End of Day: 13th November

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It's Tuesday, and I'm back as editor for the night... It's been a busy day at PlusNet although at the time of writing (4.30ish) it looks more like 6PM outside. Let's see what updates we have from the various departments tonight. James from the TeaComms Team brings us their update: "It's been tuesdaytastic in the Comms Team today, which can only mean one thing. That's right, it's Tuesday! There have been some concerns noted recently in the feedback to our daily updates that there weren't enough references to tea in last nights Comms end of day. I've also had similar concerns that we haven't been having enough of it! That's changed today though, because TeaBoy Taylor (Matt) is back after his two days off shift and opening up proceedings with a good old brew. Wasn't that nice of him. Today I've been doing my random assortment of handling forums, dealing with my personal tickets and doing some more project work which you'll hopefully hear about tomorrow. I've also been helping to sort out some sign ups for some of our referrers. I didn't make any tea. Matt's back and as already mentioned, he's made the solitary round of tea for the day. He's also been working in various different fora as well as sending out some bulk emails about max upgrades and community site usernames. Mand was only in for half a day today. she claims she had somewhere else better to go to this afternoon and was all dressed up, so clearly she'll be up to bno good tonight! Of course, when she was here she could be seen in our forums as well as handling some Home Phone queries and handling our internal problem processes. She didn't make any tea either. Bob's been in hiding today, probably just so that he can avoid being given abuse for not making any tea. I don't think he's been sat at his desk for more than half an hour solid today with all the various meetings he's been attending. He's been doing his normal tricks of keeping an eye on our email platform. Chris has been hiding up in Networks, writing service status messages where possible. He's also been seen bouncing up and down like a tea crazed lunatic in our forums. Probably because he hasn't made any tea. We'll be back tomorrow for more stories of teatasticness. See you then :)" Nigel brings us a musical update from the QA Team: "Nige here from QA, with the daily update. Matt B is now back after his day off, and has been busy project testing. Matt R, Gary, Catherine, Gavin and myself have all also spent the day project testing, albeit without the same amount of Jelly Belly Beans that we enjoyed yesterday, as they have now all been scoffed ! Paul has once again been hard at work in the problem testing pool, this time to the tunes of Take That (or so I'm told). Steve enjoyed a morning off, recovering from a night out at the local Battle Of The Bands. It seems the older he gets, the longer it takes to recover from things like that ;)" Marc from Development brings us today's End of Day report: "I'm Marc here from dev. For me, today has been spent finishing off the outstanding problems in my work list ready to move onto some project work for the first time. For each piece of code to be released, we have to follow a strict testing / review procedure. The last part of which involves filling in a change control form so the impact of any work, and the adherence to the testing procedure can be audited and signed off before anything is put live. Elsewhere in the department, most of the developers have been hard at work on a major project; the first phase of which is now in Gamma testing. Today we had our daily meeting to discuss any bugs that have been found during testing. This works really well because it allows people with the relevant expertise to chip in with ideas or volunteer to fix the problem. That's the great thing about the PlusNet team - whatever the area, there's always an expert on hand to help out whatever the problem. This helps us move projects on quickly without sacrificing on quality. It's because of this teamwork that our project work is on target to meet the deadline." Rizwan brings us today's Networks EOD: "Hi, I am Rizwan from NetOps, I have been blessed with EOD task today, we have had pretty busy day today from operation perspective. I have been working on testing and preparation for a rollout on our Mail platform, in addition to that I participated in a meeting for a server migration which mainly involved identifying who is doing what etc. Here is what rest of the lot have been up to.... Russ: Building a backup for primary monitoring service. Michael: Supporting developers in test environment. Ben: Installed a testing DNS server. Simon: Review of operational project and Fixing some storage and backup problems Patryk: Working on test database platform. Dunc: Cleaning up monitoring platform i.e. clearing services that are no longer live. Dan: Customer tickets and working abuse queries Matt: Customer tickets Rich: Tickets and mentoring Mark: Working on DSL platform. Mike: Webstorage and backup" James brings us today's Finance update: "It has been another busy day today in finance, so here goes with today's activities. Mark and the failed billing team have been working through their tickets and Jen has been putting suppler invoices on to our system. Kate has been administrating supplier payments and I (James) have been trying to resolve and number of inter-company tasks. We have closed 95 tickets today. And finally .... the finance team are playing CSC A team tonight so good luck to the finance team!" With Marketing's update, we have Chris: "Today in marketing, I've been cracking on with the next newsletter (due out early next week) and putting together a press pack. This involved creating a lovely spreadsheet with A LOT of information on it. We've also been working hard on our upcoming Xmas promotion - designing some new web pages and writing the all important Ts & Cs (Watch this space!) The rest of the day was filled with some work on upcoming press releases and the eating of all day breakfasts!" (Ed: Very nice they were too...) Tommo brings us today's Products EOD: "Busy busy day in products. We've had some visitors in today which have taken up most of Rich (VoIP) and Ian's (ADSL hardware with parental control) days. Darren's attended VoIP interface training, been doing Homephone analysis, processing the latest batch of MaxDSL Upgrades (http://max.plus.net for anyone else that wants an upgrade) and going through a lot of his smaller tasks. Shaun's been working on churn analysis, attended the VoIP workshop and been doing some dashboard tweaks. Me, I've been answering tickets, testing hardware, writing up a best practice for DSL pipe balancing, continuing on the next blog and thinking ahead for the next blog after having two DSL lines in the same building giving completely different throughput speeds and noticeably different sync speeds." PJ brings us the Web Team EOD: "It may be Tuesday but I came in on Sunday and now it's really confusing me.. I keep thinking it's Wednesday. But then I still haven't got used to moving from floor one to two.. I keep walking into Business Support! Plenty of activity here in the web team, a lot of it working on future developments of the website and online support. One 'iron in the fire' is an idea for an 'instant messaging' support trial through the Community Site - our very own James is working on development for this idea.. it's very early in the day on this one but I *really* like the idea of trying real-time support through the website - I'll blog about this in more detail in the near future. Colin's stepped into the breach admirably today when I needed a database table backing up (you lifesaver Col!) and Rupert's been working some more on referrals. He's asked me to tell you that he's working on the way that the referrals system processes referral credits back to the referrer - phew!. I've been prepping some support material for a couple of forthcoming trials (stay tuned to Bob Pullen's announcements for further details). Listening to a bit of Pink Floyd today on the 'pod - 'Animals' and a bit of 'Wish You Were Here'." That's the departmental updates for the day... Enjoy the evening, Colin