I see a lot of value in this idea that my social network only has real value when it's realised with some kinda physical interaction with the people in your network.

For instance ZeFrank has been touring New Zealand this week. And in a totally open way, he has let people know where he is and made himself available to meet people who follow him on Twitter who are near where he is in NZ. That's totally cool and a great way to use Twitter.

Following someone for entertainment, to learn things or just plain stalking is one thing, but using these tools to engage in a physical way gives your social network a little more credibility.

And with this in mind, I kinda find myself keeping a fairly tight reign on the people I follow, trying only to follow people I know and blocking people I don't know. Having said that though I do feel like a bit of a stalker following the likes of @zeldman, @simplebits, @jasonsantamaria and @brillantcrank. While there's the idle chirps of their lives in action, these people also provide the vital tweets that you must be tuning into hear. I think these guys are some of the more significant voices in the web-development community. I'm interested in what these guys have to say. That I also hear about them waiting in line, getting up bleary-eyed or having a head cold is like static on the radio while you're tuning into a clear signal (I think -- that aspect of twitter is probably a whole nother post).

Simon sees it like that though -- using twitter is kinda like blogging, it's not an exclusive thing and he doesn't care who tunes in. Which is great, cause it's interesting to follow his tweets.

Facebook though has become a ghetto. I agree with Simon that the bi-directional associations suck. There are people that I genuinely want to hear from and keep in touch with, but there are many others which I'd much rather wish they'd shut the hell up!

Which is where I think I can get to my city metaphor.

It's kinda like a country boy moving to the big city. You can be the disaffected guy who moves to the big city for anonymity -- you don't know your neighbour and they don't have to or may not even care to know you. You can move around and interact with whomever you want with complete invisibility.

Back in the country small town everyone knew who that guy was -- he was so-and-so's kid. You were completely transparent to the whole town.

On the other hand, there's the guy who can come to the city and create a community from the people in his neighbourhood; he introduces himself to his neighbour, he get's to know his butcher.

Cities are big enough, yet intimate enough to provide you with anonymity or community!

No matter what you do, Facebook is still the small country town ghetto you grew up in; everyone know's who you are and you can't tweet just any old thoughtless shit. I know that if I do, I get a call from my sister who wants to know why I'm so upset. Or I hear that my mother in law thinks my status's are weird and cryptic. And most people don't care what they're spewing into Facebook. They know they have a sympathetic and captive audience. They know who their audience is and in many cases their status are written not to inform but to draw attention -- which I think is different from engagement.

Twitter gives you the choice of the big city; you can tweet to the void -- people in the street can choose to stop and listen to your song, stay a while or move on. The gold though is that you can choose to engage them, you can start to know your neighbour you can surround yourself with like minded people and create your own community.

And well, of course it's Meli who is pregnant, I'm a not-so-innocent bystander / support crew / chef / driver. I'm truly over the moon. Getting to this point has been a bit of an effort. Our advice to our friends -- especially those younger than us -- get into it, it's a young persons game.

Meli and I decided that we'd get cracking and start making babies as soon as we got married. So we relaxed and left our first year in the hands of God and Mother Nature. Despite it being a wonderful first year of married bliss, there was no babies. Stupid God and Mother nature. Time to turn to science.

It started as a simple trip to the GP for Mel;
"Oh yeah, and my husband and I have been trying to have kids."
Right then, well time for you to have a blood test and your husband will have to give a semen sample. Great. And that's where it starts.

In January 2008, I gave my first semen sample. In a disabled toiled. At Gribbles Pathology. Under the harsh glare of fluorescent lights. Yeah, that's exactly how I like to wank.

So with the nasty business done, Meli and I both went to our GP. Well not really our GP, cause we don't have one. We use a bulk billing clinic in Brunswick, we have many GP's. The one we saw that day couldn't wait to get us out. She was reading our results as she wrote us a referral to a fertility specialist. "Here", she said as she thrust the referral and results our way.

For me, the results were pretty grim -- what is morphology? What does a low morphology mean? I mean the count was good, there were plenty there. They just weren't exactly the fittest bunch swimmers up lining up for the task at hand. I upset my mother by calling them my "Valley Sperm" -- the stupid, disfigured over-weight ones. Just like the Valley there's a few diamonds in amongst the coal, but it's hard for them to succeed, the numbers are just against them.

And the numbers were this; of the 160 million or so in that first load, only 9% were any good -- 14 million or so, give or take. It was those numbers that I kept in mind when we had our first meeting with our fertility specialist.

Of course Meli is fine. Despite her age. Deciding to wait until later in her life is the only thing going against her.

Now you're probably thinking, straight into IVF -- it's all the rage. But given our age, they're much more reasonable and rational than that. At least our doctor was. Do you drink? Do you smoke? You both seem reasonably healthy if not for a little tubby-ness. Are you doing it right? Do you know how to determine when the timing is right.

Ahhh, 'cause timing is everything.

When you realise that there are only twelve really good opportunities during the year to get it right (and by get it right I mean successfully fertilize and egg) you wonder how those damn kids make it look so easy.

So Meli and I were sent away with and told to get our timing right. At least for the next month. This included yet another round of blood tests for Meli and another sperm sample for me... this time in another fluorescent lit room. A dedicated room this time, with dodgy porno's. Great.

Unfortunately, no good.

So we went back and escalated. Believe it or not, there's another step you can try before you get to IVF. It's also worth mentioning that there's a whole broad spectrum of what constitutes IVF. Much of that spectrum is coloured with different dosages, pickup cycles and wonderful cocktails of drugs and hormones.

Next for us though was a technique they call IUI -- inter-uterine insemination. Turkey basting. I'd get to "produce" some more, and it'd be "washed and concentrated" before being put exactly where it had the best chance of finding an egg and giving it what-for. Meli would also take a mild treatment of additional hormones to encourage her body to come-around to the idea of conception.

We tried this for three months, with no joy. And since this is my blog post, it can be all about me; the first month of IUI really upset me. I was very, very anxious about not being able to make Meli pregnant the natural way. Not being able to do this is like being asked a very easy question you can't answer. Not being able to answer that, questions your very credibility as a man and as suitable husband. To put it bluntly, it fucked me up. Sobbing uncontrollably, because your can't make it happen -- because your so anxious about making it happen is a mighty weight to bear. For the most part, it's also something you experience alone. Not everyone wants to talk about infertility, particularly not your own. But, while you experience these things by yourself, it took me a little while (and Meli's support) to realise I wasn't the first man experiencing this, nor was I the only man suffering it now. It's just not something blokes share easily.

I must say how grateful I am though to all my mates. Nerds treat life quite differently, and the stuff of life is shared more openly and with a lot more support and joy that I can imagine it being regarded among other blokes.

Finally, by June we'd had no luck. We took a break and travelled to the States. Meli came with me to the Pacific North West -- Portland Oregon to San Francisco California and back again. I had a conference in Portland at the end of May and then we took ten days cruising through Oregon and Northern California.

When we came back, we prepared ourselves for our first round of IVF.

IVF starts with a pickup cycle. In it's gentlest form, the woman is given a large dose of synthetic hormones which encourage her body to produce more than one egg for a cycle. They make her do this just to the point of ovulation and then they arrest the ovulation process with an injection which is meant to discourage the ovaries from releasing the eggs. Depending on the age of the woman, she might produce 7-10 additional eggs (if she's younger and healthier) or only 1-3 (if she's older or unhealthier).

The pickup itself is a relatively straight forward day procedure. It does knock women around though. It knocked Meli around. While not directly painful, having your bits messed around with is simply not fun in anyones language. Being lightly anesthetised as well makes the following days a little foggy.

On that day, I get to produce. And by this time producing was something I got to look forward to believe it or not. Melbourne IVF has a great room, with a couch, mood lighting, DVD player, great porn and they're very quiet. If you could take half hour a month to just...get away from it all. You'd be a more relaxed person I'm sure.

Yeah, so, I get to produce and my stuff is again washed and concentrated. Each egg collected is mixed with couple of hundred thousand sperm in a petrie dish and put in a body temperature cabinet for 24 hours or so to see what shakes out. I'd like to think that while they're in there someone is playing Issac Hayes and Marvin Gaye records.

Meli and I were lucky; of the six eggs collected, five became embryos. They picked the best one and our fertility specialist popped it in. Done.

And then you wait.

Anxiously.

As little as two weeks later Meli's goes for a blood test to determine how it's going. And it's looking promising. Two weeks after that we're back with our fertility specialist to have an ultrasound. An uncomfortable one if you catch my drift.

And there it is. A tiny little jelly-bean, with a little blur in the centre that flashes like a tiny LED, blinky blinky blinky blinky blinky...

...done intentionally, front to back, top to bottom, money-no-object, by an army of the most talented professionals, from art director to stylists to make-up artists to baby-wranglers to lighting assistants to photographer to digital retoucher, all working assiduously in concert in pursuit of the utterly pointless.

Substitute photography for software development -- boom, I'm transported to one or two projects from my past.

Tip of the hat to Kottke, Worst photo ever?.

Since we're deploying to EngineYard, we've got the added bonus of using a filtered_remote_cache, so we need to make sure our repository cache is updated with the new branch path.

if variables.include?(:branch)

  set :svn_path,      "branches/#{branch}"

else

  set :svn_path,      'trunk'

end

set :repository,          "https://yourrepo.com/appname/#{svn_path}/"

set :repository_cache,    "/var/cache/engineyard/#{application}/#{svn_path}"

Then in the :deploy namespace add this chunk of goodness (tip 'o the hat to Simon)

  task :confirm do

    unless Capistrano::CLI.ui.agree("Sure you want to deploy from #{repository}? (yes/no): ")

      puts "No worries, use --set-before branch=whatever to deploy from a specific branch if it exists."

      exit

    end

  end

  before "deploy:update_code", "deploy:confirm"

This should give you the branch control you need when you're deploying code and migrations, but it won't interfere noisily with your other capistrano tasks.

Ideally, what we should be aiming for is the deploy.rb to be "repository / branch aware", so that if you're in a branch (or tag), then it deploys from there.

Thoughts?

It was time for some therapy at Dr Wilkinsons mud baths and hot-springs.

WFT?

Yup, back in the day a cowboy would amble into town after a month on the dusty trails, filthy dirty from all kinds of manly cowboy stuff. He'd find the closest saloon where he could get a room and a hot soapy bath and wash off a month's worth of mud and dirt.

Now though, it's completely on it's head. I'm slipping into a tub of sphagnum moss, volcanic ash and hot spring water. Then after a rinse I'm over to a tub of bubbling hot-spring water to ease away our troubles.

That's just damn kooky. But that's life as an inverse cowboy!

1. He has a foul temper, a foul mouth and suffers no fool.

Ah, so do I. In fact I've made more project managers cry than any of the geeks know. Yeah, it's not a pretty stat and it's probably true that I'm a genuine arse-hole. There's no reason to take pride in a stat like that but I'm passionate about my work, I care about the outcomes, I'm opinionated and I believe that what I'm doing is "right".

It's often taken for granted but working with people who care about what they do is one of the most rewarding benefits of healthy working environment. The passion created by people driven to work hard and do their work well can be contagious. Sure, it can also be poisonous, but I think that's a result of poor communication and expectation management rather than passion.

2. But he's a bully, Travo you hate bullies.

I do hate bullies, I loathe and despise them. My experience tells me that while Ramsay is confronting, in-your-face aggressive and sometimes demeaning to the people he's there to help -- he's genuine about his intentions. Bullying as I've seen it is not so in-your-face. It's passive-aggressive, it's spiteful, bitter and manipulative.

Ramsay doesn't operate in this way. He communicates what he expects up-front (sure, sometimes he doesn't -- he observes) and makes assertions about the outcomes.

3. Ask. Order. Explain. Order

When I was a cadet, and after I had been awarded the rank of corporal after two weeks of training and drilling, I came back to my squadron and was told, "All you've learnt can be condensed in to Ask - Order - Explain - Order."

WTF? Essentially the idea goes that, if you're working with people in a position of leadership, there are certain assumptions you can make about the context and environment you're working in. There should be trust and there should be a shared understanding about a common goal. You should be comfortable asking someone to perform an action.

If that person fails to comply with your request, as you are in a position of leadership, you can order them to do it. This is of-course pretty much in the domain of the defence forces and people who hold official rank. If you were a chef in a kitchen it probably meant you bellowed your request louder. If you were a manager in an office, it probably meant you would ask again with a threat -- you fucking manipulative coward.

Finally, if that person continues to fail to comply with your order an explanation is required. You need to communicate to them your expectations, you need to make the outcomes more clear, you probably need to give the over-all mission more clarity. Then you can repeat your order.

What's not included in this cycle is the need to listen; the person you have just ordered to do something may need to provide you with some critical feedback as a leader, so you can adjust and modify your expectations and goals as a result of a change in the situation or environment.

In a kitchen for example, your team may need to let you know that you're out of a certain ingredient. It's a micro-adjustment you need to make, based on feedback from your team. A good manager, I would expect should be capable of absorbing and adapting to these micro-adjustments without blowing a gasket.

So yeah, I would work for Ramsay.

I am passionate about my work, and I feel energised by people around me who also have passion for their work -- I don't feel threatened by those kind of people.

As I get older I'm more open and less anxious about feedback and tuning -- acknowledging that you don't know everything is both horrifying and also comforting. If you're lucky enough to work with people who are willing to share their knowledge and experience with you, you'll soon take advantage of a collective knowledge.

If people want to help you improve your skills, and you're open to it, you can only become better. I'm sure Ramsay's frustrations are mostly from people who are not open to improvement; he's essentially banging his head against a brick wall.

It all makes for entertaining TV though doesn't it!.

Specs are your friend... but they can't be trusted.

One of the first thing that Steve said to me was that while you might be able to get 100% coverage (using RCov along side RSpec) on your code by writing specs, they aren't truly indicative of whether or not your app works as a whole.

Writing tests against every line of code that I'm writing is intense -- and it requires a hell of a lot of discipline. But, this is my reality now and I'm really enjoying the challenges it presents.

It's one thing to use an exciting new language, but to keep coding the same old shit to solve the same old problems is a shame and a wasted opportunity. To embrace a set tools and resources though, which encourage you to improve the way you approach those problems and sometimes force you to rethink your approach, is really another thing entirely.

Get your recipes right... and deployment is a dream.

I spent a horrible week becoming increasingly frustrated at not being able to deploy. We needed to deploy to both our staging environment (which we already successfully deploying to) and our new production environment. I was making a bunch of newbie type mistakes and stumbling all over the place until Rob showed me the light.

Rob had been using Webistrano to manage the deployment strategies he had for his application quite successfully. He had also taken advantage of the ease by which you could create and manage the recipes for each stage. And thankfully, he showed me how to weild the same mojo. If you can learn to get your recipes right, then you'll have dreamy deployments too.

Some advice though is keep your eyes peeled for stray mongrel .pids!

Your code sucks... no, really.

The beauty and simplicity of Ruby is like a magnifying glass over every nasty bad habbit you have. Any weakness you have in your understanding and boom, you're exposed for the fraud you are.

I'm pretty certain that I've been able to obfuscate my weaknesses within the structure of other languages. I guess it's easy to do that with Ruby and Rails too, but rigor that Cogent uses tools like Saikuro, Flog and Simian peel back the veil and show you the horror which your rubbish code.

Props to Marty for spending some time with me in the early weeks and months helping me to get my act together. I definitely struggled early on, Ruby is a cruel mistress.

I love my new gig with Cogent, but since landing the gig one of the main things on my mind has been "don't fuck it up". And I can't help but think, I've been pre-occupied with failure rather than success. If I'm not careful, I'm going to be on my arse.

So I have to work at turning my mind to success.

The last six months have been great - I've not been more challenged both technically and personally since I started web development in Melbourne nearly ten years ago! Working with Cogent, and in the open and transparent way that they do, has been a revelation. It is a very real business experience -- I'm closer to the work, the business development and the bottom dollar than ever before.

I have embraced a new platform (Mac, OS X - not to mention Unix), a new language and framework (Ruby, and Rails), a new way of working (strict BDD with Rspec, coverage, complexity and similarity analysis before check-in), and since I started I have deployed two really great web apps. Not too bad for six months work. Not to shabby at all.

The staff at Cogent are awesome, they're super, super smart guys who are always on their game and always ready to lend one-another a hand or provide support where needed. It just doesn't get any better than that.

So, focus on the candy. Accentuate the positive. Celebrate your victories - no matter how small - and keep your eyes on the fries.

So what do people think of implementing blah on our blah?

And then usually someone will respond inline;

> So what do people think of implementing blah on our blah?

+1

Well, I think that to truly understand blah-de-blah, we should first consider how we present our blah in that context. ... and on ... and on ... I go.

> So what do people think of implementing blah on our blah?

The real reason here (as my esteemed colleagues have suggested) is that they're mostly time poor. If time were currency, my colleagues and I are living below the poverty line.

What doesn't help is that I'm also trying too hard. Which brings me to my next point...

In roles where you're bored, unchallenged and without focus it's very easy to go looking for distractions; email, web, coffee, a stroll 'round the office -- anything to help pass the day.

Sure, if you're disciplined and still have interest in the projects or organisation you're working for you'll go and poke a stakeholder with a stick and see if you can't get them interested in some prototype that you've mocked up. If they can see some kind of benefit they'll invest in your enthusiasm. But usually, it's an uphill battle.

I'm aware that this paints a fairly grim picture; it's a catch 22 but isn't laziness a merit in a developer? Well, no. I'm sure it's not. Not from what I've seen at Cogent.

So, lately, I've been shutting down the IM and email and working hard to focus on putting in solid hours. It's hard. But I think I'm turning a corner.

The next most difficult thing now is keeping up with Simon Harris.

"Awww gee mate, I'm not sure about this mate, it could get really expensive real fast mate..." Why is that? - Is it the lack of confidence, inexperience, lack of exposure to similar jobs, isolation, lack of colleagues?

We were lucky to have a brickie come by who took one look at the job and said, "Yeah, I can do this." My wife and I were like, "Great, how much?", expecting to pay up around the area a hand-wringer had quoted us. He quoted well under. "Awesome - when can you start?" Monday. Brilliant.

He was confident, and when we had raised the worries and concerns of the other bricklayer who quoted, he was unconcerned; "I'm a brickie, it's what I do. I could rebuild this whole house." Love it. When we asked about other trades that we needed to be involved in our epic job, he had a network of contacts in other trades that he could call upon.

I find the same thing happening in tech; hand-wringers. They get one sniff of the work and they start wringing their hands; "Aww gee, but what if... and then there's this thing that might not work... and if I don't get this then that happens..." Is it conditioning? Or the same reasons as above.

Working with Cogent gives me confidence, exposure and colleagues. Experience I'll get with mileage, but for now the first three go a long way.

One of the most ironical things about this, is that in one of my final emails at Yamaha Music went along the lines of, "... do not do this. It won't work. Not even if you try twice." I tried some of these solutions, over and over again, crossing fingers and waving dead chickens around hoping that by the glory of geebers, something would work.

The first discovery was that there is a MacPorts ticket for the problems I was encountering - this details are similar to the grief I was having, but not the same.

Further Google searches on the problem revealed some helpful advice from Lee Packam's blog; he had a handy post describing the same kinda problem, but with a specific patch for DTrace and that configurable option.

I tried this several times yesterday, blindingly hoping that it was something I was doing wrong. The unix side of Mac is was so unfamiliar to me that I didn't have a clue what I was doing.

Today I came accross Jeffrey Gelens post, who was also unable to build using the Packam DTrace fix, but with some twiddling came up with a solution that worked for him. I tried this a couple of times (to be sure) and still it didn't work.

Finally, with more googling I found the InVisible Blog, that describes a way to get the whole Rails stack working on Leopard. Foturnately, the rest of my Rails stack is pumping, I just needed to get Postgres running.

This technique combines the previous two in a sensible way, kinda - if you read and look closely, you'll notice that the DTrace patch is probably not required, furthermore, by this time the MacPorts guys had updated the Postgres PortFile to include the Packam DTrace Patch anyway. I'm just not certain that this guy even bothered to include it in his configure command.

Anyhoo, I'm relieved to finally have it installed and working.

Why bother? You might also ask; well, as one of my new colleagues suggested, if possible my applications should be database platform independent -- which makes sense. So I did have MySQL 5 running by yesterday evening.

All in all, a painful experience. I probably would have been much, much easier if I'd waited for a month or two - hell, even a couple of weeks for the MacPort weenies to have sussed it out.

Oh well, I'm here now... which way to the bar?

I didn't realise how much his songs had attached themselves to my core. Some of the deepest parts of my conscience resonated to the strains of "To Her Door", "Deeper Water", "Who's gonna make the gravy", "Dumb Things", "Leaps and Bounds"... all of these songs bought big fat tears to my eyes.

My wife just said I was over-tired.

Great gig though; it was my first Paul Kelly gig, which made it all the more special. He's a great musician, a national treasure in fact. God bless.

Yamaha was an equal parts great learning experience and difficult personally negative experience. I'm grateful to everyone there from whom I've learnt many interesting things; logistics, finance, service, marketing, product support and dealer networking.

I've ranted about the negative aspects of this before; the significance is that these experiences actually have a lot more to do with me and my ability to deal with them than the individuals and circumstances that cause them.

As if I need to reassert my goals; I must work harder to develop a personal toolkit which allows me to function and act appropriately in environments that are uncomfortable, disagreeable or downright crappy.

Which makes me all the more grateful for the support of my new colleagues -- it's great to be in a positive and encouraging environment.

Not to mention all the cool stuff that I get to do, the exciting new platforms I get to do it on and the killer technology I get to do it with. Sweet.

Sure things have changed. It's not like I remember. Hardly at all really. But it kinda feels better.

What I'm loving

Terminal : under the hood, there's this really strange and powerful beastie that will do your bidding for you.

Good Mac software : Mail, TextMate, Calendar, Adium, iTunes, iWork, Delicious Library, Toast; there's just a whole bunch of really nice, well made apps which just work

MacPorts : The developers hardware store -- you want it, just grab it off the shelf. Sorted.

Parallels + BootCamp : This really is the best way to run Windows. Lock that fucker up in a box, don't let it out unless it's, really, really necessary. Parallels makes using windows the most surreal experience; seeing ugly windows over the top of your shiny Mac desktop in coherence mode is the strangest thing. But, it's so convenient.

What I'm struggling with

Windows windows everywhere : it's a little hard to explain, but I do get quite lost trying to locate the last window I was working on. Command-Tab is useful, minimizing stuff to the dock is weird -- I can minimize something, but if that application is still active, there doesn't seem to be a command key to maximize it.

Bad Mac software : as with most operating systems there is a load of junk out there.

Unix : I don't have a heap of experience in this environment, so I've got to sharpen my chops. I'm enjoying the challenge, but hoping that I don't screw anything up.

Just sublime

And there's the hardware, and this is where it gets a little creepy; it's freakin' beautiful. I kinda want to touch it in inappropriate ways. Do you think Jobs would care?