End of Day: 22nd of October

[#1]

It's my regular Wednesday night EOD Editor slot... however it will be last one I do for a while! I'm off on my holidays for 2 weeks next week! *Does a Jig*. While I'm getting pre-holiday giddiness, lets see what everyone else has been up to. Bob from Comms

We've all been pretty darn occupied on the Comms Team today. I've been drafting an email on the recent closure of our wi-fi service, and been knee-deep in documentation on some of the up and coming architectural improvements & enhancements that we'll making to our email platform. Chris and Matt have had their work cut out reacting to today's data-centre outage and the problems we had with the phones over in CSC South Africa. Between them, they've also both managed to keep on top of the usual flow of change control reviews. Mand's been testing some of the content and coding changes for the launch of some new special offers tomorrow as well as making sure the CSC know what to expect. In addition to all of that, we've even managed the odd forum and Usenet post too! As opposed to a random link today, I thought I'd go with a poll. I had a moment of realisation yesterday whilst tapping away at my keyboard that I *never* use the right-hand shift key. Now if I'm completely honest, I've always thought this to be the expected behaviour for a typical right-handed typist. As I thought about it more though, it dawned on me that there are ergonomic reasons for having two shift keys and it's probably how you're 'supposed' to type anyway? I decided to try using the right-hand shift key for certain key combinations and it all started to make sense. Thinking I must have been denying myself the luxery of this key for all these years I glanced up and asked the question of the others around the table... To my surprise I wasn't mocked and jeered. Far from it, turns out I'm not alone because everybody else around the table also neglected to make any use whatsoever of this key (which I must say is remarkably clean compared to the others on my keyboard!). So how's about it. Do you use the right-shift key, the left-shift key or both? Perhaps you've some other novel way of getting your keyboard to output upper case letters? Why not let us know by filling out this poll.

Jake next from the CSC

Good Wednesday afternoon to you all from Jake in the CSC Tech with today's top 5.

1. Fault update – When a customer has a fault, our faults team do endeavour to keep user's up to date via calls and text messages. But sometimes when you're Internet's down you just feel helpless and because you can't follow the ticket status online you need to call in. Completely understandable.
2. Router configuration – When you're setting up a new router for the first time or it's your first time on broadband it's easy to get stuck, and we've as usual had a lot of calls on this today. The main thing is the realm at the end of the username, if you don't know it you don't know it, and for reference it's username@plusdsl.net )
3. Email configuration – Usually part two of setting up your broadband, there's a lot of usernames to remember and variations of said username which need using when first setting it all up, and then there's also the mail servers. Folks need a quick help with these and are almost always well away after that.
4. Sales calls – Always a sign we're doing something right when Sales features in the top 5. We've got loads of exciting things that have happened recently with our Broadband packages and there's a lot of interest. The Essentials option is proving popular with our lighter broadband users and there's a lot of interest in upselling to for Home Phone
5. Order Updates – People twitching to get online, can't blame them, and again when you've not got the Internet you can't follow progress online. A quick check on our BT system and people have an idea of when an order is likely to complete.

That's all from the CSC today, thanks to everyone who's called in and kept us busy - we've just taken our 1300th call of the day, as of 16.23!

QA regular Catherine closes the day. Do you think the rest of her team should help her out with these?

I know we say we're busy too much, but today really has been worthy of the word. A lack of personnel due to illness and rollouts, along with some last minutes checks on a bunch of exciting things we're rolling out tonight, has made for a rather hectic day. Of course, despite our facilities managers best efforts, the air con is still broken so it is still incredibly warm, particularly on pod QA. Ah well, all in a day's work I've been on a couple of projects which need to stay under wraps for now, and fitting in some problems from our Polish colleagues where I can. Gavin has been working on our mail platform and picking up various bits and bobs too. Gary has been...unusually quiet, actually. Although he just started singing the 'It's getting hot in here' song. Hmm. Matt 1 rolled out the changes for our wifi decommissioning changes last night, so he's been at home all day. Alright for some. Nigel and Paul have been efficiently managing the aforementioned last minute checks and fitting in various bits of staging work as well. It's Paul's first overnight roll so wish him luck! We've also been helped by Mark and Mand from upstairs - thanks! Finally Matt 2 has been doing some testing in the middle of his burgeoning mangerial responsibilities and telling us about a ball of kittens he saw somewhere. Awww... STOP PRESS: I've just heard that apparently the aircon will be fixed on Friday!

--- Woot! Working Aircon! Well, that all from us today!