The Simian Downtime Analyst

Was clicking about on Mashable and saw a post about Vigster, a social networking site for gamers. Being a bit of a gamer, I got excited about it. Went to the site and was bored. Bored. I had seen another site named dropped by a semi anonymous poster named Gary. GiantBomb.com. I went to GB and found that their silly logo really brightens up the site. It seemed easier to navigate, and it looks like it has potential to amass games to it catalog much quicker due to a nice submit button on the games page.
What really sold me on GB was the silly hype video they made for users to embed and promote them.
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Ok, we all know how much I despise Twitter. And if you do not know, that is very surprising. Me and James have growled about it many times.

Today, I noticed that we were picking up a little bit of traffic from FriendFeed. While I do not hate FriendFeed as much, it is along the same vein. I decided since some of the people that check us out hang out on FriendFeed, that I would chill out about it and check the place out. It’s one of those situations where you really hate doing something, but you basically have to. (more…)

Update per Nicholas of GoAnimate:

[We] have a contest going on right now on the website. Any user creating an animation from now until October 1st has a chance to win a US$5,000 cash prize.

Well we already love ToonDoo here for the comic panels, but there is another animation site vying for our attention. Its called GoAnimate and it guides the user in making simple animations. It is not as intuitive to as ToonDoo (but only by a little) and there seem to be way less characters to choose from. But here is Tom (yes the characters are pre-named) with a demo.

Why does that title make me want a bag of Ruffles?
Anywho…Hulu has pretty little widgets you can drop into your site and list some videos. It varies between just popular stuff and being able to customize it to your personal queue.
I think its pretty sweet, but then again Hulu bought my allegiance ages ago. Check it out for yourself.

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Well thanks to some Google alumni, there is a new search engine on the block named Cuil. If you did not catch the likely obscure reference to a BabyFace song in the title, the name is pronounced “cool”. The engine just launched a few hours ago and it was already broken by the time I searched for a third topic.
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Today is SysAdmin Day:

Let’s face it, System Administrators get no respect 364 days a year. This is the day that all fellow System Administrators across the globe, will be showered with expensive sports cars and large piles of cash in appreciation of their diligent work. But seriously, we are asking for a nice token gift and some public acknowledgement. It’s the least you could do.

Happy SysAdmin Day!, Jul 2008

Thinkgeek has some gifts for them. (more…)

Google Walk!

New beta-ness for your enjoyment with Google, rejoice followers! Now showing next to the Directions is a link for Walk, to give you a basic idea on how you could take your trip by foot. There could even be a different route than you would normally drive, maybe there is a hidden footpath you did not yet know about? Also it’ll also show you approximately how long it’ll take to get there. This, perhaps could be one of the greatest greeneries of the month.
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