End of Day: 23rd of July

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Crikey. When the weather report was talking about a really hot Wednesday, I was expecting blue skies and sunshine, not a nasty grey, humid and sweltering day. Oh well, at least we have air con! Our EOD updates follow.... Catherine from QA

An industrious day for QA as we all quietly beavered away on our respective projects. Paul has been working on our testing queue which, I may add, was recently reduced from 90 right down to a puny 2! Those tasks keep coming though so he's been being helped by Matt 1, who's been filling in any spare moments with some more work on the Partner project. Nigel is taking a well earned rest after his hard work on migrating accounts and is on holiday all week. Gary has been revelling in the joy of his new haircut and playing with things that go beep whilst working with QA Wizard, ably assisted by Gavin, who is working on a tool to make our (and hopefully, in a sort of chain of events type thing, your) lives easier. Finally, after I got through my daily swarm of meetings, Matt 2 and I have been working on Plan 9 From Outer Space, which is our latest super secret plan for awesomeness and sparkles. All will be revealed soon, dear readers... All this work was helped by Matt 2 telling us about his magical flipflop. He only has the one, but when he puts it on, he can move anywhere with absolutely no friction, but he only has to just *think* about stopping to stop! I think a photo is necessary.

A rather taciturn Carl from Networks

Below is what we have been up to in Networks - Net Ops - tickets, abuse mailbox, RIPA's, Virus reporting for mxcores, misc ops tasks, parbin, RIPE admin, problem investigation Net Development - MPLS VPN commissioning, Data Center planning, RADIUS changes to support BT Teleworker, 1 down due to sickness, Crytopcard rollout

Development next

Hi everyone, it's Ben here from the Development floor. I've been working hard (as always) today working on our php scripts which automate our communications with BT for when we actually place the orders for your broadband. I've been altering them so that they will work for our next big project round the corner as they'll have to handle multiple types of customers. Working in the same team as me we have Rys, who today has been writing the API's that will allow our Workplace to talk with our Ellacoya system which will also be changing as part of our project. To make up the rest of the team we have Arun and Hijas, both all the way from India! Me and Rys are so happy to have they guys here, we don't know what we'd do without them, they are saving our precious rear-ends with all the hard work they are doing to help us with our project. As for the rest of the department, the Live Code Support team have been supporting some database operational tasks, as well as the usual bug fixes. We have a team working on bugs from the Brightview 2 project - 1 bug fix has rolled live today, with many more in testing. We have multiple projects hitting the testing phase, so I'm sure you'll be hearing about those when they're ready for their live drops. Seb has written some unit tests for our Framework test runner (so he's testing our tests now - this man is unit test crazy!) Kat has been improving her tests for the promotion code project she's working on - before Seb our crazy unit testing machine runs them through his set of tests. And finally, we like to do our bit for the environment here on the dev floor, we recycle our (many, many, many) cans of coke. All our plastic bottles from bottles of energy drinks - or my favourite chocolate milk are put in the recycling bins. But there's one area we fall short on, and that's the amount of electricity we use on the floor, we could switch off all our monitors, but I don't think that would be very productive, but now a means is available to reduce our electricity costs by switching off machines overnight and powering them up remotely using Wake-on-LAN. It's kinda cool (no pun intended). It all counts!

Amy provides the Marketing update

While Spencer has been sunning it up in the wonderful Greece, us lot at PlusNet towers have been working mighty hard. Shailini and Phil are down in London today for various meetings so it's been a small team today. Martyn, Brian and our new guy Gavin have been working on new versions of the sales pages all day today - exciting stuff! Chris has been running round today sorting out various things, the most noticeable coming back into the office with a GIANT cheque to hand over to Sheffield Childrens Hospital following the money PlusNet has raised for hem - we are determined to get someone from the team to dress up in the bear suit (it wont be me!) I have been catching up on all the meetings I had in London yesterday, and also dodging the flying ants that seem to have invaded outside the office! This caused much amusement from the people driving past who couldn't work out what everyone was jumping around for! That's all for today.

Matt in Comms with the penultimate update

What have we been doing? Well aside from Mr Parr, who has been sat at home with his feet up (literally... the poor sausage hurt his ankle at football on Monday night) Bob, James and I have been investigating, testing and generally sorting out problems. There have also been some meetings, some jabber conversations, some agent support and probably a fair bit of forummage (I think that might be my new favourite word - how well does that work? If you don't rummage through threads and posts on a forum, what exactly are you doing?) and I've no doubt other things that haven't been communicated to me in order that it can be put in this end of day note, but that's the way the cookie melts, sinks and forms a tasty sludge at the bottom of your cup of tea. Here's Bill Bailey showing you the wonders of Cockney Rock.

And last up is PJ, our favourite roaming portal pirate who is on holiday in the CSC for a couple of days

I've been in the CSC today just to soak up the atmosphere and quietly get on with my work on my laptop. Since I'm here I might as well report in for the CSC. There's about 30 people in the CSC as I type - here's a flavour of the CSC today.. Over on BOT (Broadband Operations Team) they tell me about their busy day working mainly on Home Phone provisioning and House Moves. They do look a bit tired bless 'em, but they're here 'til 9 tonight on their new later shift pattern. Laura tells me that she and Heather met Gordon Ramsay last night at the Runaway Girl in Sheffield (filming a new 'Kitchen Nightmares') which I bet was fabulous. I suspect much amusement was had. Over on Faults Tony tells me about the major problem we've had with submitting faults to BT. We believe that the the problem was resolved earlier today. But this has resulted in a couple of delayed 'updates' for us - meaning delayed updates for some customers whose broadband faults have been escalated. Richard, an escalations agent (i.e. he's an experienced fella) working a mixed bag of letter and tickets. He's often called on to advise our new staff such as Lee who's on his second day. (I hope I was of some help to you earlier Lee!). Matt in Comms has had his head firmly stuck into problems all day. James says he's been looking at tickets, problems, forums, South Africa, training and ADSL2 (seems like he's been busy). Bob's saying very little.. typing away with a look of concentration on his face. I'll leave him to it. We also say a tearful 'ta ta' to Stephanie who's leaving our fair city to move to Reading. We wish her all the very best for the future. Thanks Steph for all the enthusiasm and hard work you've put in.

-- Right. I'm done for the day! Time to go rock climbing!