First, a song: Is this the real life? Or is this just fantasy? Easy come, easy go, little high, little low. Any way the wind blows, doesn’t really matter… to me.

Now the sherry has worn off it’s time to get back to reality.

So the new year has only just begun and we’re already hitting the ground running at 120mph. Today we start as we left off, continuing head long into our major projects as if the festive period is a distant blur (I guess there’s different levels of blurriness for different people depending on what blur-inducing things they did).

Anyway, our first update comes from Development’s own Cam:

Most people are back in following the Christmas and New Year break and picking up from where they left off from last year, whether that’s projects or problem fixes.

I am currently doing some code reviews for changes to one of our systems (looking good so far Ben!) and also rolled out some updates to our systems that were not able to be rolled while the Christmas change freeze was on (as opposed to the actual freeze which has suddenly hit sunny Sheffield).

There’s continued work on our Madasafish project to complete some post-launch items and in-life support as well as new projects starting to be kicked off. The BAs and Management are busy (well, in meetings  ) planning for our department’s next major project kicking off soon.

So, hope you have a good year, my New Year’s resolution? Check how many files are involved first before agreeing to do a code review!!!

So that’s Development, what have our little dears in Networks been up to? Ian tells us now:

Ian here again. It’s been a while, so let me see if I can remember how this goes…

Well firstly, a happy New Year to all. So, what have we been up to on this first (working) day of 2008?

Starting as we mean to go on, it’s been a busy day in PlusNet Towers.

NetOps have been busy, as always. Mike G and Simon B have been planning some memory replacements in our NetApp kit, which means failover time again for the mail storage. Thankfully, now that we’ve pretty much got the storage sewn up, it should go without a hitch… Famous last words. Ben B has been continuing the new Clamav rollout to the mail cores. Ade has been busy fixing Ellacoya and BV pipe issues. Riz has been playing with the Postini whitelists while Mike P has been continuing his sterling work supporting the Dev and QA guys on our testing platform. Meanwhile, Sarah has been busying herself with the PayAsYouHost platform and DCS, and the rest of the team has been working on platform monitoring, stability, tickets, problems and housekeeping.

Geoff M has been playing with some Sun kit, getting it ready for virtualisation. Mike G, as already mentioned, is Mr NetApp for the day. I, on the other hand, have been busy clearing out admin tasks from 2007, as well as planning deployment of some nice new security software. The rest of the NetDev team have either succumbed to the latest stomach bug to do the rounds, or they’re still off on leave recovering from their seasonal celebrations.

Here’s to a productive 2008.

So a busy day between Networks and Development then, I imagine that’s kept our QA department busy:

Happy New Year from QA! I hope you all had a great holiday and Father Christmas brought you everything you asked for! Not to start a t-shirt theme in this EOD, but he brought me this comic

Since it’s the start of the New Year, let’s have some QA New Year’s Resolutions!
Mine is to really improve the documentation of our processes. There’s a lot of shared knowledge but so far a lot of time is wasted by not sharing that information. Communication is good!

Matt wants to improve the mock services we use for testing billing, phonecalls and so on, as he wants to use Firefox to access the mocks box via SOCKS with locks. Or perhaps he just wants to say that line more often

Matt B’s resolution is to get the team a payrise

Gavin’s resolution is to get the rest of the team some proper training on QA Wizard so he can share the responsibility for it with the rest of the team.

Kelly’s resolution is to spend more time playing guitar. He’s going to have a small raised platform at the end of the desk and will serenade us with gentle ditties when we do well, and with scary metal when we don’t get results.

That’s all, have a good night!!

Scary stuff! Now over to Pete for an insight into the goings on in the Online Production team:

Recovering from too many mince pies and choccy biccies, here’s a quick run-down from the Online Team:

Developers:
Colin: Looking at how we can introduce the means for you to create and edit your very own support pages right here on the Community Site!
Rupert: problem fixing for our Referrals system
Dan: working on a project reporting tool for internal use in our Workplace

Content:
Mark: problem fixing for our Madasafish platform.
Jonathan: working on addressing a content issue highlighted by one of our customers It is clear that our content is not as descriptive as it should be in relation to exactly what happens when usage allowance is fully used up, and before it is topped up. We aim to have this clarified and published tomorrow.

Design:
Wojtek: working on a new template for this very Community website
Grzegorz: Community website development
Sam: problem fixes (sundry)

Myself and Jonny have been mainly planning schedules.

Happy New Year everyone!

P-j

Well, that’s OP, now what about Products? What have they been up to? We’re going through the Square Window now to hear from Damian:

A Happy New Year from everyone here in the Products team. Today we are still minus a few team members who I believe will be back in the office tomorrow, so we will be back at full strength.

Shaun is back and has been working on the internal company dashboard, adhoc reports, signup promos analysis, customer segmentation and generally catching up with work he missed while on holiday.

Dave’s been working on December’s usage data and updating the product design sheets, looking at an issue with BBYW, working on his latest blog, producing PAYG data and producing virus data for December.

Today Ian’s been looking at our rules around email and free accounts, a lot of which are dormant but still active. He’s also been working on a couple of problems and generally catching up after his short break.

I’ve been working on an internal Marketing reporting, investigating Hardware issues and working on my general day to day tasks.

And now to Chris for a peek at Marketing:

Happy New Year everybody. We’re still under strength today as Martyn, Tero and Phil are still off work.

I’ve announced the winner of the Christmas photo competition , worked on some pressroom enquiries and started reviewing last month’s cancellation survey results. We’ve also done some more work on our BBYW journey and starting designing some pages for an upcoming special offer.

So what impact has our work had on our CSC? This from Steve:

Just start with a Happy New Year to all….

This morning has been pretty busy here in the CSC, with everyone returning back to work or from visiting the family over the last couple of weeks.

But everyone’s still in good spirits

THE TOP 5 CALL REASONS ARE:

1. SPAM – This seems to be the most popular lately, unfortunately this time of year is terrible for spam so our postini trial has come at a good time.
2. Sales – Did everyone get a new PC for christmas? Sales seem great, so many hearing good things and asking about our packages for their new laptops/pcs/xbox’s.
3. Router Configurations – Many people simply setting up their routers for the first time or the tenth time needing to check settings and confirm everything is right.
4. Provisioning Updates – So many people moving house and getting switched on for the first time, always reassuring just to give us a quick call and make sure it’s all going through fine and get a specific date.
5. E-mail – The usual checking usernames and passwords and server settings.

We pass it over to Team B for the evening now, good luck guys!

Business Support
Happy Easter   just checking you’re still with us at this stage…

Our Business Support team have all been very busy today dealing with businesses returning after their Christmas and New Year hols, we expect this to continue over the next few days and early next week as more companies return to action.

We have had people call us today checking on their ADSL connections thinking they had faults but simply we had to advise them on rebooting their connections, after ebing away for so long the connection had simply gone stale.

Our tech agents have been busy catching up on faults some businesses have experienced over Christmas so we haven’t had time for any more mince pies which is just as well.

We have also dealt with lots of customers paying their invoices for various services and starting the year off in good stead, I wish I got a commission from them.

Pay-As-You-Host have been busy getting some new domain prices for their customers ready so I would advise you take a look at their great site for more info if one of your New Year Resolutions is a new domain – http://www.payh.co.uk

Happy New Year
James

As for Comms, well, to be honest, I may as well write their EOD for them. “Catching up” was their general update, so we’ll look forward to a rivetting EOD message from them tomorrow when they have caught up

As for my New Year’s resolution? I’m afraid it’s not very original but still meaningful nonetheless: to give up swearing!

Now don’t forget to prepare yourself for the snow tomorrow!

Dan

Bookmark to:

This entry was posted by Dan Kirkland on Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 at 6:13 pm and is tagged with and is posted in the category EOD. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a reply below. Pinging is currently not allowed.