More than 1100 homes and 17 people have lost their lives in several fires raging (linkrot: wishtv.com/Global/story.asp?S=1499715) around southern California. Oregon is joining (linkrot: news.statesmanjournal.com/article.cfm?i=69837) the firefighting efforts. We need to put these brave firefighters in our thoughts today.

Blogging the California fires:
- Don Park shares a picture taken from space . Eerie-looking, isn’t it?
- Locotes has another post, but bigger picture (linkrot: www.20six.co.uk/weblogEntry/155f8fx4w4h3k)
- Andreas thinks the fires are “Natures way of keeping everything in balance”
- elaine reports weather conditions in LA: smoke (linkrot: 404 eraine.net/blog/archives/000353.html)
- Steve is preparing for voluntary evacuation in Big Bear Lake (linkrot: 404 www.capgun.tv/blog/archives/000067.html)
- Several pictures of the smoky sky taken by Jason (linkrot: jason.blogging.la/archives/000147.phtml)
- send along your pictures to Textamerica’s Southern California Brush Fire moblog (fire.textamerica.com) - the addy is fire.fire @ tamw.com [9/10/07 9:12am PST: Textamerica linkrot]

On June 5, 2003 eBay fired off a letter to Google to stop allowing searchers to use “ebay” and other trademarked names in their Google Adwords campaigns.

In other news, Google is facing heavyweight challenges from other search engines. It’s sort of poetic justice for them because they were ignored for so long by the “big” search engines. Perhaps this is a lesson in never underestimating competition. Always strive to improve and excel at business. Never stand still.

And I concur with Jeremy the Google Page Rank is still broken. Time for somebody to put a fresh quarter or two in the machine.

In this article from PC Magazine the following quote about broadband penetration by the end of the decade:

“Intel predicts that by the end of the decade there will be 1.5 billion computers with broadband connections and 2.5 billion phones with more processing power than today’s PCs.”

Somehow as I look at my cell phone I still have a hard time imagining it being more powerful than the PC I’m typing on this on, but then again 10 years ago, what 286, were the blaze of the day? How about the 80’s where the Commodore 64 came onto scene for me and I remember thinking: now that I have so much more memory than the Vic-20, just imagine what I can do!. I am one of those who wish there was more broadband penetration (as I listen to radio @ aol streaming in the background). Hmm …

In this UK Guardian story, it deals with what has happened at Microsoft since the lawsuit settlement with the government. I can think of one major thing recently and that is making IE as part of the OS (no more standalone releases of Internet Explorer) which is what the big story was not too long ago. This totally could change the browser landscape over the next 1-2 years as consumers very well might not be interested in upgrading their OS just to get the newest whiz bang IE. See my irider review below about one possible browser alternative, irider.com Certainly there are plenty of others: mozilla.org towards the top of the list, I’d think.

There is also talk about what Microsoft giving some 10 billion dollar dividend out? And the XBox division continues to hemmorage cash, and Microsoft contends that they are still fully behind trying to make the XBox the #1 video game console. In other XBox news, Free-X released an exploit for the XBox which would allow linux to run UNmodded and they were quickly put in the M$ crosshairs. Lots of puzzling things happening at M$ headquarters and definitely something making me go hmm … huh … what?