It's nearly the end of the day and I'm hyper. I'm not entirely sure why. It's not Friday and it's not pay day (quite!). It must be the honour of being tonight's editor 
Or maybe it's just the fact that I'm still alive following yet another near death experience. Or something. Actually, it's probably just the coffee. That's boring. Sorry. We'll kick things of with the Centre of Customer Supportingness. Heerrreee's Brrradders! A fantastic day in the CSC today. Answered 95% of calls On to the Top 5 1, Webmail - due to this morning problems following maintenance to improve the resiliency of our webmail platform. 2, Router setup - calls regarding the set-up of connection equipment. 3, faults - both outstanding and new ADSL faults. Chasing updates even though logged faults are up to date. 4. Email - set-up of email clients. 5, Hardware delays - chasing hardware deliveries. Still getting delays from the 7th although getting less and less. We continue with Catherine from QA: The technical chat of cookie sizes today has been distracting me into thinking of a cookie as big as my head, but aside from that we've been fully occupied but not too hectic today. Myself and Matt 2 have been on problems - him on the quick live tests, me on the ones taking a bit longer. Gavin has been doing his share of the reviews for all these testplans we've been writing, Matt 1 has been testing signup and Nigel has been doing his usual work on data checking. Paul's rollout did go well, so thanks for crossing your fingers - even despite the earthquake! Finally, Gary was in early for some network testing so he went home early too. As a result of a conversation over lunch the other day I've also been educating Colin about Vikings, which I'm sure you'll agree is a vital subject to be fully up to date with. I'm off to the land of the ice and snow now, see you tomorrow! [Ed: Catherine clearly trying to pretend that she's Norse, or Scottish] Simon from Development, ever the optimist: Hi there. I'm writing this at about 06:00, towards the end of my shift today. Paul, Kat and myself were in the office at 01:30 for the second attempt at rolling out the latest project named 'Enhanced Care' (see press releases for specific details). The first attempt was at the same time last Thursday morning. Shortly after the rollout team entered the building we had the power outage at one our data centers which took out the portals and workplace. "These things happen" we thought and headed back home after briefing the on-call manager on the situation. The second rollout date was promptly scheduled for this morning. During the drive in I heard news of the earthquake on the radio with reports saying it was felt everywhere from Newcastle and Norwich. Someone or something really didn't want this rollout to happen... Fortunatly the PlusNet towers were still standing when I arrived and the rollout proceded as planned. A few Red Bulls, a couple of Pot Noodles and a Ginsters pasty later and the rollout is complete. Kat's just about to commit the code changes to head in CVS. Then we'll handover to the day shift before we head home for some sleep. They say bad luck comes in threes, what's next? 😮 Chris from Marketing, apparently ate all the pies. Today we ate some turkey. I also ate some crisps and some fruit pastilles. In between eating things the marketing team has been discussing improvements to the website search function, making the finishing touches to the newsletter and planning some improvements to our business pages. I've also been exploring new ways to promote BBYW Pro in the gaming world and have been wondering what to have for tea. [Ed. Pies, perhaps with cheese. And gravy. Gravy is nice.] Chris from Team Comms now, who had to add a little more to his EoD when he realised that I was editing... As neither James or Mand replied when I asked them what they had been doing today, I'll make it up. Mand has been sat in a darkened room occassionally turning the light on to make sure that the switch works. James has been sat in a brightly lit room occassionally turning the light off to make sure that the switch works. [Ed. Which is strangely appropriate in this room] James has actually been completing the plans for 2008 posting which you should be able to see soon and also placing a number of orders. Mand has been busy in meetings for a fair portion of the day but has also been answering any CSC queries that come her way. I've been splitting my time between the CSC floor and the networks floor. I've also responded to a number of forum posts, been seen in usenet and also been chasing up some problem fixes. Happy Wednesday, see you Thursday. Ben from Networks sayeth: Hello again, Ben here from Networks. Today I've been mostly working on making sure that our records are kept in line with postini and vice versa. Matt and Dan have been working tickets, and Dan's been dealing with abuse and mail management as well. Rick has been looking at ways to thwart sneaky spammers, and looking at traffic management issues. Dunk and Mark were in overnight making our webmail platform more resiliant, which has been in our sites for a while now. We're not done with that yet but one step at a time! Carl's been been working on ellacoya db design, and some documentation. Ade's been looking at loadbalancer configs, and testing third party email products on our staging platform. Josh has been working on Solaris LDOM management automation, and Michael and Sarah have been working their way through problems in our pool. Alex from Finance: Today Kate has been working on payrol (ready for Friday) and banking related issues, Mark J has been looking into the referral bounty reporting, Jamie has been working on the budget, I (Alex) have been closing customer tickets alongside Andrew. It's Wednesday, which is always a nice feeling as we're halfway through the week! ) [Ed. Think you'll find it's actually three-fifths!] PJ has an epic for us from Web Development. [Pete, don't you always say our End of Day posts should be short and to the point?] Another hectic day (see? I didn't say busy did I? It's busier than busy in here in WebDev today). The Flickr link (see right) has had a couple of cosmetic changes but we're happy with it now.. hope you like it too. It's going to have a new YouTube friend join it very soon. James has been working on the YouTube link we want to use. He got all technical on me explaining that he was stripping out the Zend libraries from the code. Colin has been working on XML site maps for the Community site. Dan has been looking at improvements to Manage My Mail to support our Postini Spam solution and Jonathan has been working on making our Business Support numbers appear in the business pages (that'd be useful don't you think?). Rupert has been working on Direct Debits and referrals (he started to explain it to me but my brain started to melt and my eyes glazed over). The upshot is that if you're a referrer we're working on ways to make sure you get paid in a way that's convenient to you. We've been looking at the pile of work we call NADS but what anyone sane would surely find another word for.. small pieces of development work. Looking at our outstanding 'NADs' recently we saw that we'd actually completed (or at least released functional parts of 'agile' style) an awful lot of them over the last 12-months. The remaining NADs that need progressing are under review and this week we're prioritising the list. Of course the topic of conversation has been last night's earthquake. Being a bit of a night bird I was awake to (enjoy wouldn't be the right word) witness the weirdness of having the house move about for a bit. So that's pretty much it from us. I'm off to de-caffeinate. See you all tomorrow!
End of Day: February 27th