The Simian Downtime Analyst

Lots of things are going on behind the scenes around here at SDA.  We could not do the gaming we wanted to do today due to the aforementioned Live outage, so we decided it was the day to be productive in other ways.

With a little focus here, we will be exploring ways of providing new content thats at least a hair different than most.

Me and James are also collaborating on other projects as well which we hope to gush about at a  later date.

Image by BAMCAT via Flickr

So I’m over a friends hooking their XBox 360 to their wireless network for their son’s birthday and I see that Microsoft left a little note. Outages on Monday for users.

After a wee bit of surfing it seems that the outage will be extended to Zune users.

I might actually have to pry myself away from the Xbox and post an update Monday.

Image via CrunchBase

Well when Intense Debate and Disqus were lesser known….it was a bit of a coin toss on which one to use. We tried installing one on each blog we had, but for some reason ID would not install properly. Disqus did, and that is why its still on the blog. Both comment systems have great features and I would not really pit one as that much different from the other.

Automattic may have just decided to cater to the folks too lazy to pick one and install it, because they just acquired ID. Its great for ID, since they have the backing to add lots of features now. Its great for Automattic, since the built in WP comments lack. It is also great for the users of any comment system, because this just put a fire up under them.

Via the mouths at ID.

Image by airpark via Flickr

I got power back on Thursday, The Amber is still without power finally got power late Saturday. Its just too bad her internet connection will be down til next week. There’s a horde of golfers in the area for the Ryders Cup, and most of the street lamps are now burning properly. Honestly nothing else new for me to report on, have  a lot of catching up to do now.

Image via Wikipedia

This is the most green post ever! So green in fact, no electricity was used in producing it, only my extremely strong mental powers known as iPhonefication.

Remnants of Hurricane Ike, flowing up from the gulf collided with a low pressure system, creating a 100 mile wide vortex of insanely strong wind gusts, reaching 80 mph sometimes. Louisville, hometown of SDA, was smack dab in the middle.Louisville Gas & Electric has over 3000 lines down, and at the peak of the winds and damage on Sunday, they had over 300,000 customers without power in Jefferson County.

The last time this combination of hurricane winds and a low pressure system collided was in 1954. The winds still weren’t as strong as the tornado in 1974, where it reached 84 mph, but this by far was the most catastrophic incident to date. Both my home and my fathers have been without power since Sunday, and we had to take a tree down in my fathers front yard that was dangerously close to collapsing onto the house.

Our governer stated that Kentucky had over 500,000 people without power, majority of which were in Jefferson County. LG&E locally has said that some areas of town may not have power for up to 14 days. I’m even getting spotty cell reception here and there, so it’s a miracle I can even post this right now.

We will try to poke our heads in every once in a while, so don’t worry, we haven’t forgotten about you all. Have fun, and remember kids, playing with downed power lines may be fun, but it can also kill you, so wear protection.

Well it will be spotty around here for a bit. There is a bit of a local issue with power. Our local guys headed down to help the folks down in TX who are having a harder time.

We all love getting our hands on a good piece of software, some of us are even willing to shell out a few bucks for it. Well this is why Software Saturday was born. Freeware/Shareware/ Payware needs a home and we want to help. We will showcase them in every edition of Software Saturday. This time we showcase KM Player.

KM Player

A lot of folks use the old standards or they use VLC, which is a lovely piece of software in itself. Some of us get into arguments with VLC and have to part ways. KM player plays nice with everything you can throw at it for the most part. It runs on Windows 2000, 2003, XP, Vista as far as I know. Sorry Mac folks. (Although there is plenty of stuff to play music and videos with on Macs.)

This player is a bit different from the Konqueror Media Player, so remember this one is Windows only.

You can get the deets and dl here. Screenshots here.