“It’s Friday 14th July 2000 and here is the news:”
Much work is going on behind the scenes in preparation for ADSL.  This exciting new technology is eagerly awaited and will bring high-speed Internet connectivity to the desktop.  More news on this very shortly.”

Whoops! We’ve just stepped back in time there; to one of the original ‘Daily Posts’ that I used to write for our forums, in what now seems like the Stoneage.  This week I came across a stash of them that I’d squirreled away.

From another, a month previously.. “MIS – A very busy day today generally (see Be3G, some things never change).  There are several key features that we are focussing on.  Particular(ly).. the FrontPage and CGI server implementation.  Extra POP3 mailboxes have been undergoing extensive testing.. Mailboxes are now created and fully useable after only 15 minutes!”

Imagine that.

Now let us spin back through time to the present and let’s see what everyone’s been up to today.

It’s Thursday 28th February 2008 and here is the news:

Jeremy, CSC:

A busy, busy Thursday (sorry guys.. look I didn’t put them up to this honest! – Ed) with a lot of calls however call times have been kept low at all times, always below 10 minutes, even during the busiest spots! Top 5 for the CSC am shift is as follows:

1. Setting up customers – new and existing customers struggling to get connected due to configuration issues with routers. Most customers have been having trouble accessing the router configuration pages; once there they connect fine.
2. Faults calls – Customers calling for fault updates and also to report new faults. All the usual faults have been identified although some agents have reported a slight rise in the number of no sync faults than usual.
3. Email configuration and faults- Customers needing help with both email clients and also accessing email via the Webmail facility.
4. Sales calls – Customers calling to either sign up or calling to ask questions with regards to looking to sign up. Questions are generally related to cost of broadband, setup times, and also the home phone service.
5. Username and Password confirmation – General confirmation of username and passwords for customers with regards to accessing email, the portal and accessing the broadband service.

James, Comms:

It’s been a pretty quiet day in Comms today. Mand’s been in North Allerton with Ian, Maria and EFS today to talk about the hardware issues we’ve been having of late. She forgot her cricket bat though, so we’re not too sure how much progress will have been made.

I’ve managed to get my Plans for Year document into final signoff as well as dealing with some Account Management queries. Along with Forums and Development CCs, that’s pretty much taken up my day.

Chris has been bouncing between Networks and CSC, handling Change Controls, forums, problems, Service Statuses and posting in Usenet.

We’ve been a pretty industrious tag-team duo and with that, we bid you adieu.

Seb, Application Development:

It’s not easy these days in development. Lots to do and tight deadlines – as usual.

Everybody is working hard on the new project. Recently we have organized PlusNet Open Days at Leeds University. It was big success in our opinion so I believe we will some fresh developers shortly.  Ben and I are working hard on our Test Driven Development Strategy, and actually me and Kat will try to develop our part of the project using that technology. Wish us luck and till the next time!

Martyn, Marketing:

Today I’ve been trying to squirm out of the craziest Marketing team social event ever. Chris and Phil have decided to enter a 10k run and have been trying to recruit the rest of us. I’m having nothing to do with it, as a 10k run would probably kill me off. What’s wrong with going for a beer after work?!?

Speaking of work, I suppose you want to know what we’ve been up to? Well, we’re launching a new offer next week, so that’s been keeping us occupied as there are a few new pages to design and build. Chris has become our Broadband Your Way Pro champion and he’s been continuing to investigate new ways to promote the product to gamers, while Tim has been building pages again. Phil’s been trying to get Medal of Honour for the Wii added to our traffic management profiles, although I think he actually made the post because he wants to find someone to play with.

Catherine, QA:

In QA today!

- Gavin has shaved off his beard and has not been eaten by space goats – yet. He’s also been working on finding out why QA Wizard is giving errors.

- Gary has been working all day on his test plan for provisioning. He’s also shaved his beard off.

- Paul has been Mr Rollout today, controlling the hordes as they rush to our live codebase.

- Matt 1 has been drinking pop and doing some more testing on signup.

- Don Mattio (Matt 2) has been revelling in his private world of music and helping Nigel with some database checking.

- Nigel himself has been doing the DB checking. He shaved off his beard several years ago.

- I have been eating Garibaldis, avoiding all forms of crypto zoology and doing some more problems from the pool.

I also take no responsibility for exciting QA news which occurs between now and 6pm, as I’ve had to get this in for 4.30!

Duncan, Networks:

Duncan here again, it’s been quite a while since I’ve done this but here goes…

Me, Mike P, Riz, Mark H, Sarah and Rick have all been working on getting our problem numbers down which have been creeping up over the last few days.

Dan and Matt have been mentoring Neil on tickets while he’s still finding his feet. Neil’s also attended the daily operations meeting to get a handle on the management side of things.

Ben’s been finishing up a new mailing list server after we lost one after the power outage (it was one of our few remaining BSD boxes), he’s also been writing SNMP plug-ins for our monitoring server to talk to the Sun disk-packs within the mail platform and code reviewing some RADIUS scripts.

Mark L has been working on importing switches and routers into our new monitoring platform.

All in all it’s been a productive day with a good number of problems either closed or having fixes identified ready for rollout tomorrow.

~~~

Quite a long EOD there wasn’t it?  3 sheets of A4 later..

So, until next time..

P-j

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This entry was posted by Peter Jackson on Thursday, February 28th, 2008 at 6:45 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.