Down at Highgroove Studios, we’ve finally lifted the wraps off Scout, our simple solution to server monitoring and reporting.

It’s true, we’ve been using Scout internally now for months, and it has proven its usefulness time and time again. We’ve also been collecting meticulous feedback from our pre-launch users. We hope it saves our customers as much time as it has saved us.

See the Scout Blog announcement here: Scout Opens to the Public
See our blog announcement here: Scout’s Grand Opening

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.

Jodi and I attended our good friend Ben Krause’s gallery showing last Friday - a solo exhibition by another good friend of ours, a talented artist named David Peterson.

I’ve known David for a little while, and always loved his work. I take that back: I friggin’ love this guy and his work. Another disclaimer: we commissioned him to do a large piece for our home. I have watched his work over the past years, and I was looking forward to his solo show.

I remember walking in the gallery last Friday and being blown away. The show was amazing. As a techie/engineer-type, to me, his resin-based artwork resembles amazingly clear flat-panel like displays showing the most intricate, detailed patterns and colors. Pure blacks, and bright colors — amazing, just awesome. For even more of David’s work, check out his website at davidepeterson.com.

I got this letter from my pal Javier:

Dear englishspeaking friends

As you might have already heard, we’re planning a little roadtrip in may 2008 starting from Zürich to Odessa (Ukraine). We’ll be driving about 3000km in 10 days in a car that should cost less than CHF 500 (~ $425). The cars will be sold in Odessa and the profit will be donated to a local NGO.

Intrested in joining us? Write an email before the end october that contains the following information:

1. Teamname
2. First name, last name and email-address of every team member.

The maximum number of cars will be 20, so: First come, first served!

Gentlemen, start your engines!

Carlo, Duri and Javier

P.S.: Excuse our english, but it’s not our fault that your german sucks.

I’m sitting on the porch of the Georgia Tech’s Solar Home, listening in on the strategy sessions on regulating the power from the array of solar panels on the roof. The competition’s scoring system has all kinds of regulations, rules, and ways to earn points. This means the strategies range from making sure the electric car is drawing excess energy from the panels, while running the dishwasher to using passive cooling (opening the doors) versus simply saving up energy to complete the energy balance (no net loss) daily.

The competition is really heating up. Georgia Tech’s team is a bit bummed about their placement in the Lighting category. Their entire concept is based on Lighting — and is quite spectacular, with the best natural light of all the homes, in my humble opinion. Somehow, with their clever use of LED, florescent, and sun-light, they got placed last (20th), and not just last, but quite far behind the 19th place finisher. It’s quite baffling, and it’s dropped them from 2nd to 4th, which says a lot about how well they’re still doing in every other category.

The mood on the mall of DC is very cool. Last night, Jodi was giving me a “private” tour when Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) walked up with a few aides, and wanted a tour as well. So, Bernie and I toured the home with Jodi as our guide.

Georgia Tech’s Team Icarus is competing in this year’s Department of Energy sponsored Solar Decathalon.  Jodi has been working tirelessly for the past year on the house as part of her Architecture Master’s degree, or what I like to call her “early retirement” (only kidding honey).  Her impeccable design talents really show through.  She’s way too modest to blog about it, but, I, on the other hand, have to do some shameless promotion to give this blog its namesake.  Plus, I’m killing two birds with one stone by blogging about this awesome environmental cause as part of Blog Action Day 2007.

Just some insider facts about the Georgia Tech’s Solar Home:

• The solar panels covering the roof power the full home and home office, and an electric car.
• It has a sexy Bulthaup kitchen with a full glass window where a sink floats over it.  German, modern, industrial, clean lines with a Bisaza glass tile backsplash make this kitchen hott.
• It has a “transparent” roof — this is cool because all around the top of the roof there’s sunlight streaming in, and with the solar panels able to move on levers, this house lets in a serious amount of light.  This could mean lots of extra heat, but the aerogel insulation and clever shading do a good job of just letting light in and keeping heat out.
• The shower has a full floor to ceiling window for “showing off your assets” to your neighbors.  Actually, I can see this house on the side of a mountain or on the beach….

I’m going up to Washington DC to visit the competition, and Jodi this Wednesday through Saturday.  I’ll be tumbloging the event.  As it stands now, Georgia Tech is in 2nd place!

I just went down to Blockbuster Video (and had to re-sign up for a membership, it’s been so long), and rented 8 movies for a total of about 31 bucks (I got a free one).

I whipped out my trust copy of HandBrake (for the Mac).  Set it to iPhone, and hit rip.  My flight to Frankfurt is looking bearable already.

To Whom It May Concern:

Please accept my SECOND FINAL attempt at paying off a balance for a charge I did not authorize. You see, I haven’t used your crappy credit card since 2003, and somehow one of those Internet companies charged $14.95 to an already expired, non-activated card (which I still can’t figure out how they were able to do). Unbeknownst to me, your company purchased the previous Credit Card company, MBNA, through which this Georgia Tech Alumni Credit Card was issued, and never bothered to get my account working for your paperless billing system.

You reported my account delinquent, and closed the account without contacting me. Ever. When I finally decided to pay you losers off using your phone system, since you couldn’t take any other forms of payments, I found out a month later, that you charged me $10.00 for paying off my $19.00 balance (14.95 plus all those huge late fees). Please accept this payment of $21.50 which includes another $10.00 in addition to the $10.00 fee and $1.50 who-knows-what charge. Keep the damn change.

Thank you,

a customer you will never have to deal with again.

It’s a great time to be a techy. Here’s my top 5 run down of why:

1. The Apple iPhone. I don’t want to sound like a Apple Fan Boy, but of all the techno-gadgets out right now, it’s got to be the coolest. When I was young, I was enthralled with a show called “Beyond 2000” and in some of the interviews with the designers of the Flying Car, “they” said that by 2008, there would be many families owning these flying cars. Well, we don’t have flying cars, but we do have a tiny hand-held device that can hold GBs of music, movies, TV shows, and pictures, can take and share pictures, provide maps of the world on command, satellite imagery, directions, and is a full-fledged Internet device that switches from on demand edge to wifi seamlessly. Oh, and is the best phone (dialing, answering calls, syncing contacts, visual voicemail) out there. Truly futuristic.
2. Rapid Web Development Frameworks. It is truly easy to build rapid, effective, database-backed, web applications and deploy them on the Internet, securely or publicly for anyone and everyone to just plain “get things done.” Technologies like Ruby on Rails, the Django Framework for Python, Java (maybe) and PHP (possibly), simple open APIs, easy cross-platform Javascript libraries, the Open Source stack of Apache on Linux, and the excited-ness and open-ness of the “Web 2.0″ community makes building these kinds of things fun.
3. DVRs. Tivos and Tivo-like technologies are fundamentally changing how we view television. My MythTV server (I keep rebuilding it) can record HD over the air, and content from my DirecTV box, very easily. When I miss something I want to watch, I order it off iTunes, or simply watch it on one of the network sites like nbc.com or abc.com or maybe a torrent network (or friend). Oh, and I don’t watch commercials. MythTV automatically detects them (using black screen fades, logo detection, and other algorithms), and I hit one key to skip all of ‘em. Watch for social networking type functionality, like interacting with other TV viewers (my friends) to really bump this technology to the next level.
4. VOIP. Skype, Asterisk, Vonage, and others make it easy for someone (me) to have a phone number in almost any area code (or toll free) that rings to multiple phones, soft(-ware based), or real, and then rings elsewhere, turns voicemail into text/e-mail, and receives faxes turned into pdfs and delivered to my e-mail inbox. Hosted VOIP services will be very disruptive technologies in short time.
5. Social Networks. Yes, it’s true: MySpace enabled all teenagers (and tweens and twenty-somethings) with a computer to make the ugliest web pages in the world — the equivalent of rainbow HRs, dancing baby animated gifs, and MIDIs playing in the background (you remember?) — technology-one-upped as photo slideshows between text, youtube videos everywhere, and embedded mp3s in the background. But, despite my cynicism, networks like Linked In, and now Facebook are mingling business and pleasure, and connecting people presently (friends, classmates, work-mates), historically (old class-mates, old pals), and forward-in-time (in groups and ways they didn’t know exist) in totally new ways. I think they also show some ads too, though I’m not sure. Even if they have no intrinsic value to many people right now, the fact that a majority (or is it closer to 99%) of all college students are using sites like Facebook on a day-to-day basis mean they aren’t going away when they get into the workforce. This kind of connectivity and open-ness will be demanded and expected in the workplace, soon.

Hey alright, I made it to 5. It really is a great time to be into technology. Highgroove Studios and all our ventures are doing fantastically, and we are simply having a terrific time working on all kinds of fun stuff, like web development using Ruby on Rails, apps on the iPhone, Facebook integration, and maybe some top-secret stuff, soon to be revealed….

If you’re into techno-babble as much as me, there are some events (in Atlanta) coming up that you might want to check out, including the Georgia Tech College of Computing Alumni Association’s Net Neutrality Panel, the Ruby User’s Group and Python User’s Group meetings (meetup), Startup Weekend Atlanta, and BarCamp Atlanta. Techno-babblers, rejoice!