About 18 months or so ago we started to experience a spike in attempted break ins. They're fairly typical in their nature — probably a small bot-net attempting a dictionary style attack to login to our server by guessing email addresses and passwords. We've configured our mail server to start ringing alarm bells if it detects any unauthorised login attempts and then throw up a firewall.

We're now starting to encounter some more sophisticated attempts and these are targeted against specific email addresses. These attempts are still automated and designed not to trigger the alerts. In fact, it was largely by accident that we realised this was happening. Our biggest issue here though, is that the attacker is now targeting specific user names and is guessing the password.

We're responding to this in a couple of ways, we've introduced our own firewall rules and stopped using the mail server security. This appears to have stopped the break in attempts for the moment. The 'intelligence' acquired by the hackers to profile our mail server is now useless.

We've also been in contact with our mail server software provider. They have introduced a mechanism for altering peoples login credentials for the domains concerned. The email address is no longer the same as that being used to connect. We can now employ a security prefix for a domain that looks like a subdomain for example dave@hisdomain.com authenticates as dave@mysecret.hisdomain.com the prefix "mysecret" is never leaked outside of the mail server. It acts like a domain based password. Combined with SSL connectivity, the only way someone can learn a username is by being told the prefix by the domain owner.

We're hoping that this will help to thwart the break-in attempts for a long while.

We started seeing our first attacks 18 months ago and in the last few months we're now seeing targeted attacks against our users. This is happening because email address and password combinations are becoming valuable targets. Many systems and online software are using them for logins and password recovery is often done via an existing email address. If by simply having access to read your email, a hacker could recover passwords and gain access to other systems and websites that you use.

We think that this is probably happening to other people, and by sharing our experiences we hope that you'll consider investing some time in securing your server and educating your users about their own personal security.

We'd also suggest that if your mail server authenticates using the email address, perhaps you should lobby your software provider and ask them to consider using a different authentication technique.

1Password by Agile Bits software also goes a long way towards making the authentication and password management experience much more secure and accessible for everyone.

Many thanks to David Hook for co-authoring this post and providing his technical insight.

I'm a director of a cooperative open to all subscribers who may pay a tiny monthly fee to host their website and email on our server. We rent rackspace and buy bandwidth at commercial rates. We have worked hard, and grown slowly over eight years to build a community of nerds, artists, fan-clubs, small business and non-profits who will share the bill for those commercial services.

Our monthly subscriber fee doesn't include a commercial hosting service. None the less, our small team of volunteer members work hard to provide the best care that we can for the needs of our diverse subscriber base. We try to resolve email forwarding and routing problems, we work very hard to prevent our server from being breached by the sometimes apocalyptic storm of hackers trying to break in and we work very, very hard to minimise the amount of bandwidth that our server uses.

Occasionally we are subject to extraordinary bandwidth events. As a result we're also subject to the additional charges associated with that bandwidth. We try hard to maintain a fair balance between keeping our monthly subscriber charges low and selecting a monthly bandwidth strategy that suits the needs of our subscribers. This includes the traffic to their domains and also any amount of email traffic they sustain.

Extraordinary bandwidth events have included a slash-dotting and recently a link from the BBC News website to one of our subscriber websites. They're infrequent, but can consume nearly half of our monthly bandwidth allowance in twelve hours and if unchecked can be devastating.

On the other hand we host one or two websites which sustain moderate daily traffic and need our attention to ensure they run efficiently.

One of those websites is a fan forum which accounts for a very large portion of our monthly traffic. We found that by helping them improve the performance of their website — tuning their database, tuning apache, g-zipping their pages among a bunch of other tweaks — their traffic increased. By doing this, we overlooked the simplest equation; if you make web pages load faster, visitors will use that advantage to view more pages. Viewing more pages meant more outgoing traffic, which meant that we'd be using more of our bandwidth!

All this has finally lead to us throttling the website. It's completely opaque to our subscriber and their visitors in that they have noticed no discernible difference in the speed of the website. Ultimately it keeps the outgoing bandwidth on that website way down and within manageable levels.

We've done all we can to keep the server from huffing and puffing. We've also done the right thing by our subscribers to ensure that there is enough bandwidth available for everyone. We also have enough bandwidth for additional subscribers, their growth and the occasional burst in traffic.

That problem stems from immaturity and an unwillingness accept the directions and decisions set in a project. Furthermore it points to a lack of authority and credibility when raising objections to those decisions or direction. "Raising objections" is a very sanitised way of saying whining, moaning, complaining and resistance.

A pure-blood consultant knows the levers to pull and push that effect change and redirect a project towards their own preferences. A white-hat consultant obviously does this in alignment with the business goals and objectives. A black-hat consultant does this for personal benefit and disregard for the goals and objectives.

What are those levers though? — The answer really depends on your objectives. The actions required to effect change in process are different from those required to effect a change in the direction of a project.

A project being run in a modern way (agile, scrum, lean...whatever) is normally structured so that you are involved and have opportunities to feedback and offer suggestions about that a project. If you're thoughtful about your observations you can be influential during a retro and tease out concrete action. If not immediately, you at least have the opportunity to re-raise issues and direct attention towards them from a different angle.

Feedback must be accompanied with credibility and authority — failure to establish yourself in this way through your actions or communication will only lead to further frustration.

Often, my failure is to establish my credibility and authority, then to break through issues like a sledge-hammer. My severe objections come as an unpleasant and unwanted to surprise to someone who, for all intents and purposes, believes they are doing the right thing. While I can sometimes be excused for "wearing my heart on my sleeve", it is not an effective way to bring about change and it's something I'm working on.

We're all human, how do you change what you don't have ownership of?

As I sat stupefied at my desk with an extremely patient pair, I certainly felt a deep sadness. I really felt like I was in the wrong place. I missed my son very much — especially having just left him in childcare begging for me not to leave.

There are three aspects of staying at home that I found challenging, enjoyable, rewarding and distinct from office work. At home: it's physical, it's emotional and it is social at a community level. Office work is sedentary, intellectual and "interpersonal".

I loved the physicality of being at home. There is really so much to do, all the classic chores — cooking, cleaning, washing — some of which you have to do while carrying a toddler. Plus there are the extra-curricular activities that you do to entertain a toddler — visits to the pool, the park, the zoo, the library and the museum. AND there are the myriad ways of getting there — walk, bike, tram, train. Huge fun.

Looking after a baby / toddler is also emotional because you have to connect with them at a really subconscious level. You have to know when they would need a drink, need something to eat, need to have a nap. Sure, after a while, routine helps to make these things less instinctive, but in the early days you're really just trying to tune into their needs. In time those signals become much clearer and you respond instinctively.

Being part of the community and spending time with our playgroup was indeed one of the highlights of staying at home. It was also a huge saviour from the unexpected isolation and loneliness.

I kept taking Eric to my wife's mothers group when I took over and I am really grateful to have met such a lovely bunch of women (and fathers). So many experiences are shared, but there is so much to discuss as well since all the kids grew and developed in their own unique ways. Having a thoughtful group of people to discuss these experiences with was a relief and a lot of fun.

It was also great to spend heaps of time at our local coffee shop meeting people from the neighbourhood — more women and children of course. From these exchanges you get to know people gradually and after a while, there are much less strangers in the neighbourhood.

There's no doubt about office work being sedentary, no doubt about the demand on our intellect. Yet, the social nature of office work is quite different than what you experience in the neighbourhood.

I'm still trying to put my finger on that difference. There's a certain amount of propriety in an office. I guess it provides a structure that helps ensure long term stability. With that social stability in place it provides the foundation for productivity. Nothing is more disruptive in an office than in-fighting and bullying as examples of anti-social behaviour.

I guess too, that we maintain our propriety to keep our colleagues at arms distance. The scope of our relationships are focused on work and our shared interests based around work and the skills we bring to our work. Occasionally though (and my wife is especially good at this) we find that those shared interests extend beyond our work and into our "outside" lives in these instances, real friendships grow. I find this difficult, yet I am grateful though to have met many fantastic people in the workplace.

I don't mean to have painted a bleak picture. I've only been back a couple of days: I'm lucky to have the support of my colleagues and I'm also lucky to be working on good project with some good guys.

I have returned to the adult realm, my life having been transformed forever.

When he was nearly 15 months, I wrote down all of his words (in no particular order);

star, car, ham, duck, dog, pea, bus, poo, shoes, sock, cup, hand, ball, bowl, butterfly (buuuh), bee, bee-aaah (cat), stick, light, park, box, mum, dad, croc, drag (dragon).

These 25 words or so were a perfect reflection of the things around him, the things we read, the things we ate, the things we did and the things that interested him.

Five months later I attempted to capture his words at 19 1/2 months old. It's not easy, because it's expanding at a rapid rate. Here's what I got down;

draw, pad, phone, box, bucket, bowl, plate, chair sit, book, guitar, pants, spoon, fork, mix, dance, TV, blocks, see-saw, pram, keys, door, nap[py] bus, bat, tree, flower, grass, sand, bath, ear, mouth, hair, chin, feet, toe, leg, arm, eye, neck, head, hat, tum, doodie, bum, poo, pee, more, flap, floor, [dim-]sum, pond, chomp, bat, gone, fall, broken, all, bag, tea, cup, come, here, mine, stop, wait, hey, fun, inside, outside, up, down, open, close, drink, milk, strawb[erry], egg, meat, play, no, park, slide, swing, eat, grape, gram (grandma), grump (grandpa), roll, bun[ny], climb, cream, cool, frog, horse, cat, dog, pig, bear, ma (Jemima), dragon, fish, bee, bird, duck, Hump[ty], bear, pot, buzz, tap, bub[ble], giraffe, tray, tea, ballon, see, sun, moon, towel, button, ball, rain, wet, cook, pan, Tom, square, queen, green, blue, red, plane, train, tram, bus, beep, okay, glove, [orangu]tang, dolphin, done, hen, hat, hug, bib, bed, light, on, pea, milk, guy, straw, talk, walk, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, dip, teeth, comb, bean, please, broccoli, apple, plum, orange, fox, jug, cup, stuck, again, pen, baby, game, ted, burp, pardon, ah-huh, no, okay, red, blue, black, white, brown.

It doesn't seem like much, but that's nearly 200 words. As a parent with a toddler, that simply makes our lives infinitely easier. What these words only partly reflect is the conceptual stuff that Eric understands — which is way beyond his vocabulary. Simply put, we can ask him questions and he can say "ah-huh" or "no".

If the first words you can encourage your child to speak are an affirmative or a negative, be they "yes", "no", "yup", "nah" or whatever, it'll make your life a whole lot easier. I realise that I lot of kids learn "no" first, I guess we're lucky that Eric understood them both pretty early.

What's especially interesting is the impact that Meli and I have had on his language during the holiday break while we've both been around.

We've been able to encourage his manners more — instead of standing at our feet and saying "UP UP!", he now stands at our feet and pleads "Up, pleeease." He is forming a strong conceptual understanding of "Please" and what it means for getting stuff or simply bossing people around. He's coupling it with a bunch of his verbs; "Down please", "Sit please", "Draw please". In all of these cases these are things he wants Meli or I do to — put him down, sit with him, or draw for him. We're delighted that he's bossy.

Eric is coupling a lot more than his verbs and is very actively working on describing things; "Red car" and "Big train".

The coolest word though and the one I'm most proud to hear him say — his name, Eric.

I'm personally affronted because I have been tagged as being "distracted by shiny objects". This label is meant to mean that when I am working or pairing, I am unable to focus on the task at hand — that I am distracted by problems outside the scope of the story. While I'm sure it's an amusing and convenient label for my colleagues to apply, I don't think they've taken the time to consider why I might be distracted.

Two quick ideas come to mind; boredom and lack of discipline. Obviously some stories are just so trivial that to stave off boredom you go looking for other things to do for stimulation. Really though, this is an expression of a lack of discipline.

You must practice software development with discipline. I have encountered this so consistently whilst working with Cogent. Being disciplined won't guarantee you success but it will ensure that you have a consistent stack trace of behaviour to review if you fail.

Retros and stand-ups are other instances where I find myself being chastised for not conforming to the cult of efficiency's code. It's usually because I tend to ask questions regarding the notes placed on the board.

Retros aren't straight forward. The abundance of literature surrounding retros supports this. Retros are meant to be outcome focused, there can often be so many issues and ideas gathered during a retro that you may not get an opportunity to speak them. In those cases the group decides that the issue simply isn't important enough, and should be disregarded. Yet it was important enough for the individual to raise it, sometimes it's not easy to abandon those thoughts.

Three things can happen when you place an item on the board during a retro; the whole team goes "YEAH" — there is a shared understanding of your item or, the team goes "HUH?" — what you've placed on the board is entirely out of left field and all are happy to wait for you to explain it later and finally, "MEH" — no one really cares.

I find that I often like to ask a quick question about an item for some context. This is when the retro bullies start tut-tutting — "You must wait until later." I find this incredibly frustrating. By no means to I wish to impede the flow of a retro, but sheesh.

I don't think that in this instance, lack discipline is entirely the case, but a personal difference (defiance perhaps) which seeks some conversation and affiliation during a retro. Many I have attended have become sterile and rushed — often a chore that folks participate in by obligation rather than genuine interest.

Conducting a retro is something practiced by all at Cogent, ensuring that junior consultants get a chance at running them. I think though, that our senior and more experienced consultants need to work harder to bring something special to the table to ensure that retros are useful and engaging.

I started this post rallying against the cult of efficiency and wound up identifying my own lack of discipline and different needs within the group. I'm certain that there is a pervasive cult, I just need to gather more evidence.

The obvious was pointed out to me by Meli, that the primary purpose of their positioning is for volume; softer instruments at the front and the louder instruments to the rear. Less obvious though, was another suggestion by a colleague, that it is a matter of convenience for the conductor, to enable line of sight.

What I'm concerned with though is whether or not the musicians are positioned in such a way as to stimulate the left (logical), and right (creative) hemispheres of the brain.

I noticed that generally, when the audience is facing the stage, the melodic instruments are usually placed to the left side and the rhythmic instruments to the right.

In this way, music which provides the rhythm, structure and mode of the piece enters primarily the right ear and stimulates the left and logical side of the brain.

Music which provides the melody and often the tension against the rhythm and structure enters the left ear and stimulates the right and creative side of the brain.

Honestly, I don't know much about the science of this, a few Google searches didn't really provide any evidence to support the idea that music is heard and interpreted this way.

None the less, orchestras have been arranged in this way for well over two hundred years. Surely there must be some evidence (and I'll accept colloquial evidence) that there is some sense to this.

"It" is all the cache and association that people make (particularly those people in the technology and development space) when they think of developers, coaches and team leaders who practice agile software development.

Much to my chagrin, Steve has not blogged under the Cogent banner. He has blogged under his own name (or the iridescent urchin). This means that the momentum and value that Steve brings to the discussion and discourse on agile and development process has a tertiary link to Cogent not a primary link if his writing was posted under our banner.

Worse still, there is an underlying belief that there is waste associated with setting up any form of blogging or content publishing on our own website. This further prevents us providing a platform to associate quality discourse and thinking about agile and development with the Cogent name in a primary sense.

To muddy waters further, we aggregate all of our team blog posts under a subdomain at blogs.cogentconsulting.com.au. In one sense this is an efficient way to gather those posts and "rebrand" them as Cogent, but it seems to lack some kind of authenticity to me.

For those who think this about image, you're mistaken -- it's about the association people make in their minds between Cogent as an entity and agile software development as the service that we provide. This is about people, not Google search indexing, and while Google helps, it can also reveal inauthentic or ambiguous associations if they exist.

We're pretty active on the tweeting front though. Yet, we have a CogentThoughts twitter account that one or two of us very, very rarely post to. We're not actively celebrating our successes, nor are we advancing or agitating the discussion around agile software development using channels associated with our name.

It's rather embarrassing to say this, but it's been nearly ten years since I read The Clue Train Manifesto, yet the core theme still resonates with me; markets are conversations.

Some businesses converse visually (images, logos), others converse aurally (music, podcasts), others in a more meta-physical way such as the quality of service you had while engaging them or, the way they conduct themselves during business. Any way it happens, all of this contributes to the conversation that occurs between a business, the customers that engage it and the community that surrounds it.

The conversations we have with the people we do business with, the community, our colleagues and our peers all contributes to the association that people make with our name and the work that we do. And I believe that's what brand is.

We at Cogent will need to consider how we start to pull all our activity and thinking together so that there is a primary association with our people, agile software development and Cogent Consulting.

I find this kind of approach to solving business problems disingenuous.

I also drives me crazy when I hear customers say this, "Look, we don't need the Rolls Royce version, we just need the Commodore version, just enough to get us on the road."

Again, this analogy fails to capture the need to ensure that the solution is fit-for-purpose. Sure, we can get the customer on the road, but if they're intending to take that ordinary sedan into the outback they're going to find themselves severely wanting.

Time and time again, I find myself rallying against my colleagues (and unfortunately my customers) determined to make them see that the choice they're making is not fit-for-purpose and will fall short of their expectations.

I appreciate the tension that exists between the budget a customer has and their highest expectations. I expect that customers are already compromising before they come to us for solutions. But I often fail to reconcile two things; why they often never tell us what their highest expectations are, and why they think they can get away with a cheap solution.

Consulting is not an easy business, in particular I find the implicit subservience unnerving. You can overcome this by committing to engage your customer as closely and regularly as you can. If your customer is disengaged from the software your developing for them, a disconnect can occur between the problems they experience in their business, the problems you perceive that exist in their business, the solutions you're working on and the solutions that the customer imagines you're working on.

If you commit to an ongoing dialogue about their intent, you'll soon know if you're building something that is fit-for-purpose, and they'll know if they're asking for something that isn't. You're also going to find yourself in a equitable relationship with your customer, hopefully avoiding the master and slave scenario we all dread.

What this takes though, is trust and honesty from both parties...plus a touch of courage and a dash of care on our part as developers.

Every few years or so, I find myself feeling a little lost. Who am I? What am I doing? Where am I going? Who do I want to be? What do /I/ want to do?

While I'm getting a better handle on who I am. It's just the other questions that I'm a little hazy on at the moment.

Of course, I can hear every pragmatic economic realist screaming: you work to support your family, to provide a safe and secure environment for your son to grow up in!. We'll duh - of course, but part of that is determined by how happy and fulfilled I am in my work and life.

I'm very conscious of not crashing and burning out, suffering depression and loss of identity many years later. I don't want to find myself having lived an unfulfilled life.

Having said that, that I feel this way every few years or so doesn't necessarily make me any better at resolving these feelings or answering these questions. Yet I do take solace knowing that I do ask these questions. The unexamined life is not worth living.

With all that considered I've got Merlin Mann now screaming in my ears -- first, care.

Problem I have at the moment is that I've been loudly proclaiming that I don't care. I've been frustrated with the purpose of my work at the moment and haven't felt close to the end product. References to software development being as part of a "line" don't help. Nor do "backlogs". This is the language of machinery and productivity, it's not the language of creativity or connection with your work.

What's especially wrong with this is that I do care about what I do and I part of my frustration is that I have found myself separated from the deterministic part of my work. I'm reduced to twiddling bits. And that really blows.

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!