End of Day: 2nd May 2008

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A third of the year is gone already, this week has now finished... and next week is a short week with the Monday Bank Holiday (Hand's up who's forgotten?) so as well as there being reduced staffing at PlusNet Towers, there'll also be no End of Day on Monday. Mike from Development who was quick off the mark with:

Hello everybody, my name's Dr Mike... (Everyone: Hi, Dr Mike) Yeah, ok, so I'm not a doctor really, just a code monkey with a blood caffeine level way beyond the legal limit. This week myself and Paul M have been working on the Brightview migration code for Phase 2 which is going swimmingly. As a random point of interest I can tell you that variable variables can be used to access static class members in PHP. I went to go and ask the rest of the devs what they'd been up to so I could post some juicy tidbits but all I managed to extract was "Signup bug squashing" from Ben W, "Brushing up on call processing" from Steve S and "Working on the never ending project, a.k.a smallest project in the world, a.k.a Account Finder" from Henry. Nice. /me slaps /plusnet/developers/* with a trout for being non-descript. Anyway, thats all from dev. Tune in on Tuesday for the next exciting episode.

Adheel from the CSC brings us the next update:

Hello Peeps, Really busy in the CSC today just gone over 1,000 calls at the time of writing, and everyone talking about the awards dinner last night (for those lucky enough to have gone!) The Top 5 for today are as follows: 1) Mail Client/ Webmail Accounts - Mainly new users, customers setting up their email accounts slightly incorrectly, and calling in to confirm settings. The set-up guides in our help and support are extremely clear, but a lot of customers don't know about these, and some also state they prefer speaking to an agent which is fair enough! 2) Router set-up - Not only new customers, but customers reconfiguring their routers are calling in asking for advice on setting up their devices, and talking through general settings and confirming the realm required for connection. 3) Fault chasing - Mainly No Sync and Intermittent, no determined pattern, and most of these faults (especially No Sync) that have been already logged and just requiring a update, or calls being returned where SMS/Voicemail left. 4) Account Type Changes - Seen especially on tickets dropping into the CSC pool but also a increase of these queries on calls, more customers realising the new packages are offering a competitive deal that will help establish us in the market further, especially as our support is the best and now our products will hopefully get us more nationally recognised! finally... 5) Fault Diagnostics - Again mainly No Sync and Intermittent fault types, users calling as sync status is being lost, and needing to be advised of master socket/hardware/alternative equipment checks, and a few call backs after these being checked but the issue continuing. And finally good luck to all football fans over the weekend, lots of big games, and of course being a Blade (boo-hiss!) I hope we manage to nick a playoff place. Anyone going to Hillsborough on Sunday, good luck too! 🙂

Marketing Martyn updates us with:

It's been quite a week here in the marketing department with all the excitement of the increased usage allowances. This was a big project for us, with web pages needing to be designed, emails needing to be written and journalists needing to be briefed. It all seems to have gone well so we're as happy as Larry (whoever Larry is). Today we've been working on the newsletter, a blog about our new usage minisite and also planning for some changes to the homepage. We've also been looking out of the window and hoping the fine weather will hold up for the bank holiday weekend, although I suspect that some team members will be playing the new Grand Theft Auto all weekend, so the weather won't matter to them!

Tea MakerBob from Comms:

Bob from Comms here. Only been three of us manning the Comms desk today (Well 2 and a half really cause Matt didn't get in 'til this afternoon). Chris has been working on an up and coming content filtering solution called Aladdin, whilst Matt has been covering all things Development related in Mand's absence. James has been away with the Sales Team. Me? Well aside from networks change controls and forum coverage, I've actually learnt a few things today. I must pay more attention to the emails I receive, I must remember to lock my laptop, and I should never put it past my immediate work colleagues to seize every possible opportunity to play a prank on me. We've been a little low on the ground today, so I thought I'd take advantage of this and offer to make the tea (that means it's not my turn the next time you see). I was of course putting this laborious task off as long as humanly possible so told Chris I wouldn't make tea until the B3ta newsletter arrived. For those that don't know this normally lands late in the afternoon. When it did land, I kept to my word and scuttled off to make said beverages. When I came back though my laptop was unlocked (I've been caught by this in the past!). Surprisingly though, none of the classic pranks had been played on me so I wondered what everybody was smirking at... I then took a second look at the B3ta newsletter - http://www.binarybob.plus.com/beta_newsletter.PNG (Ed: Very amusing :)) Apart from being subject to yet more Comms Team tomfoolery, I've been laughing at everybody's hangovers following last night's uSwitch awards celebrations. (which sadly I was unable to attend). Oh, I also learnt that Googling for "Google" does *not* break the Internet. Have a good weekend all.

Lee from Networks:

Lee from Networks here. This week's been a very busy week, we've been able to roll out a new Oracle database cluster which gives us full resilience for our traffic management and usage platform. It's very whizzy with all the latest Oracle cluster technologies. One thing we've also been able to fix as a result is the usage processing which will now update much faster. Apart from that, it's been the usual project support, problems and keeping things running smoothly. Looking forward to a nice long bank holiday!

I'm looking forward to a relaxing, wet (I'm Scottish, and it's a Bank Holiday - guaranteed rain!), Bank Holiday weekend, and watching Sheffield Wednesday play on Sunday... hope everyone enjoys the long weekend. Colin