Today is a very special day for me. Not only is it my first-ever stint as EOD Editor, but I've also spent the day not doing my job! You see, I am normally a project manager, but to help out the QA team, I've been doing a spot of testing on one of our in-house tools. And the good news? I didn't blow anything up and most of what I was testing was working very well 
OK. Now for the departmental updates! Firstly we have James in Comms: Today I've been spending a lot of time on our Community Site dealing with our forum users, but I've also been giving a number of Madasafish customers some loving over on the MoneySavingExpert site. Bob's been snowed under with the recent Usenet problem as well as his blog post on ManageMyMail /Postini. Mand has been talking to lots of people about lots of things. She even spoke to me a bit today. She also got me a Double Espresso which tasted like coffee granules. She did her bit on problems too. Matt and Chris have mainly been sending me jabber/MSN pokes about making them cups of tea, which I suitably ignored Now it's over to Alex in CSC: Afternoon everyone. Its been a busy day in the CSC today with a large volume of calls from 11am which continued for the following few hours. Things have slowed down now and we're back to normal service again. 1. Modem/Router setup. Mainly new PlusNet customers who need help to configure their broadband hardware. 2. Email client setup. This is a common one since you have to have a number of settings correct to make sure it all works. Most of these were just correcting slightly incorrect settings. 3. Fault Updates. People calling to check the progress of their on going fault investigations or calling to update our faults agents with more information. 4. Username and password confirmation. Easy to forget and easy for us to confirm back to customers. 5. Domain issues. These can be tricky to setup as for customers new to domains a lot of the configuration will be totally new. Again as with email client configuration all the information can be found on our support pages and is fairly easy to resolve. OK... Gricey from Networks has gone all smart on me... # Hi there, it's Gricey with today's Networks EOD. # I'm off to London later today as part of one of my projects so I wrote this EOD at 1530 - should give you some idea of today's activities 🙂 # Today's EOD is brought to you in YAML format! It's my favourite serialisation format. Delicious. AaronB: - Manned the Parbin pumps Whilst Awesome wagged it. - Spent about an hour trying to find a farking include with a bug on JTN. AdeM: - Backup Network setup - Staging work for Ellacoya - Documentation BenB: - Helped Sarah with her ongoing mission of learning perl - Updated the portal etc builds to not mount the slave web stats servers - Helped Steve Smith with an XFB issue DanDangerP: - Tickets - Abuse mailbox - several Core Database changes DenisA: - Design work for BV Load balancers Migration project GeoffM: - Manage my mail work # IanW Joins us on a temporary basis. Say hello to Ian! IanW: - RIPE allocations - Monitoring platform slave acls - PN acclimatization JohnR: - Reports - DB Monitoring LeeOD: - Data centre work - Postini - SMS project review - Objectives MarkH: - Standardising DB Configs MattR: - ITW work - Tickets - Port requests CC MikeP: - Housekeeping - Monitoring NeilM: - PARBIN Documentation - a few hostmaster tickets RickP: - Working to resolve Usenet issues - Improving our anti-spam configuration RizwanS: - Working BT Ordering system - Writing scripts for package and software monitoring on servers RussM: - Monitoring improvements SarahR: - Writing a CBC housekeeping script - Exim config changes for smarthosting mail on some servers SimonB: - Data Centre Planning - Staging Improvements - Server housekeeping # The following offenders did not reply to my rallying EoD cry and will be shot at dawn. Say goodbye to these guys [Crikey, that'll leave a gaping hole... I hope we have some contingency! - Ed]: Offenders: - AlanL (to be fair I think he went home) - CarlN - IanG - JasonA - JohnP (to be fair I think he went home) - KevinL - MarkL # That's all from me for this week. # Until next time, # Gricey. Now it's James in Web Development with his update: As I write this EOD post, Colin and myself are trying to figure out why the air con never quite seems to get it right. Anyway... I asked Duffy this afternoon what he had been up to today and he said simply said ‘spycatching' (the process of catching spies). While attending to these duties of state he also worked on the Manage My Mail app. Andrew has been working on problems. Sam has been refreshing the design of some of the pages on the portal. Dan has been working on Postini and he will be coming in at 2am tomorrow morning for a live rollout. Tam has been chasing a bug in the Meeting Manager app ala Wile E. Coyote, and has been reviewing the new spam control panel in Manage My Mail. Wojtek and Grzegorz have both been beavering away on Brightview phase 2 templates. Nick has been eating multiple curiously strong mints whilst working on email templates and a new billing guide. Mark has been working on Brightview Phase 2 support pages, whilst having the excellent sax riff in the song ‘Baker Street' firmly going round in his head. Chris has been smoothing the edges of the sign-up pages. He also beat me at pool... again... and just the black ball in it as well! Oh well. Colin has been pestering QA and has been doing something secretive. I've been working on converting Twitter to use a cache file system and I have been pushing out Jonny's new Community Site footer. Oh and loosing at pool. Kelly has been at the Sheffield Wednesday ground all afternoon filming content for PlusNet TV. Pete has been managing Brightview emails, VOIP trials and other stuff. Until the next time... James. Short and sweet with Chris from Marketing: A sunny day here in Sheffield and we've celebrated by toiling away on an upcoming minisite. I've finished the first draft of the newsletter and hope to send it out tomorrow. I've also spent a large amount of time putting GAME vouchers into envelopes for you lucky people (you know who you are!). We've spent the rest of the day writing some other emails and working on the marketing team 'process flows'. Exciting stuff I'm sure you'll agree. Owain in Development has the following for your delight and delectation: Most of the development department are focused on finishing off the current phase of the Brightview development and carrying out integration testing in preparation for the QA team being let loose on it shortly... Several developers have been supporting the MAAF user migration process - which is extremely close to being complete - so a big 'well done' to the guys involved in that. The java team has been working on various platform upgrades for the JBoss software on the core back-end servers which will hopefully be out of the door shortly. We're also in the process of putting the finishing touches on a prototype <secret project>... more details to follow. That's it for today. I want to know what Owain's <secret project> is all about (if you do too, you best come back soon to find out)! Anyway, I'm off to start work on my latest task from my manager, Karen. Is it a slick new piece of web development I hear you cry? No, not likely, it's a... pub quiz?!!!!! We're having a Development team off-site next week and this will help make the day fun. We WILL have fun. TTFN!
End of Day: 2nd April