Boston is so weird, it’s only 4 in the afternoon and it’s already almost dark.

Misconception: Renting is for Suckers. In Houston the market was such that it seemed silly not to buy. Here in San Francisco real estate is definitely another world, and I plan to rent for a while even though it does limit what you can do with the space in some frustrating ways.

Eric Meyer’s 13-month baby knows thirty words in sign language, I saw Meet the Fockers earlier tonight and thought that part of the movie was just made up. Apparently not!

Memos from 1972 made in Microsoft Word, incredible. The superscript feature always bugged me too.

The the new A List Apart is gorgeous and functional as well. Congrats to their team.

The Atom Publishing Protocol is now a Real Standard.

So I’m going to take a whack at this “Shangra-Li Diet” thing I’ve read about on several blogs, most notably here. I’m not having a weight crisis, but I think 5-10 pounds would put me in a healthier class for my height. I bought the book and read it this morning, it basically just repeats itself a lot and seems to have a lot of filler, but it may be useful to some folks as a motivator. You can get all the important details from various blogs. Mostly I’m interested in it to see if the mind hacking really works, and I’m willing to endure Glenda making fun of me about trying something out of a diet book for the sake of you guys ;). Apparently I don’t own any sugar, extra light olive oil, or a scale, but I’ll post updates as I get going. Update: The author has a WordPress blog.

Good example of bad alt text.

AirPress looks like an interesting new blogging client.

Dean Allen, a web pioneer and good man, has passed away. I’ve been processing the news for a few days and still don’t know where to begin. Dean was a writer, who wrote the software he wrote on. His websites were crafted, designed, and typeset so well you would have visited them even if they were filled with Lorem Ipsum, and paired with his writing you were drawn into an impossibly rich world. His blog was called Textism, and among many other things it introduced me to the art of typography.

Later, he created Textpattern, without which WordPress wouldn’t exist. Later, he created Textdrive with Jason Hoffman, without which WordPress wouldn’t have found an early business model or had a home on the web. He brought a care and craft to everything he touched that inspires me to this day. As John Gruber said, “Dean strove for perfection and often achieved it.” (Aside: Making typography better on the web led John Gruber to release Smarty Pants, Dean a tool called Textile, and myself something called Texturize all within a few months of each other; John continued his work and created Markdown, I put Texturize into WP, and Dean released Textile in Textpattern.)

Years later, we became friends and shared many trips, walks, drinks, and meals together, often with Hanni and Om. (When we overlapped in Vancouver he immediately texted “I’ll show you some butt-kicking food and drink.”) His zest for life was matched with an encyclopedic knowledge of culture and voracious reading (and later podcast listening) habits. I learned so much in our time together, a web inspiration who turned for me into a real-life mensch. He was endlessly generous with his time and counsel in design, prose, and fashion. I learned the impossibly clever sentences he wrote, that you assumed were the product of a small writing crew or at least a few revisions, came annoyingly easily to him, an extension of how he actually thought and wrote and the culmination of a lifetime of telling stories and connecting to the human psyche.

Dean, who (of course) was also a great photographer, didn’t love having his own photo taken but would occasionally tolerate me when I pointed a camera at him and Om has a number of the photos on his post. There’s one that haunts me: before getting BBQ we were at his friend’s apartment in Vancouver, listening to Mingus and enjoying hand-crafted old fashioneds with antique bitters, and despite the rain we went on the roof to see the art that was visible from there. He obliged to a photo this time though and we took photos of each other individually in front of a sign that said “EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT.” It wasn’t, but it’s what I imagine Dean would say right now if he could.