End of Day: 20th December

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I've been thinking today (after we've had Christmas songs on the Plasmas' in the office all day) about Christmas songs... What songs relating to Christmas do you like - be it Carol or general song? Please respond to the EOD or why not visit the forum and let us know. I'm usually known for having weird taste in music but for some reason, I like Mike Oldfield's Un Dulce Jublio and Jona Lewie's Stop the Calvary... not very christmassy but for some reason I just like them. Anyway, on with the EOD. Ali, one of the Development Project Managers, brings us the update from Development today: "Hello from the crazy world of development!! Right now we are SuperBusy resolving issues before Christmas on the Madasafish project. Things are going swimmingly (did you see what I did there? Did you? Did you?!! **GETS COAT**) but everyone's also looking forward to the Christmas break! (And I think everyone in Dev may be secretly looking forward to our early finish today, with free beer included. Just a hunch!) Now then. A bit of an update about me since my last End of Day. I've just finished my 13-week probation and as I was still able to access the building on Monday morning I can only assume that I have passed. Either that or Desktop Support forgot to erase my fingerprints. I must say it's been a very hectic but exciting three months... I've had a fantastic time... you really should come and work here! I've worked on six projects and already had three of those roll out live - it's great to see people's hard work and dedication come to fruition so quickly. I am also still managing a number of remote development projects in India, including a new portal, an update to one of our messaging systems and separate projects to further enhance our in-house productivity software. 2008 is going to be BUSY!!!!! Right. I'm off shortly to join my Dev Amigos at the pub for some festive cheer... have a great Christmas, folks! " Doesn't Ali seem happy... and that was before the festive cheer! Mike brings us the CSC update again: "Calls Offered: 949 Calls Answered: 811 Longest wait: 23.14 CAR: 85% TOP FIVE 1.Router Configurations - mostly Voyager 210 config. This is due to customers normally setting the modem up phsically OK but not logging on to router interface and adding username and password. 2.Spam - quite an upsurge in the number of users reporting increases in spam. Many of these users still have catch-all enabled. 3.Email/mailbox setups - mostly new users and people who haven't got around to configuring their mail clients yet. 4.Fault updates - general calls chasing fault progress, tend to be the ones which have been running for over 1 week. 5.Username/password verification - quite a few missing @plusdsl.net from routers/modems. Cheers for reading" Products have an update from Darren: "It’s very quiet in Products today, most of the team are on leave or working from home. Ian has been busy with suppliers and presenting the Product roadmap to a director. Rich has been working on outstanding issues for MAAF, he’s also been working on various tickets and VoIP forum support. I’ve had a very busy afternoon forecasting for homephone, I’ve processed this weeks Max upgrades, prep for workload takeover for people’s Christmas leave and working on MAAF affiliate reporting. " Mand brings us the Comms Update: "There's a bit of a theme in Comms today, as James, Chris and Matt have all advised that they have been responding to customer queries in the forums and writing a blog post (not the same one though fortunately ;)). Matt has been carrying on with his monster faults blog post, whilst James has just about finished his even wordier 'What we did in 2007' post. Chris posted an update to our Postini trial. They also found time to answer CSC questions, hang around the forums and 'persuade' Bob to wear a Christmassy hat for the day. I've been helping out some new starters with Home Phone ordering, and answering general questions. I've also been working on internal problems, and writing some training material. Bob's been wearing a silly hat (Ed: Link), dealing with network change controls and problems and helping out our CSC colleagues." Marketing bring us an update via Chris: "Today in marketing we've been putting the finishing touches to the Christmas newsletter that'll hopefully be hitting your inboxes tomorrow. We've been doing some user testing on the new BBYW journey and continuing work on our new minisite. We also got some champagne and chocolates from our lovely boss and have become slightly addicted to the Skiing Santa game from today's festive blog.(and I'm the best :))" The tea batton seems to have been passed to Ben in Networks: "Ben here again, not done this for a bit. We've been busy as ever today; I've been working on making it easier to add users to our postini trial and making minor changes to the apache logging on some of our servers to sort out a webstats inconsistancy problem. Josh has been working on our backup solutions, and Bedders, Rich, and Dunk have been working in one of our datacentres to prepare for moving our staging platform into new shiny racks. Mark's been working on making our network even more secure, and Matt and Dan have been beavering away on tickets. Ade's been helping with one of our cron servers, and Sarah's been working on miscelaneous problems. And finally, Michael's been monitoring the platform. As well as his security work, Mark's been putting off making tea for most of the afternoon! " In the Web team Mark has been working on creating some new supporting docuementation, Nick's been working on problems while the designers have been building some new site designs for a couple of our websites. While I've been supporting the content writers with rollouts, rolling out some other fixes and also writing a blog post (not this one, another one!) which should be published tomorrow. TTFN, Colin