End of Day and End of Week, can't fault Fridays. Still got about 2 hours to go before I can go home and then the weekend to look forward to. Although knowing me I'll be checking in with work even though I'm off. Up first today we have Barbara from HR: A sked questions to everyone for views on our free staff lunches. M arsden (Jen) on her hols to scenic (and hopefully sunny) Wales. E mail – launched the Central email for the HR team R eviews of performance – still coming in but not at 100% yet. I nducted Shailini our new Head of Marketing. C iphr Rollout – going well! A manda on her hols to Devon for lashings of ginger beer and scones (and a rest). Next up Mand from the Comms Team: Afternoon all, Today the Comms team is back to full strength, with Bob returning from his summer hols with a jealousy-inducing tan, and stories of major alcohol consumption. 
I've also returned after a couple of days off, so it's been mostly catching up for us two today. We've also been dealing with the usual round of problems and meetings. Chris has been doing nothing overly exciting, or so he tells me, so I'll save you from the boredom there. James has been dealing with a couple of complaints, helping the sales team and doing some testing for a project we started recently. He also managed to pass 10,000 posts on our forums, so well done James! (Ed: Taken you long enough :)) Matt has been at Doncaster Dome getting ready for the LAN party we're sponsoring there this weekend, but we reckon this is the sum of his achievements today: LAN Party Stats Have a good weekend, and we hope to see some of you at the LAN party. James is going to tell us the goings on in Web Development: Nick - partner programme improvements and fixes the odd problem here and there Mark - Brightview phase 2 problem fixes The GMan - designing for the portal Jonny - MyAccount user testing Kelly - playing with KPI's all and day and missing meetings (Kelly passes his apologies onto Lee) Pete - being bossy Duffy - referral emails and data crunching Andrew - looking at the domain system Sam - user testing MyAccount and adding styling to Andrew's tidying Dan - building a Quality Of Service tool for CSC Rupert - MyAccount dev I've been doing some dev the smart search bar for the up and coming Customer Generated Support Pages and getting the PlusNetter of the Month application to the ready-to-roll to live stage. Martyn's going to tell us what Marketing have been doing: The marketing team have been focusing on numbers, numbers and more numbers today. I've been looking into the impact of our SEM campaign and the rest of the team have been assessing performance in each of their individual areas. We've also been working on more new concepts for the PlusNet sales pages, and preparation for the LAN party has continued at pace. Catherine's checking in next with the QA End of Day: Ah, Friday at last! Another week passes in QA and we look back on what we've been doing. I shall ask the team for the (work based) highlight of their week So... Gavin's high point was getting a gigabyte of memory for his dev box, despite only asking for half of that. Rugmini enjoyed working on the new product tool. Matt 2 is glad that he's been able to use this week for a big push on problems. Babitha is pleased that her testing on the new problems tool is going well. Nigel's high spot was only having worked one hour overtime this week Matt 1 enjoyed using Skype for the first time in a teleconference. He says it was very clear and really impressive. Catherine enjoyed being introduced to Trac, a new system of tracking bugs. I was really impressed by the way all the features you'd need are included in one application (which also tells you about our current tracking app!) Paul is (presumably) happy about having gone on holiday on Thursday 🙂 Have a good weekend and enjoy any sun we get. Over now to Rys from Development: Hello, Rys here in Dev. I'm today's Development End Of Day Panda. Apparently "EOD Monkey" was offensive. See below. It's been a long week for me, dunno about you guys. I think it's the change of scenery that's done it, since I moved desks Friday last week. To cheer myself up, today I ordered a Killer Coding Ninja Monkeys (see, panda wasn't necessary) t-shirt, and I finally got the 3G mobile internet connection I've been clamouring for, so I can code outside in the glorious Sheffield sunshine. Top tip: if you're using a Huawei E170 under Ubuntu Hardy, blacklist the airprime module, since it'll try to load it for the E170 by default. HSDPA then becomes your friend. There's not much to report, departmentally. We're slowing turning the boat around in terms of process and developing a hell of a lot smarter, but it's taking time. We chip away at the problem. Have a good weekend, and happy independence day American dudes! Jason's got a rundown of what the networks team have been doing this week: Hello from the networks team. Well what have we all been up to this week on the top floor of PlusNet towers Lee and Kevin have been putting some effort into the Data centre consolidation project. The business justification is almost complete. Once this is done we will be able to finalise costs and make the decisions necessary to allow PlusNet to maintain its services further into the future. Ian has been working on a new project “shareband” which is now in Beta. This allows the aggregation of multiple ADSL lines for the more data intensive business customers Geoff has been putting the hours in on our Cryptocard project. This will tighten security up further on our servers as it provides one time password authentication.. this kind of work keeps me happy ! Other work and projects that net dev have been working on this week includes - Peering clean up, MySql upgrades, Load Balancer replacements, MPLS connections and lots of other behind the scenes magic that helps our customers get the best broadband experience possible. Now if you think the net dev guys are busy you should see our net ops team! They are smoking hot, and no that’s not due to the unseasonably warm weather we have had over the past 2 days (MMMmmmmm) IT Support have helped roll out the new shiny HR system and the network support guys have hammered away at the ticket pool. All this while our resident Aussie has been upgrading our Opsview system. This is an important piece of infrastructure as it monitors all our platforms and allows us to take pro active measures to keep things running smoooooooooooooth. And me, well I have managed to rewrite the information security induction presentation and I have been working on building the labs for Hacklab#2. Hacklabs is a hands on training program that I have put together to help our staff understand the multiple cyber attack vectors that are out there in cyberspace. Well hope you all have a great weekend…… bye for now. Lastly for today we've got Darren from Products: Another week zoomed by and I think I've looked at more spreadsheets then I care to think about, I've been working on a new report for marketing and closing lots of outstanding tasks. Rich has been working on Product special offers, Ian’s been catching up after his holiday, as well as documenting new product rules and Luke’s been working on making our KPI reporting more efficient. Well that's it for another week, enjoy the Doctor Who finale on Saturday, or as many seem to do from the big spike in streaming catch up on Sunday evening via iPlayer. Back to the spreadsheets for me now and tidying up the next blog (hopefully out early next week). Take care and have fun.
End of Day: 4th July