MSDN: Browsing and reading email safely as an administrator. Interesting stuff about avoiding spyware and malware.

There are still seats available at next Friday's American Marketing Association's hot topic series on blogging and marketing (I'm speaking).

Here's an Apple Tablet PC. Oh, wait, not made by Apple -- Joseph DeRuvo modified a PowerBook to be a Tablet. That's cool.

Joe Wilcox covers some more bad PR that Microsoft has gotten on the security and reliability front.

We deserve this trouble. It's too hard to keep your machine clean and safe, even with Windows XP Service Pack 2 (although that makes major strides). Since employing my "layers of security" approach I have not gotten any spyware, despite visiting thousands of Web sites (including many "at risk" sites, if you know what I mean). Not saying you never will, but we need to make all 14 of these things easy enough for everyone to do (and turned on by default).

The Macintosh is easier to keep clean because it doesn't run as Administrator by default (to install software you need to enter your password, Windows just lets you install). It's just much more difficult for spyware/malware to get loaded on a Macintosh.

This week I've learned more about Windows security than I ever wanted to know (my house-guest, Dana Epp, is one of the top experts and he got me a video interview with Neal Christensen, developer lead for the file system filter manager team). He talked about some of the improvements that are being made deeply in the system (he's just started a company building an intrusion prevention system that'll help make systems running on Windows more secure).

Neal was quite an interview, too. He's written a couple of operating systems. Not every day that you meet someone who has written their own OS.

Anyway, we have a lot of work to do on making systems do only things that customers want. Absolutely agreed.

The Media Center geek dinner tonight was lots of fun. I met a Microsoft customer who has 80,000 songs -- all legally purchased -- on his Media Center. Think about that one for a minute. 380 gigabytes of music. That's more than $100,000 worth of music. Anyone have more than that on their computers?

Shel Israel posted our book proposal draft today. Join the discussion. I'm now looking at the proposal and will add my two cents this weekend.

Dana Epp is back on the Red Couch and we're watching Trump's Apprentice reality TV show. I feel like I'm a contestant on our own reality TV show. Only while writing a book.

But this is with a twist: you all are Donald Trump.

You get to decide whether Shel and I have a great book or get fired.

That's terrifying, to tell the truth, but no more terrifying than sending Tim O'Reilly or Gary Cornell an email pitching them a book project.

On with the show!

Shocker. Dan Gillmor is going to work on a new citizen journalism project. Shocker! Sounds like a great opportunity.

Thanks Dan for everything you've done for me and Maryam over the years. Can't wait to see what you do with the next part of your life.