Looks like more than Google is down. Channel 9 and Altavista and other sites are having troubles too, friends are reporting to me in IM and over email. We're working on Channel 9 from this side. Yikes. It's gonna be one of those Mondays, I have a feeling.

I can get to Google now, by the way. News.com is following the troubles.

Andy Beal, in Searchenginelowdown, is reporting that Google is being hit with a DNS attack.

Wired: The Empire Blogs Back.

More business blog hype, er coverage.

I wonder, what will happen to the blogosphere after the press start paying attention to something else? Visit Dave Winer's blog today and you'll see that the press is in a feeding frenzy about blogs.

Unfortunately where the blogosphere really will prove whether they are up to the challenge is in the next major disaster in a place where there's a decent concentration of bloggers (or in the case of business bloggers, during a business disaster where customers need help). Then we'll really see if the world has changed.

I think it has, bigtime, by the way. During the last earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area we didn't have a good way to communicate with each other and the world. Next time will be radically different.

Jeff Maurone had dinner with Bill Gates at his home on Wednesday night. That's weird. On Tuesday night I was on a boat with a bunch of .NET and Tablet PC Geeks in front of Gates' house.

Some of the people who were there: Carl Franklin. Billy Hollis (he has a Tablet PC bug named after him, can you guess what it is?). Jeff Richter. Julie Lerman, among others.

What was really fun, though, was having dinner with Burt Keeley. He's one of the visionaries behind the Tablet PC. Man, he has a lot of ideas of what to do with pen-based computing in the future. He has a ton of ideas of how to make the pen even more useful in the future.

If you're a toy freak and haven't subscribed to Engadget yet, maybe this will get you to. Here's news on the new iPAQs.

OK, this blogging thing is going a little wacky. My wife took away my computer this weekend and made me keep it home. Think I'd be able to escape the blogosphere? Oh, heck no. I saw blogs being mentioned in two magazines I was reading. And, I turned on CNN last night and saw Glen Reynolds and other bloggers.

Glen is claiming that his traffic isn't too far behind Slate's 4.6 million unique vistors per month. Whew. I bet he's going to have a high-water week with the Democratic National Convention going on this week.

Get ready for more political stuff than we can handle. Personally, I'll keep it down to a dull roar here, unless some legitimate news actually happens.

But, it's weird not being able to escape from the blogosphere, even when you try to.

James Snape, on my comments yesterday, asked "is putting your mobile number on the internet a good idea? Do you get many unwanted calls or text spam?"

I've been doing that for years. So far I have gotten a handful of calls. It really is amazing how few I get.

But, here's why I do it.

On Saturday Tim Bray of Sun Microsystems called me "hey, how about coming over to the house for salmon BBQ?"

So, we went and had an awesome time. Tim is quite adept on the BBQ. We talked very little business, other than to have a laugh over the last time we ate together. Last time we were in Vancouver it was three days before Microsoft and Sun Microsystems (Tim's employer) announced a peace treaty.

At the time we didn't know that that was going to happen three days later. Tim's boss got very nervous about what we had discussed.

So, now we're wondering what other news will happen?

Anyway, if I didn't put my cell phone up here Tim would never have called. That alone made it all worth it.

For extra points, did you know that Steve Wozniak's cell phone number is on the Internet? I bet a few other people's phone numbers are out here too.

Thanks Tim for the great dinner. That made a really sucky day very awesome.