Someone gave me a really nice present: tickets to the Seattle Sonics game tonight. But those seats! Right on the floor. Dang, basketball is sure different when you're down on the floor. Nothing like what you see on TV. You can see all the punches, elbows, trips, and the sheer mastery of the players in this game.

Talking about sheer masters, check out the Channel 9 interview with Neal Christiansen. He's designed and built two operating systems (no, not Windows) but he knows more about the internals of Windows than most anyone other than maybe Dave Cutler.

Don't miss Dana Epp in the video (Dana is working on a security system with Neal and introduced us). Thanks Dana, we definitely want to do more interviews with developers at Microsoft who live in kernel mode.

Oh, in other fun things, today I met Malcolm Gladwell. Here is a shot I took of him talking with Erik Horvitz. Why is that cool? Cause Erik has invented more things at Microsoft than any other person (he works at Microsoft Research and you'll meet him on Channel 9 in a week or two).

What's interesting when you meet someone smart isn't what they tell you, it's the questions they ask. By the way, Malcolm's speech was standing room only. I had to watch it in a second room on video screen.

I agree with Shel Israel that Malcolm is one of the industry's best speech givers. I hope I'm 1/4 as good on Monday morning.

One last thing? The cheese has already started to arrive! Thanks to Rick Schaut for sending over a slab of Uplands Cheese. This stuff is awesome! (It won several awards over the past few years too).

My link site is up at scobleizer.com. Unfortunately the old site hasn't been moved over and don't know if it will be. But, we'll start anew here.

It's running on WordPress which is most excellent. Thanks to Matt for helping us out! Uploading is TONS faster now!

Neowin: Microsoft bloggers angered by legal threats.

First of all, I've been in contact a lot with other people inside Microsoft about this and I still don't know all the facts but am working with Jason Calacanis of weblogsinc.

My unofficial Robert Scoble-only reaction is that we should have called rather than send a legal demand. The folks over at Neowin and at Engadget are great people and we like them a lot and our cause would have been helped out a lot more if we had just used a nice "please" and "thank you."

I can't speak to the other specifics and need to handle it via phone or email between our legal and PR teams.

Things are backing up here. Link site is still down. Hopefully that'll get fixed today. We used up 25GB of bandwidth and need to move to a new host that will support unlimited bandwidth.

I'm preparing for my keynote at the Blog Business Summit next week. Lots of interesting people are coming for that.

I also have been abusing my co-author on the Red Couch (our blog business book). The other day he uploaded our publisher's proposal.

We'd like your comments on it.

Now the hard work begins.

I wish I was hanging out with Dave Winer and friends in Cambridge tomorrow. But my 40th birthday party is tomorrow. We have something close to 70 people coming (and our house can hold maybe 50, so this will be real interesting).

Anyway, hope your Friday is treating you well.