It's been a good couple of weeks since I discovered I was to be made redundant and for most of that time I imagine I've been hell to live with. Mood swing central. I've been switching between a determined "this is a great opportunity" and "my whole world is crumbling around me" so much, even I wouldn't want to live with me. The stress levels have been pretty high in the household and arguments have broken out as a result.

The crux of the problem has been the uncertainty this whole situation has thrust upon us. When I took my current position, I always had in the back of my mind that there was a contract in place that should, reasonably, have ensured that I had a pretty secure job for at least the next few years. Indeed, the whole rationale behind me only taking on permanent roles since I left University was the perception that it afforded me more job security than contract roles, where I could conceivably be employed for three months and then jobless for a year.

The stark reality, however, is that even a permanent role offers no job security, at least not in a Plc. My first role was at Reliable Hosiery, part of Coats Viyella Clothing, which in turn was part of Viyella Group Plc. We discovered one day that our Directors had just been told in a meeting that the Clothing Division was being wound up and we were all to be made redundant. I got my CV on a couple of jobs boards, applied for a few roles and out of three offers chose Morse Hughes Rae, part of Morse Group Plc.

After surviving several rounds of redundancies and gradually being shunted closer and closer to an on-site consultancy role that I didn't want, I decided enough was enough and moved on to MChex Ltd who had recently been acquired by Stream Group Plc. After all, I'd made enough of a point of the fact that I didn't like the direction I was being forced to take that had another round of redundancies come about (which it soon did), I would probably have been top of the short list anyway.

Stream Group Plc was ultimately to come into the hands of Martin Higginson, formerly of MonsterMob, becoming NetPlayTV Plc in the process, and the vast majority of the Mobile side of the business was ditched shortly thereafter. MChex survived this initial change of the Group's direction, but the severance of the MoniLink contract sounded the death knell for us too.

So now I'm back in the market. Having had a couple of weeks for things to sink in; to consider my options; to get my CV up to date; to reflect on things in the cold light of day; I've decided that my assessment that permanent roles equals job security was misguided. Having "lived the dream for two years" as my wife put it, it seems I will now be falling back into a more traditional working model, traveling to and from an office every day. For all my occasional rants about having to babysit while I'm trying to concentrate on something, I'll miss working from home.

Walking Version 2.0 to and from nursery every day was good for my fitness, good father-son time and great fun. I'm forced to accept that now I'll be working from an office again, I won't be doing the nursery runs any more and will see less of my family in the evenings. I know Version 2.0 had a hard time some mornings when he saw me getting in a taxi to go to the train station because he didn't want me to go – he's never truly known anything other than Daddy working upstairs, so it's not just me that needs to make the transition but him, and my wife, as well.

"Living the dream" is not entirely accurate, either. The dream had me working from home for myself rather than someone else, but the simple fact is that I'm not going to build up a £30,000+ a year freelance consultancy overnight and I still have bills to pay and debts to clear. Given a choice between "living the dream" but having constant debt worries or working for someone else and ensuring my family are safe from such unpleasantries, I'll choose the latter.

All this considered, I've decided that finally the time has come for me to go contracting. I have a broad skill set and a lot of experience now. I've seen enough and done enough to have a good idea of what works and what doesn't and I can turn my hand to most things. And if I really am to sacrifice time with my family to ensure the bills are paid and debts cleared, contracting offers more financial compensation and a better chance of achieving that goal quickly than a permanent position.

I'm going to have some tough decisions to make with my wife. I've had one phone interview already for a Vignette contract position in London. I've got one lined up on Thursday for a permanent J2EE role about twenty minutes' walk from my home. I've also been speaking to a couple of ex-colleagues and trying to line up two more interviews fairly locally. The ideal is a contracting position in Derby, but if it came to a choice between contracting in London or a permanent role in Derby I'd have a bit of a predicament and the wife and I would have to have serious talks.

When the debts are cleared and we're on more stable financial ground I'll have a bit more freedom. I can think about building up a war chest to tide us over while I build up that consultancy and then I really can think about "living the dream". In the meantime, I think it's really just going to boil down to choosing the best path to get there.

It's been ages since I last wrote anything. That's because I went to South Africa for three weeks. I didn't let the general population know because... well, for obvious reasons. Unattended house and all that. Strictly speaking our house is never unattended because we have our killer guard cats and our highly-trained mercenary chinchillas, but it's better to be safe than sorry.

The holiday was the usual arrangement of staying with family. This year, this proved to be a bit of a problem due to certain happenings within the family that I'd rather not go into. Suffice to say there was a certain amount of tension in the air quite a bit of the time, so things weren't necessarily as relaxing as they might have otherwise been. That said, it did contribute to us doing far more than we've managed to do on previous visits like visiting friends and some sight seeing. There's still so much of South Africa that I've yet to see, it's such a massive country.

Before I went away, I had a nice phone conversation with Gavin Whyte, an Executive Director of the company. He really just wanted to reassure me as to the intentions for the company and let me know that he's there to help provide whatever it is we need to keep things running smoothly. When I asked him if his immediate plans would mean I'd be coming home to no job, he said that no, that wasn't going to happen, which was reassuring. It was nice to speak to someone who was so open and no-nonsense for a change.

On my return I did get the impression, though no-one has explicitly mentioned anything to me, that there might be some concern about my blog. As far as I know I've not said anything I shouldn't and apart from my last post, where obfuscating things would have made it unreadable, I make a habit of not explicitly naming people and companies. Whatever. I'm not going to stop blogging, although if something I have posted has caused concern, I'm happy to hear comments as to what and how I can fix it.

I'm due to meet with Gavin on Friday to discuss what's required to take our platform forward really. I think I'm expected to have a road map, which I kind of do although it needs some tweaking, and a list of essentials and nice-to-haves, which I also kind of do. There has been a policy introduced whereby we give a brief report every Friday of what we've been working on for the week, which is a good way of keeping everyone informed and also taking stock of things personally. I liken this to the SCRUM methodology, where the team has a daily "scrum", which is basically a quick stand-up meeting, to highlight what each person has been working on, what they intend to work on and what's getting in their way. One option being considered is sale of the company, but it's still very early days so we'll have to see what transpires.

Then, of course, there's Ubuntu. My holiday coincided quite badly with the kernel freeze and Beta release of Feisty, which was a shame. That said, things seem to have worked out quite nicely. All of the problems I had been experiencing have now been fixed, with the exception of the annoying APIC error messages, which are greatly reduced but not completely gone, and suspend/hibernate/resume not working. I need to look further into the latter as it may well be a configuration thing on my part, otherwise I'm sure there will be a bug already raised. But the Feisty release has come and gone with much fanfare and much greater demand than expected, I gather. The Feisty release seems like a solid one, so congratulations to all involved.

Oh, in case you're wondering, the title is a reference to the response of one Gary Kearley on the #ubuntu-uk IRC channel upon seeing my hackergotchi on Launchpad: "OMG goatee!"

Damn, it's been a month since I posted anything. I've been so busy I hadn't even realised. But now I'm not quite as busy, although I probably should still be, so I'm going to post an update if it kills me.

Much has happened in the last month. I think my last post was about the eGroupWare migration at work. Well that's mostly complete now. I do still have a number of outstanding tasks... like migrating all the old data into the new database and getting our interim PHP-based Customer Support ticket system integrated, writing a couple of guides... but all in all, eGroupWare is now in use and going down well. All the "systems" (read Access databases and Excel spreadsheets) that were previously accessed via Citrix are now on eGroupWare one way or another – be it TTS (which, I now learn, is soon to be replaced with Tracker), MyDMS, or WikiTikiTavi. Now I'm getting the distinct feeling some people aren't pulling their weight, so I'm slowing down a little too. I think I've earned a little rest.

What else has been keeping me busy? I started playing hockey again. A couple of weeks ago we played Buxton (the team who just about destroyed my knee and put me out of action again) and lost heavily. 5-1 I think. Might have been 6-1. I lost count. I was shit. I slipped on my arse for two or three goals. I was awesomely bad. Anyway, Saturday just gone we played Newark, who beat us 8-0 at their place I'm told. We went 1-0 up within the first 10 minutes and held out until the last 10 minutes when they equalised from a short corner. It finished up 1-1. This time I felt a lot better about the performance, both from a team perspective and personally. In fact I'll allow myself a little self-congratulation and say I played well. I ache like a bastard everywhere now, I was about ready to drop by the final whistle, but it was worth it. I'm just annoyed we couldn't hang on for those final few minutes, or force a winner.

My Ubuntu stuff stalled slightly. I think I've posted before about stuff that doesn't work on my laptop, at least unless I supply the irqpoll kernel option. Like the IEEE1394. Like the Broadcom wireless NIC. Like Gnome Power Manager. Like Suspend and Hibernate. The card reader, I've discovered, does. I just have to manually load the tifm_sd kernel module when I've inserted a card, which I can probably automate if I Google for it, but it's not so much of a problem that I've felt the need to.

Well, at least one of the above problems had a suggested fix of updating the BIOS. So I downloaded the latest BIOS update pack from the Acer website. Unpacked. Followed the instructions. But the WinPhlash utility they give you doesn't work on Windows XP Pro X64. Nor does the PHLASH16.EXE work from the Safe Mode Command Prompt. I have no floppy drive and I don't want to burn a DOS 6.22 Boot CD. So I set about trying to make my Disgo 256MB USB Key bootable with FreeDOS. Long story short, I failed... I've got it partitioned, I've got FreeDOS installed on it, but I can't get the damn thing to boot. Yes, the laptop supports it. The closest I've come is getting it to boot, but not finding COMMAND.COM.

In the end, I borrowed a USB floppy from my brother and booted DOS 6.22 that way. Flashed the BIOS (very nerve-wracking experience). And it made precisely no difference. So I still get annoying errors in my logs, and half my hardware doesn't work. I've started work now on trying to get the 2.6.17 kernel in Edgy to be as close to the configuration of the 2.6.15 kernel in Dapper as possible, with all the code fixes still in place. I'm determined to get to the bottom of this. One helpful soul keeps suggesting BIOS updates to everyone who reports they're also experiencing these problems... but it didn't work for me.

That's about it really I suppose. Just been keeping my head down, getting on with stuff. The Boys are doing well. Wifey's fine. I'm in good shape, apart from the aches from the weekend and a nice bruise on my ribs. I'm sure there's other stuff, but that's the main news.

Christmas this year was fun. LOTS of fun. Forget what anyone tells you about Christmas being "all about the kids" – it's all about the parents. eyeh8u already blogged about the Awesome Responsibility involved in being a parent at Christmas. I positively thrived on it.

Version 2.1 is obviously far too young to understand what's going on at just seven weeks. Version 2.0 is a different story. He's been hyped up on Christmas for over a week now, so he hasn't been interested in chocolate and sweeties and other crap. We've done the usual parent thing of warning that Santa doesn't come to naughty boys and girls. He really wanted a play house this year, so that was our weapon of choice. He responded incredibly well. He's really grown up since Version 2.1 was born anyway, but I've been amazed by how well he's behaved.

On Christmas Eve, we went a-visiting, the same as always. Mommy took Version 2.0 out for a walk while I built his play house on the back garden. Come bedtime, Version 2.0 was excited, but keen to make sure he slept, because Santa doesn't come if you're not asleep. He helped Daddy put out biscuits (we had no mince pies) and a glass of port (we had no sherry) for Santa and clementines (we had no carrots) for the reindeer. He went to bed without any arguments. He slept through till late enough for me to realise he was waking up and get the video camera.

On Christmas Day he went downstairs and opened all his presents and said thank you to Santa. Then we pointed out that there was no play house. No tantrum, as we had feared. We took him through to the front room and brought the box of the play house through into the living room. We opened it and... "Oh dear, no play house." No tantrum. No tears. He just went back to his other presents. So we asked him to help take the box outside to the bin... where he saw his play house and jumped up and down cheering, shouting "Thank you Santa!"

After that we did the usual and went to my dad's for Christmas dinner. More presents. More "Thank you Santa"s and quite a bit of food. Lots of playing nicely. No bad behaviour.

This year, Christmas utterly rocked.

Home

I've got a cold. Wifey had a cold before she gave birth. Version 2.0 caught that, then Version 2.1. Just as Wifey and Version 2.0 were almost over it, and Version 2.1 was in the thick of it, I started to get it, but it only lasted a few days. Now it's back, since yesterday. I read somewhere the incubation period for the common cold is three days, and where was I on Thursday? The doctors. Which explains a lot.

Version 2.1 is still suffering a little bit with his cold, it was almost gone but got a little worse over the weekend, but seems quite a bit better again today. At least now he's feeding again – in fact he's a proper little porker. He's starting to do interesting stuff as well now... little smiles, little shouts when he gets annoyed (like when you smother his face with kisses), his eyes follow me around the room. Actually he has his eyes open a lot more now too. And he's trying to crawl. Yes, he's only a month old, but if you put him face down, he pushes up with his arms and moves his legs in an effort to move. Fucking amazing.

Over all, it hasn't been a massive upheaval, but then we weren't expecting one really. Yes it's been a bit of a pain in the night when he's woken up choking on phlegm, and yes it's difficult to sleep (and fucking expensive, even with energy-saving bulbs) when he wants the light on all night. But it's still good to be a dad again.

In addition to all of this, Version 2.0 has been very good. Very very good. He's really taken well to being a big brother, and apart from one accident last Thursday night has been able to go to bed without a nappy for four weeks. Brilliant! We have a routine now. He goes to bed around 19:30, after a glass of "tasty milk" (Neskwik) and cleaning his teeth. He normally sleeps through until at least 6:00, sometimes even 7:00. Wifey goes to bed at 20:00, and Version 2.1 goes with her. But if he wakes up between then and midnight, which he usually does around 22:00, it's my job to sort him out – which means I pretty much have to be upstairs and awake. That's fine, because it gives me a couple of hours to do my hobby stuff, e.g. Ubuntu. I go to bed at midnight and any further wake-ups, usually around 3:00 are Wifey's to deal with. She gets up at 4:00, I get up at 8:00.

Work

Following the recent announcement, I've been finding it pretty hard to get motivated to do much at work. Not that I've been asked to anyway, if I'm honest. But I went to the team meeting last Tuesday and asked the question right out: "With the recent changes in the Group, where do we stand?" Damn, I'm glad I did. Essentially I was told that, to be fair, the new owners had only been in charge for two days (the EGM having taken place on the Friday). Obviously it's going to take them a couple of months to get up to speed and get to grips with the different parts of the business, what the state of play is. But I was encouraged to hear that they are actually considering their options with regard to our particular part of the business. Not simply reviewing how best to dispose of us, but actually also considering putting a proper management team in place, investing in some more staff and developing the platform. I was amazed, even more so when I highlighted the continuing need for some development work in order to retire some old software and was greeted with an enthusiastic "we'll take a look at what's involved" rather than "that's not important at the moment".

It went on. I asked for further input on the project plan and roadmap I'd prepared for them and was told it needed to be broken down into smaller sub-projects in some places, and prioritised into Essential, Good-To-Have and Nice-To-Have, and that it was my project and my plan and it was up to me to decide how best to implement it, I didn't need to run things past them any more.

So finally, I'm Lead Developer not just in name, but in role too. It actually feels as though maybe some momentum could be gathering again. First things I'll be doing are getting the project plan OUT of Microsoft Project and into eGroupware's Project Manager – thereby removing a proprietary software product from the list of required tools and simultaneously making the project plan available remotely and concurrently, increasing productivity – and also getting the project roadmap OUT of Microsoft Word and INTO the wiki – for similar reasons to the above.

Ubuntu

I've been slightly active in the Ubuntu community of late. Mainly in the #ubuntu-uk IRC channel, it must be said. But I've joined up with the Ubuntu-UK LoCo, set up my wiki and LaunchPad pages. I've added a few bug comments, so I've already started to accumulate Karma, and started to learn Python, mainly because it seems to be used an awful lot in Ubuntu.

Python is a funny language. It feels like a scripting language, but with a kind of pseudo-OO structure. I'm getting along better with it than I ever did with Perl. I've started writing a small utility to help me manage my CV, using Python-SQLObject. That has a similar feel to EJBs with CMP -- you just update the model, which inherits from the SQLObject object, and the changes get persisted automatically. It even handled many-to-many relationships for you, creating the intermediate mapping table between the two entities. Quite cool.

This is likely to be a long, rambling post, given that I've been meaning to post an update all week and now Wifey has just taken Version 2.1 to the emergency doctors surgery in Derby... so I apologise in advance.

Version 2.0 has had a cold all week. A real stinker. There's been vomit and uncontrollable coughing and all kinds of nasty stuff. I've been sleeping in his room while he's been sleeping with Wifey and Version 2.1. This struck me as maybe the wrong way to do things, but Wifey likes to be with him at night when he's ill, just in case he wakes up, and there's not room in our bed for all four of us – especially when Version 2.0 is such a wriggle-arse and takes up half the bed on his own. Besides, she said, she can catch up on lost sleep during the day, whereas I can't because I have to work. A nice thought if not entirely true....

Anyway, Version 2.1 seems to have caught it. He's been sneezing a lot throughout yesterday and started coughing in the evening. He seemed fine, had lots of bottle, just wanted me to sit with him. As an aside, I have to admit it's been harder to bond this time round. I'm not sure if it's because I was less involved with the birth or what, but it took me a good few days to really get into the idea of being a dad again. That's not to say I'm putting any less into it or any less inclined to throw myself on the line to protect him, but it just doesn't feel quite the same.

But I digress. Version 2.1 is currently in transit, with Wifey, to the Derby Medical Centre, having woken up in the night spluttering what can only be described as white foam. Which makes me feel like a bit of a twat really, cos while I was looking after him last night I didn't pick up that anything was wrong. So here I am, in the wee small hours, blogging because someone has to stay home with Version 2.0, Wifey knows more about what's wrong with Version 2.1 and I ain't gonna get back to sleep until I hear something, knowing there's diddly shit I can do.

Work

In other news... I got an SMS message from my kind-of boss the day after Version 2.1 was born telling me that "There's been some changes at $EMPLOYER, check your mail. New chairman is in Harrogate Friday if you can make it." He was referring to this, which was kind of annoying as it puts my position in the balance. Now I know it's a tough call to make, do you actually want to disturb someone on paternity leave, especially with potentially bad news, so maybe the SMS was with that in mind. More likely, I feel, is that it's just his management style and I wouldn't have got a reassuring phone call even if I hadn't been on leave. So the current wisdom is that we should "just keep things ticking over, keep the platform running but don't bust a gut" which sounds ominous. So I've been doing that, closing tickets as normal, and I've decided to learn Python. Then maybe get more involved with Ubuntu and possibly apply for one of the jobs on offer.

UPDATE Wifey just phoned, Version 2.1 is fine, it's just a head cold and isn't on his chest. Some saline drops to help him clear his nose and throat and keep doing what we're doing.

Callum Aiden Tait was born at 23:40 on Tuesday November 7th in Derby City Hospital, weighing 7lb 2oz. Mommy was a picture of calm throughout and is now sleeping off all that hard work and the epidural. Baby was in no rush, but the labour was still a lot quicker than first time round. I'll admit to a pang of tearful disappointment when we agreed to abandon the home birth due to lack of progress (6cm dilated at 14:00, still 6cm at 17:40), but the experience was much better than we had anticipated – even the bloke who tried to convince us to come into hospital in the first place came in to see us and was incredibly friendly, not at all like the first time we met him. And I blubbed a little bit, but didn't come close to passing out trough hyperventilation this time.

I've just picked up Version 2.0 from the neighbours who took him in at very short notice, Wifey has to stay in till about 12:00 because there was meconium in the amniotic fluid, just a precaution. Although the waters broke at 16:10, the membrane didn't fully retract, which is what caused the lack of progress – one of the doctors sorted that with what looked like a swizzle stick with a hook on the end. The epidural wasn't as effective as Wifey had hoped, and took about eight attempts to get in right, but it took enough of the edge off the pain to be useful.

Now I'm off to hunt down the two cats that escaped during the labour....

Wifey went into labour around 5am this morning. I'll update when Version 2.1 arrives.

Just had the midwife over to discuss the outcome of yesterday's scan and meeting. She's very pleased. We are on the home birth register! She looked at the notes and said given that everything now appears normal, she was going to discuss it with the consultant and see if he would retract his comment that a home birth was "against medical advice", adding that it shouldn't really make a difference (and that the comment hadn't been added to the notes because the situation was still under review) but she didn't know if people would see the note and think that we were going to be troublesome.

Rock!

Went to see yet another consultant today about the home birth. Although he wasn't there (again) the registrar we spoke to was very nice – much better than the prick we had last time. A nice Asian lady. She sensed that we were up for a fight, I think, asked us what we understood of the current situation, then explained that no matter what, they couldn't stop us having a home birth; all they could offer was advice and we could take it or leave it. The other bloke seemed hell-bent on telling us that we were having a hospital birth. She went into much more depth about the things we asked about, explained that shoulder dystocia can happen in a home or hospital birth and in small or large babies – there is no convincing link between baby size and incidence of shoulder dystocia.

We also had another ultrasound, which showed that Version 2.1's growth has levelled out and is now well within normal parameters – in fact, just above average. So ultimately she explained that the only benefit to having the birth in hospital is that if something as drastic as shoulder dytocia did occur, there'd be another pair of hands there to offer ideas of how to solve it. In summary, she's entirely happy that we understand the risks of a home birth, happy that we're not taking undue chances, happy that should the midwife indicate that she's not happy with the progression of the birth that we would go into hospital and happy for us to go ahead as planned. She even apologised for the previous registrar's behaviour.

Now that is a relief.