Week #5. Can you believe it? In some ways it seems much longer and yet in others it feels like the 5 weeks have flown by.
As I have alluded to in these updates, things have still been moving at a hectic pace here, so perhaps being busy is the key to making the time pass quicker? How have you all been finding it? Not noticing the time passing or feeling each hour?
Whatever the case, I hope that you and your families are staying safe and well and remembering to look after your mental & physical health alongside getting everything done.
So, what has week #5 been like here? Well, have you ever started a week with a clear to-do list and plan, only to have it knocked out of the park by something outside of your control? That was my week, a lot to do and very little of it accomplished thanks to a fault on our internet circuit which had some interesting impacts on our remote access. Of course, no fault found when we logged a ticket, it just magically disappeared after 24 hours and a series of emails detailing in plain text and pictures the fault that “did not exist” 😊
In past times, an outage such as the one we experienced would have meant a full stop to work until it was resolved, however thanks to our cloud services the outage only really affected a small % of our ability to work. That said, it has given me food for thought in terms of single points of failure and how best we can resolve them moving forward.
In other news, we have been continuing our rollout of Commvault which is going great and I am enjoying working with the product again. Outside of that, all other teams our busy with software releases continuing and the sales team flat out. Collaboration has continued to be strong with PowerBI still proving a useful tool. We saw another 16-18% increase in MS Teams usage alone! Unfortunately, I was unable to try and understand our Slack stats this week but maybe next week.
Security remains a high priority and this week again we’ve seen a further increase in the number of phishing attempts being caught in our filters (over a 20% increase on last week). How are you all faring on that front? The recent vulnerability found in the default mail app for Apple iOS has also been an interesting one to read about. If you have not heard about it, you can here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-52391759 and if you have any users making use of it, now is the time to make them aware of it.
As I have mentioned before, looking after all aspects of our health is important, so even in the midst of a busy week, I was able to stop and take an hour out to attend an online webinar organised by NI Chamber of Commerce on mental well-being and enjoyed just stopping to breathe and take in some helpful hints.
The picture of the tree above was used during the webinar to describe resilience and I have to say I thought it did so perfectly. The tree may have seemed down and out but it bounced back and in my opinion, looks great. The other 2 points that have stuck with me are firstly to change what we call the current distancing from ‘social’ to ‘physical distancing’; the point being it’s about being physically and not socially distant; and secondly, a task which was to spend some time thinking about our best experience in work over the past 2 months. I have not had time to do the task yet but maybe next week.
There we have it, my week in a nutshell! It’s been one of ups and downs with highs and lows, frustrations and issues but the end is in sight and the weekend is upon us again with no fault found!
Anyone any big plans? For me, as you can see I have started my new Lego project (the Bugatti 😊) so will hopefully have time to get more of that done and other than that, some more exercise, Zoom quizzing and then on Sunday night it will be back on for virtual youth group with the young people from the church which is proving an invaluable resource for them.
Until next time. Stay safe and well everyone! Dave
PS – Got a coffee today from Drop Hopper Coffee which is back open. It was great if even just for those 5 minutes when waiting for my coffee at a safe distance to have a sense of normality.
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