Active Incidents: Totality, Organics, and Football

You’ve made it to Friday. Hopefully your incidents have moved to a “resolved” status, so there’s finally time for a bit of light reading. This is the second in our weekly series of technology and ITSM-related news. Feel free to catch up on last week’s as well.

Total eclipse of the internet

The eclipse came and went. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience for those along the path of totality (just wanted to type that phrase one more time). For others it was a brief, probably forgettable moment in time where you needed cheap glasses to see a sliver of the sun blocked out by the moon, which also blocked out millions of regular Netflix watchers, apparently. It wasn’t all bad news for online streaming, though. NASA.gov broke its record for web traffic by a whopping 700%, and had 40 million viewers on its live stream of the eclipse.

The eclipse “face-palm” fact: Google reported a massive spike in “my eyes hurt” searches for Monday. Luckily, those poor souls have seven years to recover before the next eclipse opportunity in the United States.

Organic baby kale at your doorstep?

Next week, Amazon will close its $13.7 billion acquisition of Whole Foods, and Jeff Bezos wants you to notice the changes immediately. They will reportedly slash the prices of items throughout the stores, including best-selling organics. The plan, as suspected, is to eventually integrate every Whole Foods item into Amazon.com, so customers can grocery shop entirely online. For now, Amazon will roll out a Prime rewards program, offering in-store savings and benefits to Prime shoppers.

Change Management Award

Football season is upon us, and The New York Times recently published a survey in which a neuropathologist studied the brains of 111 deceased former NFL players. The doctor found C.T.E. (a degenerative brain disease) in 110 cases. Though the league has recently acknowledged a head-injury epidemic and made rule changes to compensate, it’s still an undeniably dangerous game.

Seattle-based startup Vicis has produced another precaution for players: the ZERO1 helmet. They describe it as deformative, like a car bumper, with flexible material on the inside that absorbs some of the force before it reaches the head (and brain). Seattle Seahawks stars Russell Wilson, Richard Sherman, and Doug Baldwin (a Vicis investor) wore the NFL-approved helmets throughout the preseason. At least twelve NFL teams have ordered ZERO1 helmets for the start of the season.

ITSM Tips of the Week:

• Meet your SLAs through automation.
• The students are returning to campus. Is your IT department prepared?
• Learn the predictive functions of the modern service desk with this webinar.

Thanks for reading. Sorry your 1 in 292 million shot at the Powerball jackpot didn’t come through. There’s always next week.