End of Day - 18th September

[#1]

Another week nearly done and I'm here on a Thursday again. I think Colin's trying to confuddle me. The weather's already doing enough of that, it was quite nice out this afternoon. But anyway let's start the rounds and see what we've been up to today. First today is Davina from our Provisioning Team: Howdi All, I've been given the job of reporting what us, the provisioning Team have been up to today. Well we have managed to clear the Home Phone Provisioning pool today which is a massive achievement to say there was over 200 tickets on Monday. So well done us!!!! All the other pools are up to date and under control. Heather is also very excited about her recipe for her Turkish Cheese Rolls that she has found. (Ed: you'll have to being some in Heather) We are all ready for another Provisioning day at PlusNet tomorrow when Mr Ellwood's better half is baking us a cake!! mmm Thanks for reading. Next up is Phil from Marketing: What is that sailing into view? It's a marketing update in a bottle. It reads.... "Spence and Gav are getting their teeth into the banner campaign which has been running for 2 weeks now. We're happy to get a podium finish for the PC Pro awards, with 3rd best overall rating from their readers. Thanks to everyone for voting. Oh yeah, Spence also had his first bagel from the shop round the corner on Phil's advice. He said it was 'hearty'..." Time to hear from Matt from the Comms Team who's already looking forward to tomorrow: Yarr. Jim lad. Bottle o' rum. Splice the poop deck and keelhaul the sails. This is Cap'n Jack Roughknuckles with the comms update, yarr. I be lookin' forward to tomorrow. Today once again Bob has been an angry angry man, mostly writing emails and biting anyone that tries to give him more work, as his metaphorical in-tray is in danger of falling over and crushing him. He's also been posting service statuses and shouting. There's been less of the secret activities today though. Chris has been dealing with the cleanup from a couple of problems and picked up a few others, and has spent the rest of the day swanning majestically between forums and the vending machine for more caffeine and taurine based beverages in practice for tomorrow (not the tomorrow mentioned above, well I mean it is, but it's because it's Friday rather than ITLAPD as he has to do his whole 'Friday Parr' thing). James has been taking a few calls for the CSC but has spent the majority of today working on a number of tasks and also various forums. Finally, I have been eyes deep in problems again with some changes to the way things are being done and also some updates, fixes and comments. I've also been in and around the forums and picked up a few tasks too. Random link to finish off? How could it be anything else - prepare yourself for tomorrow! Cheers for reading, ye swabs. To the brig with ye. Continuing with the piratical theme is the anti-penultimate entry today from Catherine in QA: Well, it saddens me ter think I'll not be here to see what piratical activities me Dev and QA shipmates will be gettin' up ter tomorrow, but I'm glad ter be settin' sail on a mighty quest fer holiday an' relaxation! Today we've been a-continuin' our usual testing type activities: Shipmate Paul has been a-workin' with Senior Shipmate Ben on the hidden bounty o'the products tool. Bosun Nigel has been engaged in his secret pursuits with the crew o' the ship Team Awesome once more (oh no! not a ninja in the midst of all these pirates?) Shipmate Gary has been a-wrestling the ticking crocodile of our testing platforms First Mate Matt 2 kept a dark and terrible secret from us - it's his birthday, so he had a half day to go a questin' for treasure. Possibly. Yer humble author's been a-workin' on all a-those bits o'admin which clog up a pirate's cabin from time ter time, and those land-lubbers Gavin and Matt 1 have not been aboard the good ship QA today. However, we've been ably helped by Cabin Boy Mark from the shores of the CSC. Cheers, matey! A-harrrrrrr! Rys from Development gives us the penultimate entry: The first sunny day in Sheffield in ages has seen Dev trying hard not to stare out of the window and wish it was outside coding in the sun. The fire drill test this afternoon at least let us catch some precious rays, especially since they're some of the last of the summer. I've been bug squashing for my project, mostly looking at static IP address block allocation, and our faults diagnosis journey for the customer. Our API for detecting the activation status of a user's DSL isn't brilliant, so I've been tweaking that too to make it more programmer friendly. Elsewhere in the department Lukasz is making progress on a new line checker to better estimate probably ADSL sync speeds, Ben S has been working on our new alpha integration environment, and the Remote Dev team are about to hand over some project work to the Live Code Support Team, so they can move on to projects new. Lastly, cheers to Rosey for the bacon sarnie this morning! Oh, and I'm supposed to mention International Talk Like A Pirate day tomorrow. It's tomorrow. Talk like a pirate. Arrr. And lastly we have Geoff with the Networks update: As everyone knows we had a problem on the network this morning, after an early morning roll out. Denis and Ade worked well into the day to solve this after having started at 1am. Which goes to prove the commitment and professionalism of our networks department. BV mail integration work progresses. Josh has spent many hours over the past few days in his own time getting the required documentation compiled, and he is now pushing it through. If everything goes to plan we should be able to make real good gains with the project he is heading up. The first MAAF users, which aren't new sign ups, are now authenticating against out radius after Carl swung some of the requests over. Again, with this now looking like it has stabilised after the previous attempts, we stand to gain a great deal by simplifying the platform by having only one authentication system. Ops had another mammoth day. With this mornings network issue, they still had time, some how, to work on investigating network connect times, email quarantine problems, and many other customer issues. Very few people have any ideal how hard these people work, not just dealing with issues, but also documenting and assisting people with projects. That includes all of the netops people who fend off the tickets and make it all possible. Well I'm off to watch Everton v Standard Liege on TV, first step on the way to European glory. I'd encourage everyone to tune in to Five and cheer on the Toffees.