Monday 16th March

‎17-03-2009

On Thursday, at the drop of a hat, I decided that we should all pay £1 for the privilege of wearing a hat (did you see what I did there?) to work on Friday. All in aid of Comic Relief of course, with Friday being Red Nose Day and all that. A quick whip-round from the mad hatters raised the princely sum of £110. Now, on one hand I feel pleased that we raised far more than I though we would, with (I have to admit it and say) no planning whatsoever, but on the other a bit guilty; knowing we could've raised much more if I'd thought of something sooner. I'll make up for it on the run-up to Children in Need this year. Get your ideas in now. End of day it is then. Let's see what the crew of the good ship Plusnet have been up to today. Jonathon from the CSC gives us a brief update: Hello from CSC. It's been busy today so I will keep this short. Here's our top 5 of the day:

New Auth faults - Netgear routers seemed to bite the dust at 09:18 this morning
Fault updates - Lots of calls for updates on existing faults
Username/password router setup query - A lot of people seem to not be reading the instructions, and forgetting to put the realm in when they set up
Sales enquiries - Mainly 'market' enquiries
Provisioning update - People are checking when they are going to be set up.

Thanks for reading, much love from the CSC Short but perfectly formed I'm sure you'll agree. Oh let's get the Comms one out of the way shall we? Matt, what silly nonsense have you got for us today? It's so hard to keep coming up with fresh material for these posts, it really is. Let's start with an easy one. Mand unfortunately had to leave early today. We hope you feel better soon, Mand. James is having a long weekend, so was also absent today. As for the rest of this bunch of merry reprobates, well I've picked up a few change controls and problem cleanups along with some other bits of writing, and looked at a fair few problems. Bob and Chris have been sorting out the aftermath of the email issues that we service status'd earlier. Boss man Peter has been eyes deep in Excel spreadsheets (only this morning to be fair - PJ) so we think he's had a fantastic day too, though the lack of meetings did cheer him up a fair bit (true, true). More cartoonage here. 'Night all. Thank goodness, like a diamond in the rough, here's Rys with an update from Development: I've been off for two weeks on holiday, so it's been a pretty interesting first day back, all told. Handover from Rowan, who'd been looking after the day-to-day bits of our project in my absence, went well, and I've been soldiering on with it for the rest of the day. It's been a nice mix of code reviews, catching up on design work and preparing for a roll out at some point this week or next, depending on schedules and testing time. Rowan disappeared at lunch time to pass his driving test, with only four minors. Congratulations, dude! Elsewhere in the department Henry's been on P1 duty all day, so he's probably frazzled at this point, and everyone else is chugging along with their own workstreams. A large chunk of them seem to be doing design work or help for my stuff, though, while I've been off, so big thanks to everyone picking up the project slack as it gets busy. On over to the Web team and Nick provides the update: So, another start of week rolls around and Monday brings the Web Team in quite a perky mood. Andy's come back from a well deserved rest and launched himself straight into a day fuelled by 'a day of ROCK!!!' in Spotify. It seems to have worked a treat for him. Funnily enough I've been listening to Spotify quite a bit too today. I'd say my day was a 'a day of RANDOMNESS!!!' - every now and then typing a random word into the Spotify search field and listening to whatever it comes back with. So that's meant a brain melting combination of rap, ska, chamber music and synth pop country and western for me today. My, randomness is a funny thing! You should try it sometime. Right then, other than giving Spotify a good workout, what have the Web Team guys been doing today? Andy has been doing a spot of problem fixing and building some new training support pages, James has been testing and doing code reviews for an "exciting new project". (He's not letting on to what it is either - curious). Sam's rolled his sleeves up and got stuck into problems and numerous task lists, Kelly's been zipping to and fro on his usual 'Monday Morning catch-up' and Mark's been a very happy chappie...why? He's found his prized Star Wars Stormtrooper T-shirt (which he thought he'd lost) - that's why. Wearing that, along with slurping multiple cups of Yorkshire (naturally) tea has powered him through the day. And me? Well, my day seems to have been filled with writing some shiny new emails and helping out with some testing for various people. The day has flown by; I can hardly believe the working day is nearly over! Ta ta for now. Adey gives us a update from Networks: The team has been working on consolidating an inherited data centre. The streamflows in which it has been executed was in phases, with the penultimate part running over the weekend and concluding today. The final section which basically is the physical shutdown of this data centre has been kicked off. Richard and Michael are engaged in this piece of work down in London, with Kevin project managing it. The new data centre in Sheffield is progressing on, with the network design ratified and timelines for delivery well into schedule. Tickets and internal problems raised have been tackled in terms of priorities over the day. Far too professional-sounding that Adey. Never mind here's Catherine from QA to tip the balance back again: Hello again, and welcome to another in this series of 'Intermittent Updates By QA'. Everyone's okay in the team today, apart from Stephen who's been in the wars a bit lately. We're trying to be nice to him and give him a quiet day (oh you should've said. I'd've come down to torment him cheer him up - PJ). I've been doing some work on one of our problem batches and doing some bits of admin and documentation. Onto the rest of the team. Let's start with the Matts: Matt 1 has been working on creating a test plan for an account change project that's in the works and Matt 2 has been doing his usual sterling job on problems. Gary has been working on documentation as well - taming the documentation for our staging platform and getting it into a state where everyone can understand it. Paul has been working with Rys in dev on our Partner platform once again, and Nigel, Pete and Gavin are all lucky enough to be on holiday! Onto the really important bit: a new online music service! Forget Spotify and maybe even Last.FM - www.songza.com is the new hotness now. It's a searchable, free, music service which plays you the music you search for, but also streams the video from wherever it is, if possible. It's a very simple interface and looks also to have some features such as creating and storing playlists. I used it earlier to play some epic metal while I reviewed a test plan and was very impressed. Ouch! You can stop hitting me now Catherine. To finish off this unusually busy end of day here's new person Jay with an update from Sales: Hi there J here in the very busy, busy sales department with phones almost reaching melting point! As normal the team have been busy making our customers happy and saving them lots of cash. Our new sales team have been attacked by Davina all day long ha ha - encouraging us to promote the advantages of having both Broadband and Homephone together. This has been a massive success with the whole team encouraging customers to transfer their lines across. Tomorrow all sales staff will be armed with their roller skates and plenty of Whoop Whoops! Kev is back with full force and a new mouth after injuring himself (I have no idea, probably best not to ask - PJ), Magdi is off on his hols soon so we wait for our sticks of rock. So.. yeah.. err.. whoop whoops... Well it's certainly all go here at your favourite ISP. And that's been such a long EOD I'm running very late. TTFN PJ