Wow, Valentines Day 2008 already. I hope you all remembered to buy the cards, flowers and chocolates needed to keep your significant others happy!

Today has been somewhat predictably ‘love-themed’, with all sorts of competitions and forum threads going on.

So, without further ado, show me the love:

First is Catherine from QA

Apparently we’ve been challenged not to mention a certain ‘b’ word. So, the week’s toil continues with many and varied labours lying ahead of us. Such are the demands upon our time that we’ve scarce a moment to contemplate how much we have to do…..
And on the subject of blocking one method of doing something when there are several very similar to use, I’ve been taking some time out to talk to Tommo about the latest news on plans to make ISPs police their own networks. It seems these plans may not even be legal…
The rest of the team have been doing their usual thang – Gavin has been Mr Gatekeeper today in charge of rollouts, while Paul, Nigel and Gary have been doing the usual mix of problems, project work and admin that forms the base of our workload.
As for the times when we’re not slaving away in the manner of the bee, Gavin admitted today that ‘he’s not that fussy about crisps’, to mass consternation. This upset Gary so much he had to calm his nerves with some Hula Hoops and, as he went to get them, was given a leaflet on Singles Awareness Day. Nice to see it’s not all about those in lurrrrve today

Steve from the CSC next with their update. I’m surprised he didn’t manage to slip in a plug for his band while he was at it…

1. Router Configs… customers setting up routers either for the first time, changing routers etc – If customers were receiving a guide with the routers this would be handy to keep and use when they are messing with the router.
2. E-mail setups/spam – same as above, manage my mail still is a little confusing for some but certainly a decrease on users getting mailboxes mixed up.
3. Sales – Good to see so much healthy interest, usually asking questions about an ideal package. A little tool might be handy identifying from customers use pattern for their ideal package.
4. Fault Issues – usual checks for no sync issues, getting pretty popular with the band (sic) winds, no mso’s noticed.
5. Billing – Customers just generally querying billing on account, main cause being their details have expired and they haven’t got an e-mail, in these cases the users don’t have a contact address on the account or don’t use their Plusnet mail.

Don’t worry Helen from ADD, I like soup day too!

Share the love; its Valentines day and soup day, a double whammy for me because I just loooove soup. Or is that just a girl thing?

Yes there are a few of us females in Dev, and even more now Melanie the new development team manager has joined us, so… it’s not just all geeky boys down here!

I have my head deep in a pile of C.V’s as we are looking for talented PHP developers to join the fun here. I am also chatting to the developers to see how they are getting on with their objectives. Here in PlusNet we put a lot of emphasis on developing people, so we set objectives to help people self achieve and create an even more creative and fun environment for people to work in.

I also have just come back from an Agile Development conference in the big smoke where I learned lots about delivering in a more flexible and transparent way. it’s good to know that PlusNet is already doing much of this. I am now looking into how we can do it even better. So I had better get on with doing that.

I wonder if I can mention that the office is “sustaining lots of activity” especially in the loooveeee department….

Blimey. Moving swiftly onwards now to Al from Networks

Here’s what a very quiet Networks Team has been up to today, once we got our feet off our desks:

Dunc : Housekeeping / monitoring
Russ : Monitoring and monitoring platform resiliency
Denis : Design work for VoIP over VPN
Ady : Working with 3rd party suppliers, tunnel-switching configuration, peer reviews
Ian : Back end server rebuilds and testing
Jason : Permissions system, PCI compliance, penetration test, change control approval
Kev : Review of co-location access lists and documentation of such
Matt : Customer tickets
Rich : Customer tickets, particular emphasis on DNS issues
Mike P : Problem investigation
Mike G : Brightview mail DR site
Si : Brightview mail DR site and backups
Josh : Brightview documentation
Mark H : Problem investigation, documentation, partner reports
Alan : Problem investigation, peer reviews, and MySQL monitoring improvements

Everyone else has done so little, they’re too embarrassed to say!

Till the next time…

I’m not entirely sure I believe him… Chris next from Marketing

Happy Valentines Day folks. Today the marketing team has sent an email to some dial up customers, reviewed the recent BBYW Pro free game promotion, worked on some new landing pages and……drum roll please, re-introduced our referrals bounty promotion – with even more bounty to be had. I just wish they’d let staff get a referral bounty too!

Oh No! Matt’s broken the mojo!

Busy, busy, busy, busy, busy. You wouldn’t believe how busy it’s been here.

I can say that, because even if I don’t it technically won’t be five consecutive days without mentioning how busy we are as we don’t post EODs at the weekend. Therefore it’s not worth trying not to talk about how busy we’ve been until Monday, when we can take a nice long run-up at being idle for five days straight.

In the main we’ve been discussing Be3G’s challenge and have been split up for today – I’ve been at the desk calling high usage customers, Mand has been off training, James has been off with products learning how to break bones with his fingers and Bob has been sat up with networks shouting at spam. Chris has been off sick today, the poor mite – hope he feels better soon.

It seems I’m making these posts too long, so I’ll stop there.

Except for pointing out how incredibly busy we’ve been today, of course.

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This entry was posted by Kelly Dorset on Thursday, February 14th, 2008 at 6:00 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.