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.

The Big Nerd Ranch Ruby on Rails Bootcamp was a smashing success. I’m happy to be back home with the wifey and doggy. The course was intense — chock full of knowledge, eager students, and real-word best practices.

Yes, some of us stayed up late nights (until 2:00am one night) hacking, developing, and architecting Rails applications.

If you are looking to get up to speed quickly on the Ruby on Rails framework, the Big Nerd Ranch course is definitely the way to go.

OK, shameless plug over, but really, check out Steven G. Harm’s blogging on the event.  I love his writing style and blog.  Great stuff!

Derek and I competed (and sponsored) the Rails Day 2006 competition.

We successfully built and deployed an application we call Heartbeat in 24 hours.

Yes, you heard that right, 24 hours. We started at midnight on June 16, and ended at 11:59 pm. We got a little bit of sleep, and yes, my butt still hurts from sitting at the computer all day, but we built an amazing application.

Here are some screen shots:

And here are some stats (and our commit log — notice how my commit comments are crazy, and got crazier the closer to finishing and yet Derek’s are always nice and concise):

http://spectate.railsday2006.com/changesets/teams/107/

Rails Day 2006 was a blast, and we look forward to sponsoring and competing in the years to come!

Every other night, in the parking deck across from our condo, around the hours of 11:00pm or 12:00am (or sometimes later), a guy in a jacked up jeep wrangler goes racing through the parking lot, squealing tires at every turn, before he gets out on the road and runs the stop-signs in front of our building before accelerating off into the night.

Well, he won’t be doing that any more. At least not in that jeep.

Tonight, it exploded, into fiery flames.

And while I didn’t catch the explosion, I saw the last of the flames and the blackened, smothering remains being put out by the two firetrucks. If I had only had my digital camera.

Lucky for you, I took these shots using my iSight, they’re blurry, dark, and you can’t see much. And if you squint, you can see the glee in my face in the reflection of the glass.

MacBook Pro with 2 GB RAM

Tiger OS X optimized for Intel x86

Virtualized (Parallels) Windows XP SP2 (slipstreamed image)

BootCamp Beta from Apple

x11 VNC and normal VNCserver to Fedora Box at home
VMWare running VMWare image of RH4

The screenshot:

I broke it already. Well, I didn’t actually break it or do anything, really, but for some reason the Delete key keeps coming off. Like, amazingly annoyingly, everytime I use it.

What’s up with that?

I’ve also managed to crash the Dock, and FrontRow has occasionally gone bananas on me (eating up 100% CPU, and I swear I saw it jump to 101% CPU, which must mean that dual core is eating up both processors). Otherwise she’s good to go.

My annoyance with the Home and End keys not working the Terminal (or lots of different windows) is enough to make me start to think about getting a full-size keyboard, but it’s probably a feature of the program, not the Apple-Right-Arrow that’s not working, which could spell bad-news for this convert.

And I’m still in love….

Bluetooth synchronized to my Windows Mobile 2003 Smartphone - one click connects me to the GPRS network (can you say, internet anywhere)?

p.s. I’m posting from the WordPressDash widget. Too cool for school.

Yeeee-haw. Looks like another exciting week in Nashville, trying to move our document imaging system into production here at the Tennessee Department of Correction. Problems: Incompetent Firewall Adminstration Doods, Lackadaisical Government Workers, a development server that is by far the slowest, most antiquated, piece of sh!t ever (my laptop is faster and more capable), and FileNet.

I just want to say, damn all those social networking sites for taking up all of my precious time! If only they weren’t so friggin’ addictive!

BJ’s Warehouse Club - Natick, MA. 8:10 Flight to Boston, met up with Steve Chiang, for Server Tuning Workshop. Working Wed 9-5, 11p-5a, Thur 12-4!

BJ’s came up with the slogan, “Ask Me About BJs!” and had quite a few buttons printed for store employees before someone probably snickered too much (what a dirty mind), and it got yanked. Good story. I don’t get it.

A Minado in Natick, MA, holy moly!

Is it wierd that I HATE livejournal so much? I hate it because I could literally spend hours upon hours of my life reading about the tragic day-by-day musings of 18-22 year old emo-distraught-artsy-drama-black-eye-liner girls. Yikes! Is this legal?

Also, how come everyone has their own version of their September 11 story? I would not care to hear what you were doing that day, sorry. Oh, you watched it on TV too? Me too! I know, I know, box-cutters–how did they do it, for real?OK, OK, such negativity, I’ll stop.

My blog, if left unchecked, will turn into me making fun of everything, and I’m nervous the party I am currently engaged in critical analysis of, will read it - but more nervous that I will realize I am a truly negative person, and I hate EVERYTHING. Just kidding.

The theme is self-promotion, man, c’mon! In that case, I’m starting a streaming radio station. Yes, I will play lots of wierd down-tempo, acid-jazz, and electronic music. And yes, the indie station is in the mix as well.

My younger brother Kevin has moved to Atlanta - into a pretty sweet little place, might I add.

I’m excited, we’re going to be taking el furioso up a notch, perhaps building a pilot/movie soon….

Stay tuned….