strava. Its been over a year now, and premium users are starting to get disatified with the lack of updates. Sure, Strava has made enhancements to the service. Most notably, improvements to the mobile apps and a running offering as well.

The vast majority of premium users have a Garmin device making mobile enhancements irrelevant. When the premium offering was introduced, people assumed Strava would gradually add more training and analysis tools. As it stands now, Strava is a lot of fun but its not a serious training tool.

For serious cyclists, they have to use other software offerings in order to get detailed analysis of their rides. Training with power meters is becoming much more common, and Strava’s power analysis is extremely weak. You get a number for average power and some visualizations of power output over time. People who actually train with power meters are forced to use another service like Training Peaks in order to get any true insight into their training data. Strava doesn’t even provide the most basic functions such as power zones and normalized power metrics.

There is definitely an increasing backlash to Strava premium due to the lack of development. The lack of development is especially alarming when you consider the amount that Strava has grown over the last few years. I assumed by now that Strava would have much more serious ride analysis and training tools.