It’s the End of Day… a little later than planned as I was helping one of my colleagues roll a P1 Problem Fix to live. Well, that made it an ‘exciting’ end to the week, anyway. Lets see what my colleagues have been up to …

Firstly, Jonny from the Web Design team would like me to publicise his lunchtime creation which is highly amusing… unless you are one of the stars

Barbara from HR provides us with an End of Week:

”

• Amanda ran a values workshop to underpin the business strategy. She also spent time designing an offsite meeting for Neil and Carole; to create departmental objectives for the next 12 months.
• Diane was heavily involved in recruitment and interviews for the Networks roles. Our PHP roles were also re-advertised.
• Gemma has been involved in recruitment for our commercial analyst role. Together with Diane she has been writing the Managers guide to Induction, and “boxing off” the actual process. She has also been involved in organising our workshops for potential graduate developers at Leeds University on 25th February.
• It’s Nicola’s last day today, so HR will be giving her a send off this afternoon after our lunch time visit to a local tavern, for a very nice meal!

“

Ben from Development updates us:

“If you are a regular reader of the Plusnet community site EOD’s you will probably have heard developers talking/complaining about an ‘alpha box’. The alpha box is a strange beast. What looks like a standard desktop computer sitting under the desk of every developer in the department (albeit, often with an awful lot more screen space than you would typically be used to) actually contains almost all of Plusnets codebase… But the ‘in development’ version…

The alpha box typically redefines the meaning of the word ‘broken’.

Today, I have been bringing the test cases for the Sms project that’s been developed overseas up to date. Full code coverage of a good set of tests always make dealing with issues that arise later (usually after the code has gone live) much easier to deal with.

Robert has had the third set of enhancements for meeting manager delivered and has been busy merging them in to our live code ready for rollout next week.

Rowan managed to break tradition and rebooted his alpha box with no problems after it had come back up! Impressive achievement! He’s been reviewing code for the new Partner portal for much of the day…

It’s all been fairly quiet from over in India. They have been pretty much cut off from the outside world due to a submarine dropping an anchor on one of the main cables that form the internet backbone out there… Whatever next? (Ed: Ooops… although I did think this was a ‘leaves on the line’ type excuse initially!)

Oh well, have a good weekend all!”

Jason from Networks got ‘nominated’ for the EOD today…

“Well it’s been a productive week this week in the networks department. (as well as busy)

First of all congratulations to Ade who we have learned today has been selected after interview to move over into network development from network operations. Ade always works hard and will be an asset to net dev.

So having done the rounds around the department a run down of what’s been going on..

Administration work on the mail platform has been a focus for Ben this week. Keeping the platform stable by doing all those ‘housekeeping’ jobs and working on automating them. Ade has been working on getting access to certain systems for our South African CSC and collecting stats from our Ellacoya platform. Denis has been working tirelessly to migrate some
of our older firewall infrastructure on to new shiny hardware as well as getting some extra resiliency into the firewall infrastructure.

Over in Net Dev (with help from Net Ops) our new backup platform is being built and deployed. This platform utilises the NetApp vFiler technology which isolates and virtualises storage. Using this technology we can back up multiple platforms securely into different places, while still utilising the data protection features that NetApp software generally offers - things like point-in-time recovery, volume resizing, off-site mirroring, and so on. All good stuff…”

Of course, what Jason neglected to mention, was that Lee has also published a Blog post today on the Networks Roadmap - so even the managers have been up to something.

Brad from the CSC brings us their top 5:

“It may be most people’s last day of work for the week but it’s our team’s first day of the shift pattern so think of us at the weekend!

Top 5 reasons for calling us today:

1. Email Setup - Customers calling to setup their email programs or to log into Webmail

2. New Faults - Seen a rise in new faults being raised. Could be down to this lovely weather we have been experiencing.

3. Chasing Faults - We are getting calls from customers who are anxious (understandably) to find out why their fault is not fixed yet. So we update them on the current situation.

4. Router Setup - Calls from customers who would like help to configure their new routers.

5. Provisioning Updates - Customers asking for information on House Moves, new Provides and any Delayed Orders.

Have a good weekend folks!”

Catherine from QA:

“There’ve been no updates from QA lately because I’ve been away after the rollout of the referrals refunds project and clearly none of the rest of my lot love you enough to write an EOD

My project rolled smoothly in the wee small hours of Thursday morning (coming to work that early meant I missed the rain!) and, because of the timing, the requisite scripts have already run (they run once a month). Those of you who refer will now be seeing tickets on your accounts saying your payments will now be made by BACS straight into your account rather than all those pesky cheques. This is a great piece of work which many customers have been asking for and it also lessens the load on our Finance Team who now no longer have to process all the physical cheques. Great work all round! (Ed: I’m sure the poor person who had to sign them is happy… and the customers will be too!)

That’s enough from me, what have the others been up to?

Gary nearly fell off his chair when he found out that the vending machine has crispy bacon Wheat Crunchies. I’m not sure if they were good for him, though, ’cause now he’s started singing the Ghostbusters theme tune. Matt R was in geek heaven with some shiny new hardware so he can set up a development box. Paul has been continuing with his project and listening to some tunes as usual. Matt Buckley’s been on the problems as well, but freed from his usual duties of gatekeeper, and finally Nigel’s
been working on Madasafish again. Have a great weekend everyone and wrap up warm!”

And finally, Phil from Marketing brings us an update:

Today is the end of the week! Hurrah! A good time to roundup this week, no?

* Today the newsletter for January has been sent (yes I know it’s now Feb). If you’re said ‘yes’ to us sending you emails your copy will be with you over the weekend. If not, you can opt in here - http://www.plus.net/go.html/mailpreferences/
* Webuser has published a story about PlusNet being the best price broadband - thanks guys
* We’re making good progress behind the scenes on our minisite. It’s broadband related and due out in February - but that’s all I can say for now…

…and finally, Spence and Chris have been locking horns when predicting the winner of this weekend’s match. Their both fervent supporters but of the opposite teams. Have a good one!”

Crikey, that’s us in to February all ready… now I just need to enjoy my weekend, and hope that the right team wins in the afore-mentioned football match.

Colin

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This entry was posted by Colin Ogilvie on Friday, February 1st, 2008 at 8:18 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 response, or trackback from your own site.