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Wednesday, August 31, 2005

Downtown New Orleans .. from DirectNIC.com

In all the chaos of Katrina I completely failed to remember that my Domain Hosting company, DirectNIC.com is located in New Orleans .. I didn't know 'where' exactly until a few minutes ago when I went to their site to check on a Domain. BOOM! Right there in front of me was the announcement of how they were dealing with Katrina's aftermath.

Plaza across street from DirectNIC.com offices - dwntwn NO

DirectNIC is on the 11th floor of an office building right in the downtown district. They are running on diesel double-drop power backup - so they have gone - so far - without a drop in service. And they have NO intension of evacuating NO.

They have an active webcam - looking down on 'whatever street' is below them - I have no idea where it is as I am totally unfamiliar with NO. This webcam feed is to MS Media Player.

They are also running a blog on LiveJournal. It's an interesting read - to be sure. They also have a series of stills - presumably from the webcam and some obviously from still digital shots, too.

They also sustained damage to their offices.

DirectNIC.com office damage

There is NO WATER in this portion of the downtown. I'm looking at a 'real-time' video (webcam) of the street below - and it is totally dry. But the activity below is quite interesting. They report on the blog all kinds of looting going on and wholesale 'street vending' of the stolen goods !!

I've been so intent on getting info from my online source - but failed to realize that dependance was so tied to the dedicated staff of DirectNIC keeping the servers running.

My sites are all hosted here in the midwest - but if the DirectNIC hosting services go down - my websites are off-line and I'm out of business. So my thanks are to those employees and owners who are protecting their investment and mine!

ofieldstream

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