End of Day: 11th March
It's Tuesday today and apparently the weather tonight is meant to be worse than yesterday, so I look forward to getting drenched on the way to work tomorrow. Anyway, enough about tomorrow, back to today. Cameron from Development is first up to the 'oche' tonight:
We are all extremely busy at the minute - signup updates, Brightview Phase 2, new task management systems and other new stuff as well as plenty of fixes and improvements to our live code. We're so busy we've even got Rupert joining us from the Web Dev Team - how will Pete's team cope without him and how will his new neighbours cope with his "jokes"? (Ed: Pete says: :''-( ) We also have 2 new starters in dev today - Phil and Ben. They're busy setting up their alpha development boxes at the moment. It can be quite a daunting experience as they have to install the relevant LAMP software first but we're lucky that everyone here's really friendly and ready to lend a hand with any issues or lend a shoulder to cry on after they see our code And thats pretty much it from me, bye!
Next on the Starting Blocks we have Mark from Networks:
Were a bit short on people of the EOD today as the NetDev team have been in a onsite offsite meeting for most of today.
- I have been working on the DSL platform performance, applying drains and planning queue weighting changes, Also looking into network monitoring improvements in general as we have a new NMIS install thats ready for live use. (Ed: I must find out what NMIS is for future references...)
- Rich is 1st line on call and so has been on monitoring all day.
- Rizwan working on security monitoring project work. and LTS juggling in the morning (PN4 outage)
- Russ has been sorting out some monitoring and having a spring clean of his task list
- Dan has been doing Tickets, Abuse. RIPAs'
- Matt has been doing Tickets, Ellacoya profiling problem cleanup work
- Mike P has been making Improvements to our staging platform
- Carl has been starting an ITW server relpacement project and in an offsite onsite (with his laptop and jabber online).
- Sarah has been working on the last minute tasks sent to networks for a rollout tonight.
- Dunc has problems.... sorry is working on problems.
- Adey has been doing work on scaling our DNS platform
Catherine in the traps for QA:
QA have tried three times to write the EOD and have failed as we are too occupied with the hurly-burly of honest toil. See you all tomorrow!
On the blocks for Comms is Bob:
It's been another frivolous, glee filled and overjoyous day on the somewhat sparsely populated Comms desk today. There's only been me and Chris manning the fort (Mand, James & Matt are all off being lazy somewhere) so our in trays have been somewhat fuller than usual. That hasn't deterred us though and we've taken extra special care to ensure there's plenty of work for the rest of the team when they return!Amongst the plethora of change controls, problem updates, forum posting and the like we've also managed to find out the answer to one of life's ultimate perplexities:- "What exactly is the difference between Diet Pepsi and Pepsi Max?" A quick spot of Googling returned some novel answers including: "the answer is, bugger all really. Its just marketing" "Dietdrinks are seen as Girl's or women's drinks, so pepsi in response to this created pepsi MAX." "Diet Pepsi has ginseng in it" "less wierd (sic) back of mouth sweetness" (My favourite) Being smart guys, me and Chris cast doubt on the authenticity of some of the above answers and therefore set out to the vending machine to find out for ourselves. We found one ingredient in my can of Diet Pepsi that wasn't in Chris's Pepsi Max - *Acidity Regulator* - So there you have it! Another mystery solved by the almighty Comms Team!! (Some people say the sweetener in Pepsi Max (aspartame) has been modified to get a more sugary taste. They also say that Pepsi Max has a higher proportion of aspartame and caffeine when compared to Diet Pepsi - We don't believe them though).
So much for fuller inboxes if all they can do is discuss Pepsi! Breaking off, we have Kev from the CSC:
After a very windy day in Sheffield the staff after drying out and fixing their hair were able to keep the longest wait to only 9 minutes. Here are the top 5. 1, Router configuration - New routers mainly, unplugging old ones and plugging new ones in and forgetting to write the settings down from the original hardware. 2, Fault updates - These are logged faults. no real reason just a lot today. 3, New faults for ADSL and phone - This is mainly down to the gales across the country. Causing problems which is not a surprise really. 4, Provisioning updates - New orders requesting activation after BT activating the line early. 5, Sales enquiries - Great news this. New signups over the phone.
Pete's been clearing the hurdles today with the Web Team, having been unwell yesterday and having to deal with a couple of problems:
Putting the world to rights generally; WebDev have been busy fixing problems, looking at PUGit and NADS works, reviewing applications (such as our new 'Workstream' reporting tool), trying to find some way of testing them, working on the Brightview project and attending (Kelly & I anyway) meetings.. phew! What a busy day! We'd also like to issue a very warm welcome to Mundhir who is visiting us from our friends over in the Madasafish support centre in Durban.
and at the finishing post we have Darren from Products:
I’ve spent most of the day working on smaller reporting tasks which have been building up for a while, it felt great finally getting them out of the way. Maria’s been working on network performance management. Dave’s just published his latest blog on Broadband Capacity Planning so have a read and see what you think, he also got one of his previous b...Guardian website.
Phew, that's the last time I have any bright ideas for introducing the EOD snippets, it's taken me ages to come up with some of them! Colin