Good evening to you all! A fairly uneventful day today here in Manchester (I was working from home) except that I had an unexpected delivery! Now, are you sitting down somewhere, so as to not fall over in shock? Yes, today, what with it being October the whatever-th, my… outdoor furniture arrived! So now I can have all my friends over. For a barbecue. In October. In the wind and rain. I mean, I only ordered it in July!!

OK enough ranting. If the financial markets carry on as they do, I may need to set the furniture on fire to keep warm. Now then, here’s the latest, hot-off-the-press news from Plusnet Towers…

Firstly, here’s our Michael with an update from Dev… He seems to have a bee in his bonnet, which is quite funny seeing as his full name is Michael Rose…

Design & Projects Team – update from the Business Analyst element. Really busy on our team at the moment running around helping the business clarify and validate changes and requirements. Here’s a snippet regarding a forthcoming project that’s in build within our development teams:

It’s called Epitiro Phase 1. Not E-P-I-R-I-T-O, but E-P-I-T-I-R-O. A couple of bods here have been struggling with the annunciation/pronunciation. So what’s this project all about then?

It’s quite simple: an independent organisation (Epitiro) run a number of tests on broadband lines provided by us here at Plusnet. There is nothing special about these broadband connections; they appear to us as regular customer broadband lines. Epitiro share the data of those tests with us and we’ll be placing that data in the form of graphs with commentary on our portal for all our customers to see. At some point in the near future you can look forward to viewing the performance graphs on a rolling 1 day, 2 day and 7 day view for: Connection Speed, HTTP and Ping.

That’s all for now folks, we’ll report on another project soon.

Mike’s also put on his draft copy: ‘Trim it down if you need to.’. I could make another rose reference but he really WILL kill me.

Next up we have another Mike – this time from Networks:

Hi everyone. Here’s a quick rundown of what I’ve been working on for the last week or two.

First of all we’ve been consolidating some space in one of our datacentres – this is part of an overall drive to make things more efficient and eliminate waste. A few people here have been planning away and pulling overnighters and it’s nice to see some progress.

Second I’ve been working on getting our Linux distribution working on some very shiny new hardware. I’m having a mare to be honest – the price you pay for cutting edge, I guess. Hopefully I’ll be making more progress on this and I’ll be able to write an article about it.

I’ll be down in London next week with Mike from Ops to do some more of that datacentre consolidation work. It will involve a move of some of the netapp storage we have down there, so preparation is the watchword!

Anyway, that’s all from me, we should have some more updates for you soon.

TTFN,

Gricey.

Thanks Mike. The datacentre work that he’s talking about is super-important, so I look forward to him providing you with his next instalment soon

Up next we’ve the CSC and Adheel:

Hey peeps here’s the end of day from the faults team!

It’s been a busy day in our team – we have had 4 people off so the rest of us have had to work that little bit harder, which is always good as it makes the day go quicker – as well as getting faults fixed quicker!

The day began with Brad and Tony coming in at 08.00 and assigning roles for the day. They check which fault types have or require an update from our suppliers, so that our customers are updated as soon as possible and the fault progressed without delay.

This is good as it ensures that when the rest of the team comes in we are in a good position to see which fault types need looking at more urgently.

Myself and James (we are currently both on secondments onto the faults team) came in at 09.00 and worked on these faults.

Tony has been dealing with Home Phone faults mainly, chasing these up with BT and booking appointments where possible!

Brad has been doing CSC faults. These are the faults being tested and checked before we raise them to the supplier. This ensures the faults are tested immediately and we can see if there are any glaringly obvious faults with a line (such as a dead phone line or network outage).

Myself and James continued to work on the tickets assigned to us before we came in (forward planning!) and Richard, Alex and Andy, who have come in throughout the day, have been working different types of faults such as speed, intermittent connectivity or authentication problems.

So, all in all a very productive day and lots of faults being resolved before the weekend for our customers!

Excellent update – thanks Adheel.

Today’s final update is from Matt in Comms:

One man down again… Bob was having his teeth attacked by one of the dental persuasion today. Poor soul. I wonder if that makes him as angry as being at work apparently does?

Chris has been picking up problems today, he’s been a busy bunny to be fair what with that and forums and network change controls et cetera. He has mostly been listening to Punk – Goldfinger and Less than Jake, I think. If I’m wrong no doubt I’ll be corrected.

Mand has been in meetings, has also helped out with problems, and has been writing best practices. She has also been listening to Queen, very loudly. [Ed: I will speak to Mand and make sure that she is OK tomorrow].

I have been in meetings most of the day, have helped out with our ‘Plusnetter of the Month’ decision and have also been writing. My music of choice has generally been Jedi Mind Tricks.

Random link? Click here! This is how Douglas Adams made his tea. And as Douglas Adams modelled Arthur Dent (that paragon of Englishness) mostly on himself, it’s obviously how every red or blue-blooded Englishman should be having their tea too.

Thanks Matt

I am off to make a brew! That’s all for today – until next time…

Ali McGowan

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This entry was posted by AliMcGowan on Thursday, October 9th, 2008 at 5:59 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.