End of Day: 22nd April

‎23-04-2008

So finally after using my kitchen renovations as an excuse for not completing the EOD for over a week, word has got out that I have a more relaxed evening of floor tiling ahead with one of my close friends. As some of you may be aware this kitchen is taking over my life!
Even though a big part of my job at PlusNet is to manage my teams resources on projects, my girlfriend decided that she wished to "Project Manage" the renovations. She's uses a very interesting technique of saying "I don't want to know!" and covering her ears whenever anything goes wrong, I am thinking of recommending this to our project mangers as it seems to work very well for her, and everything is currently on track! 🙂

Anyhow, lets get on with the job in hand...

First up we have Ali from Development:

It was another busy day here in development. I've been working to upgrade our backend applications to provide better services to our customers whereas Matt and Owain are working on a *secret* project.

We had our quarterly rally last week, This is the event when the whole company get together and share what has been happening over the past few months. It was really exciting to know that we are making a very good progress and achieving our targets very well. Congratulations to all those who won the awards.

That's it from me today, see you all next time!!

Giving us another great update from the CSC we have Thomas:

Hardware not being received - various problems with hardware not being issued for new and existing customers.
Fault updates - Users calling in to request updates on faults already logged to BT wholesale.
New faults - Since a few outages over night there have been a an influx of new faults coming in, most cases were resolved on first contact and a few faults raised to 2nd level
Email - Users calling for client configuration help and also support for domain email and configuration required to make this work.
Sales enquiries - Many agents have received sales enquiries from both potential customers and existing customer interested in additional service such as our home phone accounts, most of these calls have been off the back of another enquiry

THIS IS SPARTA! or Chris from Comms with their update, eh?

So what have we been up to today, I'll go around the team and let you know.

James - QoS and training for the sales team, looking into some issues for our .za counterparts and blogging about the charity work currently going on - Link Oh yeah, he's also taken some sales calls personally.

Mand - In between cursing her laptop and dealing with home phone queries, she's been dealing with problems and heading off to multiple meetings.

Bob - Once again Bob didn't reply to my message when I asked what he'd been up to. So once again I'll make it up. Bob has been cross-pollinating multiple varieties of plants in order to produce a ninja flower that can use it's leaves as shuriken.

Chris - I've been busy sending emails, dealing with problems and generally being a point of contact for our CSC queries. I've also managed to close some of my tasks down so they are now at a more manageable level.

James from Web Development updates us on today fun:

Duffy - kicking Colin's backside at pool, eating hobnobs, and getting ready for the service removal

Sam - ate an entire box of Cadbury's cookies with a cup of tea! - also continuing to assist marketing whilst
listening to the Airwolf theme

Dan - has also eaten an entire box of Cadbury's cookies, and has been knee deep in getting to grips with MS-SQL

Kelly, Pete and Jonny - have been dreaming up what to call some PlusNet TV episodes - a current working title
is "Dude, Where's my Help and Support?"

Chris, Wojtek, Grzegorz, Nick and Mark - all full steam ahead on Brightview phase 2 bug fixes and templates

Colin - has been tickering and ticketing, I hope he is defused before he explodes :S

I've been refining some of the functions in the Customer Generated Support Pages plugin and have been looking at
some improvements to the Twitter plugin.

Duncan from Networks has delivered us the following:

I've been working on a particularly annoying problem that has kept me occupied unpicking access control lists, I'll be rolling out the fix first thing tomorrow morning.

Ben's been upgrading a few of our older Debian Linux servers and has started on changes to our DNS management scripts to support a new anti-spam trial solution.

Simon's also been upgrading some of our older servers and taxi-ing Ben around.

Mike P has been working through RMAing some faulty equipment.

Mike G has been working on a new Ellacoya database platform.

Sarah has been monitoring the platform and performing housekeeping duties in addition to diagnosing and fixing problems on our web servers.

Josh has been working on updating parts of the backup platform and has been documenting what he's done.

Russ has been working on Postini.

Aaron and Kev are still working on Parbin support and hostmaster duties, but they've also been learning how to fix common customer problems.

Matt and Dan have been working on tickets, replying to RIPA requests and mentoring Aaron and Kev.

So that's it for today hopefully I haven't made too much of a mess of writing the EOD and bored too many people with the updates on my kitchen. Anyway, in true Jonny fashion I will leave you all with my thoughts for the day (even though I can't lay claim to this one):

"Parrots make great pets. They have more personality than goldfish." Chevy Chase

Sleep well everybody...