"Skiing trails is clearly a different game than other kinds of skiing, and fabulous technique counts less than nerve and craftiness. If you have a lot of nerve, the ultimate unrestrained way to ski trails, of course, is to schuss the trail until things get desperate and then sit down". Steve Barnett, Cross-Country-Downhill
The High Peaks receive an average annual snowfall of 120″. Much of this falls in single storm accumulations of 8-12″. In February and March, just after one of these storms, the high country is most accessible. Hiking trails leading to the highest peaks are snow-choked ski-ways. Dwarfed pine trees near timberline are often buried. During the dead of winter after a bad storm, the following ski tours are at their best. All three are intermediate in difficulty and could be done by anyone who has enjoyed alpine skiing.
Benchmarking has been in business for dozens of years. It is known well in the retail industry, where phantom shoppers visit the competition and try to get intelligence on their pricing for certain products. And for years now, this discipline has been available to organizations with web sites, using a newer discipline of Performance Benchmarking. So what is Benchmarking? Benchmarking is an ongoing, systematic process for measuring and comparing the work processes of one institution to those of another, by bringing an external focus to internal activities, functions, or operations. Benchmarking…
In understanding Service Levels for Web Sites, moving quickly to how to measure for SLAs, we quickly turn to Performance Monitoring to see how a web site is doing. In Avinash's book, "Web Analytics An Hour A Day", he describes the Web Analytics trinity, a framework for understanding "Why customers visit", "Who actually visits", and "What Happens when they visit". I propose to expand the trinity to "How is the Web Site Doing?" and that is why we use performance monitoring. The critical issue not found with Web Analytics is the…
From my background in rock climbing, the hardest part of the climb is called the ‘crux’. It’s the pivotal point in the whole application performance business. Why you ask? Because business people think this way, and so do the web site customers. People don’t think servers and disk drives. When discussing Business Processes, IT can get the business engaged. Now you provide a Business Process, SLM-driven metric dashboard, and you’ve got everyone up the mountain, past the hard parts and on the path to optimal metrics and business nirvana!
The following graphic shows this exactly:
Service Level Management (SLM) is the ability to help organizations monitor application performance against a defined set of objectives agreed to by either internal or external service providers. By proactively managing SLM performance, organizations can:
In my experience supporting Internet facing applications over the past ten years, I have observed organizations of all types (such as commercial, non-profits, education, or government) progress in their discipline to manage their Internet application service for their customers. Certainly economic forces move companies to focus on reducing cost instead of investing in growth, but the leveraging of technology also drives other trends (such as out-sourcing labor, cloud computing and visualization, and software simplicity). This convergence of business and technical market changes also provide the opportunity to strive for optimal integration of management tools, disciplines, and most importantly, metrics.
The Labor day weekend was beckoning and the skies were blue and while the beach was a main draw, something about heading to the mountains won out. Most of my over night adventures were in other places like the West, the Adirondacks, Kenya, and India, so I figured it was time to visit New Hampshires woods.
It was a cloudy day (again) in Scotland. This time in the town of Callander, a quaint but nice town in the gateway to the Trossachs, the first Scottish national park. The B&B we stayed in was the Crags Inn, but not a climber’s place, but the name was right. Tomorrow was all about Glen Coe.
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Ben Nevis has always been an attraction for me. Years of reading about Hammish McInnes and the other Scottish mountaineers and all their escapades on the crag called Ben. I was nearby, so I had to visit…
While on holiday (vacation for you Americans), besides the awesome scenery and mountains, Scotland’s ancient castles are certainly worth the time to visit.
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