A little over two years ago, when I announced I was leaving Morse to work for MChex from home, I got mixed reactions. Some people were envious of the working from home bit. Some people were just envious I was getting out. No-one was envious I was going to work for MChex. In fact a couple of people told me I was making a big mistake.

Had I known then what I know now about the management, I might have had second thoughts. But I've had a lot of time to think about the last two years recently, and I can't say I have any regrets. Yes, it's been hard work at times, often for the wrong reasons. I've had to do more of what should be other people's jobs than my own a lot of the time, because we didn't have the staff. I've banged my head against a brick wall trying to get a commitment to recruit people. But when all is said and done, I've learnt a lot. About myself, what I'm capable of and my strengths and weaknesses. About new (to me) technologies like EJB and JMS. And about picking up the ball and running with it when other people seem reluctant to do so – moving things forward and involving people to a point where they feel empowered and motivated to do the same.

I eventually got an interview with Capita IT services last Thursday, having spoken to Rob on Wednesday. I wasn't at all sure about the Java test because I haven't been immersed in Java for so long, but I did better than I thought. I think I got quite a good grilling and answering the questions and talking about my experiences really made me realise how much I've done during my time with MChex. So now that the switch has been flipped and the hardware disposed of, my e-mail account closed and my employment officially ended, I can start to look forward.

I decided in the end to take the offer from Data Systems & Solutions. It's a career progression, it's closer to home, the benefits are better. It's probably not going to be the hands-on Java programming role I would have been doing at Capita, which really tempted me, but I think it's about time I tried "officially" leading a team. It's going to be a bit weird working in an office and wearing a suit again... I've not had to wear a suit every day for nearly seven years. But I'm looking forward to my new job and the opportunities that come with it.

I've just had a call from the recruitment agency to let me know that I've been offered the role of Senior Web Developer that I sat the interview for a couple of weeks ago. It had been suggested that maybe I should lower my asking price, but today's offer came in at the full £35,000 so I was right to stick to my guns. The offer is good until the end of the week, so I need to get those other interviews in before Friday. I won't be turning this opportunity down unless I have a definite, better offer.

Just a quick update on the whole situation. I was in London yesterday to meet Gavin and finalise everything. I was feeling pretty sad all day. I got my redundancy letter which said, to summarise things:

• My position is redundant, effective yesterday.
• I'll be paid four weeks' salary in lieu of notice – £2,329.38
• My employment with the company will finish on 30th June.
• I'll be paid two years' statutory redundancy pay – £620.00
• I'll probably lose 1 day's pay because I've taken 14 days holiday, which is one day more than half my 26-day annual entitlement.
• All of the above will be paid, with my June salary, next Tuesday.

So I'm officially available for work from a week on Monday. I've had further interview feedback. I passed the telephone interview for the Vignette contracting position in London, which was great. But so did a lot of other people and they chose two others instead of me, one of whom I've been led to believe was Rob Morrison. I also got a call on Monday evening about my interview last week, saying it was between me and one other person but they had questions relating to my freelance work. The main areas of concern seem to be the amount of time I'll be spending on it; intellectual property concerns; and conflicts of interest. I've been totally up-front about everything, so I shouldn't have a problem.

Aside from that, things are quiet. I'm still awaiting feedback on my CV and offers of interviews from two ex-colleagues (you know who you are Rob and John!). I submitted my tax return the other night and got a £300 rebate, which was very welcome. And I've been looking into a couple of other little projects that might allow me to get things started. With any luck, I can get the loan paid off and at least one of the credit cards cleared fairly soon and that reduces the financial burden, which is the short-term goal.

Well the interview went very well. I was nervous as hell in the lead-up to it, but I calmed down quite nicely in the few minutes before I was taken inside. The interview seemed to go well. I was given some background about the company and the project before being asked to talk through my CV and how specific skills would apply to the role. Then asked some more probing technical questions and some general competency questions. The format was quite relaxed, almost conversational, so I didn't feel too bad talking about myself and my achievements – it didn't feel like boasting.

Initial feedback from the agency is that there's another candidate to interview on Monday, but that they're "very interested" in me. So by next Wednesday's meeting I might even have a job offer on the table, which would be nice.

In just over an hour. I'm making an awful mess in my pants....

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.

I've been busy the last few weeks. Really busy. Nothing new there, of course, but Wifey's understanding that "working from home" equates to "available for babysitting, helping bring the shopping in from the car, etc." doesn't help either. That's the only problem I've had with working from home though.

Anyway. After hammering out the platform development roadmap, I got cracking on with writing some Java code for the first time in a while. Actually, there was a bit of hacking a couple of weeks back to support a change by one of the operators. But this time I was going to be actually writing code rather than tweaking... a small piece at first, followed by a great big whacking chunk. I was feeling incredibly positive.

So when I heard on Thursday that the agreement with Monilink had been terminated, it was a bit of a kick in the teeth. Nothing had been officially decided by Friday evening as regards how we were going to deal with the termination. To be honest, apart from the fact that we're going to be winding up the business, nothing has yet either. I guess it means I'm virtually redundant.

I've got a meeting in London to discuss how things progress from here. Gavin sounded completely stunned when I spoke to him. I've been with the company just over two years, so I'll get a minimum of two weeks' salary in statutory redundancy pay. It'd be nice if we were kept around to wind things up properly and given a somewhat higher settlement, given that we could have put the company in a very awkward situation if any of the three of us had decided to walk out at any time – we could have held them to ransom, but we didn't and won't I'd like to think that counts for something.

At this stage, I'm not sure how much more I'm allowed to say. But I think I'm safe in saying that I haven't felt this shit in over six years. I guess it's time to dust off the CV and start getting some interviews... and if I'm not left short financially, finally get my own business off the ground. It's tough trying to pull a silver lining out of such news when you're still smarting.

In general, I'm not a fan of meetings. I find that they tend to waste a lot of time and unless they're very carefully co-ordinated, such as the daily meetings in SCRUM, they often over-run, go off-topic and achieve very little. In general, I'd prefer to have a conference on IRC, XMPP, Skype or similar – at least then the note-taking is done for you and these methods have an immediacy that e-mail discussions lack.

One area where meetings can be useful, however, is in countering feelings of isolation. Working from home, some people begin to develop a sense of detachment and lose focus. It's not a feeling I'm familiar with personally, I have my targets and I work towards them, although I admit to having felt somewhat apathetic at times when I can see an immediate need for something but haven't been given the support. Getting people together can be a good thing in these situations. Friday was one such occasion.

I left my house at 9am and took a late train down to our head office in London to meet Gavin and the team and talk about our requirements for moving things forward. Moving things forward in this case means getting up-to-date with all the upgrades, patches, fixes and improvements that have been on the ever-growing task list over the last 18 months or so, but have been put off time after time because we've been too busy firefighting something more urgent. We were asked to come up with a list of "must-haves" and "nice-to-haves" for getting things into a reasonable state.

Essentially, the must-haves boiled down to a couple of extra staff, namely an Oracle DBA and a UNIX/Linux Systems Administrator. We have so many little projects started but not finished, because the people who started them either left or got pulled away to work on something more urgent, we just need a couple of people to come in and help us out with the day-to-day stuff. This is stuff that any organisation such as our own would have to deal with, so no prior knowledge of our setup would be required. Admittedly, some of our systems are poorly documented, but the new staff could help out in that department too by documenting things that aren't already. We have a wiki (we have two actually – that's one project that got dropped part way through) and stop-gap documentation can be drafted there before being formalised.

With these staff handling the day-to-day running of things, those with in-depth knowledge of our setup, SLAs, customers and services would be free to finish off some of the projects we've started. With that done, the new staff, specialists in areas we're currently familiar with but not experts in, would offer their expert advice on how to improve our architecture, software installations and so on.

We put this argument to Gavin and were buoyed by the response. I appreciated his no-bullshit style and openness. He told us it was pointless at the moment asking him for a couple of hundred grand in a one-off payment for something because it just wasn't going to get past the board. But new staff – £30k-£40k each over a year – was possible, because it's a long-term investment. He told us that he likes to understand things, so he would undoubtedly ask stupid questions in order to better understand things. He listened to what we had to say, discussed it with us and suggested a few options. He sat and listened intently as we described our infrastructure and applications, what they all do and why it's set up the way it is. He asked questions about how it would fit into a few ideas he has and discussed possible implementations. Above all, he showed a genuine interest.

Even the mood in the office was markedly different from previous times. There was a relaxed atmosphere, a little banter, co-operation and, for want of a better word, togetherness. We sat in the meeting room and ate birthday cake together. As a team. And when we left the meeting, with a task to produce a roadmap for the few months between now and the Christmas party (yes, apparently there will be a Christmas party) we were all positively excited at the prospect of actually making some serious progress and realising some of our potential after being left too long to stagnate and merely survive.

So, if you're an Oracle DBA or a UNIX/Linux Systems Administrator and want to work for a lively, progressive company on exciting projects relating to mobile phones and gaming, why not drop us your CV? Hey, even the meetings are worthwhile!

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!"

I had some rather unsettling news yesterday. Back in 2005, when Stream Group Plc acquired MChex, MChex was positioned as part of Stream Mobile. In other words MChex reported to Stream Mobile, who reported to the Group. Shortly after I joined, there was some negotiation between the MChex Operations Manager and the Stream Group board while they tried to bring MChex staff's terms on Stream Mobile staff's terms into sync. As part of that, I was asked which company I wanted to have on my contract of employment – Stream Mobile or MChex. For various reasons, I chose the latter.

Many people have left since then, leaving only two of us explicitly as part of MChex, and one as a shared resource between Stream Mobile and MChex. Later, MonsterMob founder Martin Higginson bought a controlling share in Stream Group Plc from former Chairman Gordon Robson and re-named it NetPlayTV Plc. He had a vision of setting up a gaming company and also purchased Vegas 247 who have a Casino channel on Sky TV. Stream Mobile continued to develop mobile gaming applications as well as running their mobile chat services. NetPlayTV went on to acquire the trading operations of Chariot, the company that ran the Monday Lottery.

Yesterday, out of the blue, I got a phone call to tell me that NetPlayTV Plc's mobile services division was being axed, resulting in approximately 70 redundancies. I'm not sure how many people are involved with the Vegas 247 and Monday parts of the business or what they do, but three directors (one of whom is our DBA and specialist in the SMS software that connects to the operators), two developers (one of whom is our secondary DBA), a support manager, an account manager and a whole load of operators and supervisors (who also handle our 24x7 support desk) were all chopped at a moment's notice. The operators and supervisors all had their access to the services interface dropped before being told, leading to a load of support requests before they realised what was going on. Seems mobile services is not the direction our new owner wants his new play thing to take.

In theory, I should be safe. Due to an exclusive five-year service provision contract we have in place, we can't really be chopped – we have to exist purely in order to service the contract. But it just goes to show how a seemingly small decision can make a massive difference. If I'd opted for Stream Mobile instead of MChex on my contract two years ago, I'd be looking for a job now.