Just a quick note to everyone out there that Jameson and I survived the Atlanta Downtown Tornado of 2008 (I’m trying to make it sound more dramatic than it really was).

Strangely enough, I was outside walking my dog when the tornado hit — only just now did I find out that I was merely a few miles from the path of the tornado. I remember it being a nasty storm, and getting pretty drenched with rain, but I had no idea it was as bad as it was until I opened the door to my place and the power on the entire street went out. For about 5 seconds it was eerily quiet and very dark.

From my view outside, I can see downtown, and it is strange to see a few buildings still with holes in the windows and curtains flapping in the wind.

A strange occurrence, for sure — Atlanta hasn’t ever had a tornado in the downtown area (at least since they’ve been keeping track).

Life is good!

Baxter Street Lofts is very close to completion, and the entire site looks amazing. Jodi’s been working non-stop putting the final pieces in place. If you want to picture Jodi these days, just imagine her face glued to her Red Treo mobile phone with a huge stack of files in one hand and her MacBook balancing on the other arm.

Mom is working the Millard Fuller booth (founder of Habitat for Humanity) at the Atlanta Home Show this weekend.

Highgroove Studios is doing better than ever. Our clients just plain rock, and we’ve really honed our process down to pure good-ness. Our long-term goals are clear, our vision is good, and our team is rock-star solid.

I’ve been heads-down, getting Scout ready to launch. We *just* finally got the virtualized, geographically-disperse (InterNAP and AtlantaNAP) hosted web/application instances up. The two database instances (also virtualized and geographically-disperse) are configured with Master-Master replication and have hardware fail-over load-balancing. That’s some pretty serious hardware and setup — but all worth it when I tested by dropping one of the servers while inserting some records through the web application, and rebooting with no hiccups, not even a noticeable lag or nothing!

My dog, Jameson, my little work buddy, sits next to me every day while I work, reminding me when it is time to take a break. She is also a really good listener when it comes to explaining AJAX page updates or general Ruby on Rails questions. As I type this, I’m getting a reminder that it *is* time, right now.