we were in athens on the day the fires started. we took this panoramic shot from the areopagus, the hill opposite the acropolis (right side). in the center of the photo is the hill of lycavitos (literally, hill of wolves, although the wolves were killed to extinction ages ago). the view is facing northeast and you can see the plume of smoke rising from behind the hill and the sprawl of athens. in the bottom left of the photograph is the ancient agora. remains have been found there dating to 2800 BC. the large building of the stoa was rebuilt by the rockefeller foundation and is now a museum of antiquities.

the fires spread quickly, due to the high winds of the following two days, burning thousands of acres. one of the many areas that were affected was the city of Marathon, historic home of the famous race. unfortunately, the fire has been attributed to arson. truly sad.

you can view a high-rez version of the photo here
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as all parents know, our kids LOVE the iphone. they probably love it even more than some adults. of course, iphone application developers know that and there are countless games out there for kids. my six year old daughter loves one game in particular - and to be perfectly honest, so do i.

developed by walaber, the name says it all. jelly car is a soft body dynamics-based little game where you drive a floppy, gooey, tiny car through an obstacle course in order to hit a target. there are many levels from beginner to expert for hours of play. there may be many very cool and complex iphone games out there, but the simplicity and wackiness of jelly car makes it stand out. it was actusally voted the best kids game on the iphone. plus, it’s free and you can’t beat that. i give it 5 stars and recommend you download it from the iphone app store.

Yesterday, Twitter launched a redesigned homepage, which shows a shift in focus towards search (rather than specific users, as the old homepage highlighted). It seems that this new homepage could be a recognition, on Twitter’s part, of how users have shaped the microblogging platform - it’s now the place where you can find up-to-the-minute information on what’s happening NOW (rather than depending on search engines that are increasingly appearing to post more dated content, dependant on the slower nature of crawling the web and indexing content). Just look at the trends to see what people are talking about right this second (um…M&Ms and William Shatner? Really?). So does this poise Twitter to take on the search behemoths of Google and bing? Only time will tell…