End of Day: 17th December

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It's a week before Christmas, and for many of us, either a week off or our last week before a week or more off For our tour of the building today, we're going to start with Mike from Networks: "Hi, Mike here from Networks again. Today has been the usual hectic Monday coupled with everyone selfishly taking vacation, so here's a quick round-up of what people have been working on: - Simon B: Outfitting remote power strips at our Sheffield office for some internal servers, documentation, security work - Matt R: Tickets, mainly traffic management related - Duncan S: Problems with the Wifi service, datacentre space cleanup - Sarah R: Monitoring, Problems, datacentre space cleanup - Ian G: Database scaling, failover testing, security work - Mark L: Network access work, problems with our internal DNS - Carl N: Madasafish network work - Josh B: Backup work - Adey M: Madasafish Network Monitoring, problem management, RMA of some network kit - Rich P: Tickets, fixing a strange homepages NFS issue - Me: IWF documentation, training, handover, monitoring That's all folks! I'm off on vacation til Wednesday now, so I'll leave you in the capable hands of Si Bedford for tomorrow. TTFN, - Gricey" James from Comms brings us this update: "Welcome to the last working week before Christmas hits us! Today I've been working alongside my new starters in the Provisioning Team as well as fielding some questions from our Customer Service Analysts. I've also been working in the forums and looking into some problems that the CSC have been talking to me about, both here and in south Africa! Chris has been working in the forums, handling Network related change controls, writing service status messages and handling some problems. Mand has been in meeting central today, but whenever she's had a moment spare, she's posted in the forums a bit and continued to handle the internal problem process. She's also been dealing with some of her personal tickets. Bob wasn't too amused when he got in the office this morning. We'd decorated his chair, desk, telephone and monitor in tinsel, wrapping paper and various other bits and pieces. His entire chair was actually wrapped up! Once he'd recovered, he started catching up in the forums and usenet after a few days off. Hopefully tomorrow he won't be too mentally scarred. No Teaboy Taylor today, so we're struggling along with only the vending machine to drive our days forward!" Marketing's update comes from Martyn: "I'm writing the EOD today as Chris is up to his eyes in padded envelopes (he's sending out the free games as part of our current Broadband Your Way Pro promotion). I've been writing a couple of emails, one about Broadband Your Way Pro and one about My Referrals, both of which should be sent out this week. Nick and Phil have been busy in numerous meetings and we've welcomed Mark back to the Marketing desk after a few weeks in the CSC. We've also all recovered (just!) from the marketing Christmas night out on Friday." Darren brings us some insight in to the day in Products: "Today we had visitors from BT who gave a very interesting presentation on the 21st Century Network, explaining what it means to us and you the customer. The meeting has pushed us in the right direction on what kind of services we will start to offer in the future. I have been working through all my usual Monday reports and investigating a problem with migration discounts. Shaun has been busy with weekly reporting for PlusNet as well as Madasafish Rich has been working on Madasafish migration troubleshooting and even more troubleshooting (I think he just likes the word) for the VoIP beta on the community site. Now its time to go have some Christmas drinks! (yes I am aware its Monday!) Darren" Travelling Tam brings us the Web Team update today: "Dan's been working on the customer service bits of Workplace to better support the South African agents. Colin's been dashing around working on problems and the community site One Blog project along with Wojtek & Jonny. James has knocked up a neat little app that displays the keywords from our current support database as a tag cloud. Over time this will be extended to include all tagged content such as blog posts, forum posts, videos, tutorials etc. Nick & Mark have been working on P1s & updating support pages. Pete's been managing managerial management things & listening to Led Zeppelin. Sam is building a new skin for My Broadband Speed. And I have been doing a bit of Community stuff and more tidying of the SelectPlus jQuery plugin. I also learned that Bill Hau, Nigel Wood and myself will soon be forming a new team provisionally referred to as The User Experience Ninjas of Ultimate Power." That's all from us today, Colin