It’s been a long day today, been in since 7am for a couple of rollouts, had intended to leave on time… if not early, oh well best laid plans as they say. Good job I hadn’t really planned on doing anything, and the later I leave it the quieter the traffic will be.
I hadn’t actually intended to be editor today, but James seems to have roped me in to doing it. He has though said he’ll be editor tomorrow.
So it’s a good job James has written a contribution, here’s what Comms have been doing today:
ANOTHER sunny day in Sheffield (which also means I may die of heat exhaustion in the bus again). I’ve been working on forums aswell as some project stuff that you’ll hear about before tooooo long.
Matt and Chris have been working on Easy setup again and Matt went into town at lunchtime to buy some Solero’s, which were awesome.
Mand’s off celebrating her birthday today and tomorrow but new and improved Healthy Bob claims to have been busy. We don’t believe him though if for nothing but to make him more angry!
And that’s all for today. Semi-final day at Wimbledon tomorrow and we’re expecting another busy afternoon on the network (which means I can get away with watching the match).
Have fun everyone and look out for James tomorrow…
Wow. Today has been beautiful up in Sheffield. Quite a scorcher! I’m fairly sure that this is going to be mentioned in all the EOD posts today. Lets see shall we?
First up, James from Comms
Wooo! It’s an absolute scorcher here! We keep on looking outside longingly. Amazingly though, for the second day in a row, our air con unit is keeping us lovely and cool as we battle our way through the day.
Matt and Chris have been continuing their work to configure some routers for customers who have opted in to the Easy setup trial. Bob has been looking angry and decidedly sweaty when we got in this morning after yet another of his “Healthy Bob” sessions in the gym. After that, he just looked angry.
Mand’s been working on her usual dose of problems and going to a bunch of meetings. Then there’s me, spending my day pottering about in our forums and handling a couple of complaints. That and watching the amount of iPlayer traffic on our network SOAR as Andy Murray came onto Centre Court. Andy’s (our Andy, not the tennis player) run away on holiday (nice timing Andy!) and Mike’s been hiding somewhere - I think I’ve only seen him once today.
I’m off to find a beer garden. C’mon Murray!
Yeah! Told you so! I bet it continues….
Rys from Development
I’m working on the tail end of some code for our reseller portal, adding a new feature that some recent new customers need. Development has really dragged on after some problems integrating back-end and front-end code (each written by a different team), and it’s not quite finished yet. But, there’s a bright side actually, which I’ve realised as I come to the end of development.
The development experience, while testing from a sanity point of view, has taught me a hell of a lot. The issues encountered doing multi-site development, from the design to the sharp end of getting it delivered, mean the next time I come across a project that smells similar in intent, I’ll be well equipped to help steer it in the proper direction.
Every cloud has a silver lining. Anyway, among all that recently we’ve had a fair bit of action on our alpha and revision control projects, improvements to vISP portals and myriad other things (some really quite exciting, but that I can’t talk about yet I think). Oh, and we had a desk move, so we’re all in new teams and seats again.
Oh. Perhaps the next one…
El Marky from the Web Team
¡Hola! from El Marky, reporting on behalf of the web development team from the air-conditioned bowls of PlusNet’s development hacienda. I’ve been working on problem fixes and tweaking web pages and email templates for a number or projects. I asked the rest of the team what they’d been doing today, here’s what they said -Nick “Well, apart from trying to work out whether one of the voicemail adverts on Spotify is Ali asking for “more Beatles” (I kid you not - listen out for it, dead ringer), I’ve been working on Problems, and mainly sorting out things for the BSP. (Ed. That’s Big Secret Project)”
Phil “You can say I’ve been working on signup improvements”. (Ed. I will Phil.)
Gary “I’ve been building new web template files which will hopefully plug effortlessly into the new code being written by the dev team.”
(Ed. I note that Gary’s exceptional cardboard sculpture has been mistaken for a pile of discarded boxes, and has been cleared away. Art will never be the same again, though the office will be a little bit tidier.)
Sam, the team’s bona fide artist, has spent the day drawing. Surprising nobody.
Team leader, Jonny, has been rushing around doing ‘management’. This week he’s introduced a new mantra ‘keep calm and carry on’. Sage words indeed
The web team’s new mascot is Juan-Pablo Wrestito, the renown Mexican silicone rubber wrist rest and web usability expert, he’s been searching the web for interesting news, or in his words ‘Web Noticias Excepcionalas’.
Here’s what he found -
There’s a new version of Firefox, and you can watch its real-time download statsThere’s a new way to ‘google’, using Microsoft’s Bing search engine. Try it here oh erm, I mean here
The Sony Walkman is 30 today. Happy Birthday Mr Walkman
Uh oh.. this is a break from the norm..
Finally, Ian from the Business Support Team
Today has been relatively busy throughout, no major service issues or problems though which is always a good thing. Unfortunately no spare time to sit watching the Wimbledon online as it seems the majority of our customer base have!
Martin and Adam have done a sterling job ensuring all faults are up to date, be they newly raised issues which need initial diagnostics completing, or long standing faults which need discussing with BT Wholesale prior to engineer visits taking place.
Mark and Phil have been dealing primarily with Plusnet Partner accounts ensuring that all queries raised are picked up and dealt with promptly and efficiently (as is the Plusnet way) such that Partners can provide a good service to their own customers. Anyone interested in becoming a Plusnet Partner or reseller might be interested in having a look at http://www.plus.net/partners/
The rest of the team, that’s me, Oliver, John and Joe have been picking up all other issues, ranging from provisioning of new accounts through to account changes and billing issues, along with any technical issues and faults which are thrown our way.
Most of the team have already left for the day or will be leaving shortly, John and myself are the lucky two staying till 8pm tonight to help out any late working business customers who may need to contact us.
1/4 on the weather reports! That wasn’t very good! 
Right, why are you reading this when you could be outside having a BBQ?! Hop to it!
Do we have a new tennis hero? I think we have a new British hero!
Andy Murray today beat Juan Carlos Ferrero in straight sets to reach the Wimbledon semi-finals. And in what is now becoming the norm the British public went straight to the Internet to watch the live coverage. At the peak we saw 1.81Gbps (making up over 25% of our network capacity) of iPlayer traffic this afternoon beating the previous high set on Monday for Andy’s fourth round game of 1.66Gbps (which we also assume will include quite a few people catching up on Top Gear and Glastonbury).
Only just over 2 weeks ago our previous high was 953Mbps which was set back during the Olympics but we’ve seen that figure beaten by Top Gear, the breaking of the Michael Jackson news and several times now by the tennis.
Certainly makes for fun times when managing a broadband network, I have a legitimate reason for watching the tennis, got to make sure it works for everyone else haven’t I?
Join the country around the TV screens, monitors and radios on Friday for the semi-final. Will we see iPlayer traffic reach 2Gbps?
Hello Readers!
I’m posting from home (and a bit later than usual) today, which means I can do something that’s almost unheard of in Plusnet EOD history - yes PRAISE THE AIR CON!
I’ve been at my desk for most of the day (tying up loose ends as I’m off work until a week on monday :D) and even though I’ve been wearing a hoodie all day (hood down or course ;)) I’ve not felt anything like warm, just comfortable.
But then I stepped through the office doors, it was like walking into a wall of fire - yikes! I’m now sat slowly cooking at home… never mind on with the EOD!
First we have Adheel from the Faults team, who is keeping quiet about his beloved Blades for some reason!
Good evening all, here is the faults end of day!
Its been a busy day and although the sun has been hiding , its been swelteringly humid in the office. I also missed the ice cream van as I was in a meeting so I’m not impressed
On a plus note, lots of work has been done today, which should stand us in good stead for what is set to be a busy week. Our 3 secondee’s are on their last shift on the team and are pretty adamant they have learnt plenty in the month they have been on the team.
I’ll be testing them next week so we will see if that’s true or not. My learning stick (a 2×4 under my desk) will be close at hand should they fail to get 100% on al the modules. Just joking lads! :-p
The next batch of secondee’s start tomorrow so I’m sure we will get a end of day from one (if not all) of them to advise on how they are finding it on the faults team some time over the next few weeks.
The team has dealt swiftly with a variety of fault tickets today.
Myself, Alex and Jake have been dealing with new faults. These are the ones that go through manual testing before raising to BT.
Rich (who beat me 3-0 at pool today and I no longer consider a friend) has been dealing with PSTN (voice) faults. This involves running a test on the copper line part of the telephone line to find any specific faults. This can then be raised for further investigation or the customer contacted for further internal checks to be tried just to rule out all equipment.
The other chaps who came in dribs and drabs throughout the day include Rich U and Jon (who along with Jake bid farewell to our team today), Brad (who has been entertaining us with his anecdotes from over the weekend) and Tony and Keith (who made a killer brew for the team as soon as he came in this morning.) Simon our team leader has been recovering from last nights game of football in which he was on the winning team and I wasn’t.
Ah well, revenge shall be mine next week!
Have a good evening!
Adheel was sat no more than 10m away from me today, strange how he had such a different experience.
Next (and finally) we have Matt B from QA…
And a very good evening from QA. Here we go with a quick run round the team.
Catherine has been working on getting problem fixes rolled out live, interspersed with drinking tea (Lady Grey) and joining in with the usual conversation around the kettle.
Gary has been working on our Partner product and has been relatively quiet all day. I’m assuming this is indicative of some hard work being done…
Gavin has been creating a test plan for the upcoming move to our new datacentre. Yes, it is as fascinating as it sounds!
Paul has been reviewing all open problems to see which can be fixed within future projects. Integrating problem fixes into project work can save a lot of man hours that are then free for more dev work so it’s really useful.
Peter has been testing some work on our usage recording systems and also testing some priority problems.
Nigel has been testing some new marketing promotions as well as planning the testing of some future promotions.
Finally I have been the general dogsbody today. Picking up random testing tasks and making some team scheduling changes, as well as writing this EOD for you lovely people
Thanks Matt!
That’s it from me today - I’ll see you in a week and a bit!
We are pleased to announce that we have activated another 155Mbps segment of central bandwidth. Customers connecting to this new segment will access the Internet through the gateway known as pcl-ag01.
We’ve activated this extra capacity in line with the current budget and our projected growth in customer numbers.
When new capacity is added to the network, it takes time for the network to balance and for a representative proportion of the customer base to connect to the new segment. In order to speed up this process we might need to briefly disconnect some broadband customers from the Internet.
If we decide to do this then we’ll announce further details as a planned maintenance notice nearer the time.
Hello readers!
A short and sweet EOD today, with just the one entry from James who’s a TSM (Technical Shift Manager) in the CSC.
Well within the CSC our TSMs have been pretty much back to normal today.
In recent weeks we have had Simon, our faults manager, along with James K, our business support manager, working with our colleagues in SA so we have had other TSMs such as myself covering for them. So whilst I have been covering the business team in recent weeks Im back to my traditional desk today looking after our CS and Prov teams in Sheffield.
Our Operations manager, Nick, has also returned to the UK too having been in SA for months and months and months. Its good to have him back with us, especially as its another person I can beat at golf as my victory yesterday afternoon proved.
So things here seem a little more normal and Im sure our teams are loving having their normal leaders back too, well grudingly they might admit that.
Cheers James!
Thanks for reading all!
The end of another week at Plusnet and I’m pulling double duty this week.
It’s been a week where a lot has happened, we were saddened last night to learn about the death of Michael Jackson. When news like that starts to break the world increasingly turns towards the Internet. Google initially thought they were under attack from people searching for the same thing, while Twitter and other sites crashed from the volume of hits.
The BBC saw a spike in hits on their news pages and began streaming the BBC News channel direct from the front page. We saw a 50% increase in iPlayer traffic (the live streaming TV is identified as iPlayer as it uses the same technology) at 11pm last night. There’s also been a small increase in YouTube and Streaming traffic today possibly from people watching/listening to Michael Jackson videos and songs.
Our thoughts at this time are with Michael’s family.
On a happier note we would like to welcome two new Plusnetters to the fold with birth of baby Oscar on Wednesday and baby Alexander this morning. Congratulations go out to Luke and Caroline, and Anthony and Helen, both mothers and babies are doing well.
We have only one submission today for the End of Day and it’s from James from the Comms and Training Team:
Today, our recently expanded team have been musing on the meaning of life, along with commenting on the weather and its hourly fluctuations. We also welcomed Mand back after a brief absence, but sadly lost Matt to the [insert name here] illness.
I’ve been looking after our forums and pretending to know how to use telnet. Mike, fortunately has been sat to my right poking me and trying to show me the error of my ways (Bradders says hi too). Mand has been looking after Home Phone and Chris has been sat in his chair looking smug (and decidedly not busy). Andy has been doing “content related stuff” and Bob has looked angry.
And that’s all, time to go home. Take care everyone and be careful, there’s a heatwave coming.
Be careful what you wish for. That’s what they say isn’t it? I was hoping for some great, insightful content but thought I had none and was about to sneak off home, but now look.. in the nick of time I have lots to edit. So out with the savage pencil then and let’s see what’s happening around the old place..
Here’s WebDev Nick with an update from the friendly folk in the basement
Mark says “You might be old enough to remember amazing feats of plate spinning, back in the days when Paul Daniels was the standard-bearer of BBC light entertainment. Well, it feels like the Web Dev team are doing one of those feats right now. For my part I’ve dropped two plates today, a couple of minor website problems. I spent most of the day doing project tweaks. Tomorrow might be calmer, boss man Jonny is away so maybe we’ll put the spinning plates back into the kitchen and hire a bouncy castle…”
Indeed. I bagsy first jump though! What else has happened apart from the plate spinning? Oh yes, Sam’s made a very welcome return to the WebDev desk, after being tucked away upstairs with the Marketing bods for the last few weeks.
Today he’s been on a ‘Secret Squirrel’ fact finding mission. He said he could tell me what it was…but he’d have to kill me. (However, I’ve used my cunning detective skills to work out that he’s been very busy today designing stuff). Er, well…it is his job.
Gary (Mr. Cole Trickle) has also been building some nice new pages and thinking about buying a rather smart ‘Rocket Man’ t-shirt. Get it bought, Gary.
Phil’s been staring at his screen all day. In fact, as I type this he’s still staring at his screen in a very intense way. Code does very funny things to him. Good things though.
Duffy’s had lots of meetings today hammered out some new copy and eaten an ‘ice cream oyster’. I never knew they existed, but it did look nice.
And onto little old me. Well, I’ve been in ‘help’ mode today. Helping Marketing with a bit of copywriting and helping out with a bit of testing and bug-fixing for the boys down on our floor. I like to do my bit where I can. Good karma and all that.
Hope you’ve got a sunny evening where you are. Bye for now.
Kev from the customer options team
We’ve all been busy today assisting customers onto the best packages and helping our new customers sign up to our services. We’ve had some assistance today from across the building with Damien, Kimberley and Rob joining us from their respective departments.
Edmund, Laura and I have been focusing on ticket responses from customers contacting us online regarding their accounts whilst Paul, Magdi and Adam have been assisting our Sales department who we work very closely with.
Darren has been keeping an eye on us and ensuring that all of our call wait times are as low so we can assist our customers as fast as possible.
That’s all from me, time to go enjoy what’s left of the good weather.
And lastly it’s a Comms EOD but with a difference. Here’s ‘new boy’ Andy
Hello!
I’ve moved Teams! I now sit with the Comms team up in the CSC.
Life is a bit different to how it was down in the Dev Dungeon. Up here there’s a clear and profound love for caffeinated beverages as well as an angry man we call Bob.
So what have we been up to?
I’ve mainly been putting the finishing touches to the new setup guide we’ll be shipping with our routers as of… erm soon! I’ve also began making updates to our support pages based on YOUR feedback (that’s you reader *points*). If you use our support articles you can rate them with the smiley faces at the bottom of each page. If there’s anything that needs changing I’ll pick it up.
But enough rambling from me…
James: Looking at (and getting cross with) Wordpress, handling the forums and some complaints and some highly exciting meetings. And drinking coffee. Caramel Macchiato is lush.
Mike: Finalizing BPR module 2, setting up direct dial to internal voice mail. Mystery Shop call, QOS , Feedback on QOS, # key on mac, QOS Benchmark (gold star dear reader if any of that makes sense to you - Ed).
Chris: project work, CSC support and a meeting thrown in for good measure.
Yes there’s another new name in there too, Mike can introduce himself another day.
Toodle pi……..
Oh, before I forget… Commic
Great stuff. Thanks everyone who contributed to today’s EOD.
On the back of Dave Tomlinson’s recent news that iPlayer traffic for last Sunday’s ‘Top Gear’ has smashed our previous network record for video streaming a particular programme, we present a bit of fun. Here’s ‘Jeremy’ with tonight’s TopStream.
see also : Who is The Stig?
Good evening Campers! I hope the day has been productive and entertaining for you all.
First up is Catherine from QA
137 characters, Twitter stylee….
A small team today, with focus on problems and project work. There was joy at lunchtime pizza, and we’ve rolled 8 things to live. Hurrah!
and next is… oh, Catherine again!
or as a haiku…
Gavin, Cat, Nige, Matt
Problems, projects and admin
Joy! Lunchtime pizza!
I like the Haiku 
Next is Jake from the CSC
Hey,
Wednesday afternoon. Ace. And I’m off on Friday too.
The CSC have seen some big spikes in calls today, but as ever have been well on top of everything and have done a sterling job answering calls.I’ve been in meetings and training most of the afternoon and am approaching the end of my faults secondment, which has been invaluable.
Over to Paul C who’s wrote today’s top 5:
- Router Setup – The most popular call with quite a few folks connecting on the default router login. Roll on the new “Easy Setup” routers, which should help with connecting and some fault diagnostics, exciting times!
- Intermittent Faults - Most common fault by far but seem to mainly be noticed when the speeds drop as a result. We’re looking at the way faults are raised and actioned and there’s a few new interactions on the drawing board.
- Speed Queries - Quite a few customers calling experiencing slower browsing and downloads. A fair few seem to be down to some of the maintenance reported last week.
- Fault Updates - Lots of new faults are inevitably leading to more calls for updates. The 2 way sms update system seems to be getting a fair bit of praise though so this is really being pushed.
- Prov Updates/Queries - Always common calls but seems to be a rise today with a number of agents raising this. Generally it’s always a good sign so no complaints.
Bye for now.
and finally, Arun from one of our off shore programming teams out in India
Here we go!
It has been a good and bad day for the remote team in India. The weather has driving us mad today with some really high temperatures. It’s windy and humid too!
The team skipped lunch, but had a fantastic dinner together instead!Anees - digging the deep roots of Plusnet’s Domain System.
Mithun - in rivalry with PHPUnitTests.
Jinesh - started on with an email problem.
Shiraz - back to a Webmail problem, at present chasing the Business Analysts back in the UK for some help.Myself, I was mostly trying to fix my vpn issues. Still not working!! I’ve also spent some time investigating a ticket pool problem with one of our major partners.
Right! That’s it from the good ship Plusnet.
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