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So here I am, sitting in Rockin’ Java in the upper Haight, surfing on the free wifi. All kinds of cool people are (and have been) here, including Matt Haughey, Tantek Çelik, Erika Hall, Scott Andrew, Doug Bowman, Michael Leung, and Merlin. Some other people have drifted through but I didn’t catch their names. Sooner or later I ought to buy something. Or not.

As is always the case for San Francisco, the weather is beautiful and the driving horrendous. Tight parking I can handle, but the restrictions on turning, one-way streets, and general vehicular topography are a nightmare. It makes Cleveland Heights look like nothing. I can well understand the impulse to be a biker in this city, and I’d almost certainly be one if I lived here.

Regardless, it’s a thrill to be sitting with smart folks and talking about whatever comes to mind. I’m looking forward to more of the same over the next few days.

In her Web Design World keynote on Wednesday morning, Kelly Goto introduced us all to a “bored genius” and her thoroughly fascinating projects. Some of my favorites are The BullRide, RealTime / Interface to the Future, Neologues: Bang Interface, Stump, and TreeLogic.

In the past 40 days, I’ve been to three conferences and five cities, two of them twice. Last night I returned from Boston, and so far as I know I don’t have to board another plane until 2003. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy visiting other places (although the actual traveling isn’t such a thrill) and I love having the chance to see my friends and colleagues at conferences. It’s just that the last six weeks were a little intense, and I’m glad to have a chance to slow down and relax at home.

I had a fascinating experience last night as we approached Cleveland. As the plane was descending through a layer of dense snow on its final approach to Hopkins, the plane was struck by lightning. Okay, I know, the bolt actually jumped from the plane to the air, but still. Thank God planes are still basically steel tubes with wings. After all, if you’re going to fling yourself around the sky, you may as well do it in a great big Faraday cage.

Kat and I are no longer sick, and I’d like to thank everyone who wrote with notes of concern. Last Thursday, shortly after I wrote the previous entry, we got a call informing us that Kat’s grandmother Ruth had passed away. This was not an unexpected event, but that doesn’t make the loss easier to bear. So last Friday afternoon, still sick, we boarded a plane to New York City and were there until last night. Fortunately we got over our illnesses before the memorial service.

Obviously, e-mail was one of the last things on my mind while we were away, so now that I’m back and it’s foremost again I’ll be trying to catch up before next week’s trip to Boston for Web Design World. If I don’t, and you wrote me, at least now you know why I seem to be blowing you off.

On a lighter note, I’d like to share one of the best literary interpretations I’ve seen in quite some time.

I’m back from a 26-hour foray to New York City and Meet The Makers, and I’m sick. So is Kat. I could feel my temperature going up on the flight home, and my throat is doing its best sandpaper impression. Of course, we’re both working today, but at reduced capacity. A bit of a crisis over at css-discuss, and followup mail from yesterday’s event, isn’t helping me get away from the keyboard. Please do keep sending e-mail, but expect delays in reply.

It’s traditional for me to curl up on the couch and watch The Stand when I get sick, so I think I’ll go do that. Unless I decide to watch something else. Whatever.

Kat and I just spent the last five days at Walt Disney World with my parents, sister, and her guy. The family time—a first, really, as it had very little in common with the family road trips of decades past—was a much-needed break in all the craziness (by substituting for it a different sort of craziness, I suppose) of our recent life. I got to be a personal bodyguard to the goddess Babylonia, at least for a few minutes, while at the Adventurers’ Club, so that was fun. We also got to attend Mickey’s Not-So-Scary Halloween Party on Halloween night itself, and the Imagineers really outdid themselves. The train station at Main Street USA looked spooky enough that someone asked if it was the Haunted Mansion.

While we were at Disney, we all went to see La Nouba for the first time, and Kat and I saw Quidam last month during its stop in Cleveland. Both productions were deeply, inexpressibly moving; the artists of Cirque du Soleil have created forms of beauty for which no words exist, and perhaps never should.

Kat and I just got back from a week in Boston, where Molly and I presented at User Interface 7 East. The gang at User Interface Engineering put on an amazing conference, and I’m really looking forward to the next one.

As usual I’m trying to catch up with my e-mail, but in a bid to make it worse, I have a question maybe some of you can answer. If you pay for your site based on the bandwidth its traffic consumes, how much are you paying for that bandwidth? I’m not interested in the monthly charge for flat-rate plans so much as I am the per-megabyte fee for large volume accounts, or what you pay for exceeding your monthly quota. Please let me know.

In all the head-pounding over learning XSLT last week, I let some things slide by without comment, so I’ll try to cover them all in a single post. (And remember, if you have an RSS aggregator, you can syndicate these posts via my RSS feed!)

In early November, I’ll be appearing at Meet The Makers New York on a “standards mini-panel” with Jeffrey Zeldman, so I’d better get around to calling Moishe. There will also be a San Francisco Meet The Makers where my co-worker Arun will be on a panel with Tantek Çelik of Microsoft. You might be able to score a free VIP ticket to either event if you hurry (and are willing to fill out the questionnaire).

I’ve added more information to the upcoming events on my Speaking page, including promotional codes for events that have them. I disclose when using a code will make me money, and have been thinking about ways to turn those into community-building exercises. Maybe I’ll take everyone who used my code(s) to a group dinner, assuming I can come up with a way to verify code use.

Last week, we published a CSS2.1 Quick Reference sidebar tab for Gecko-based browsers, and French translations of the CSS2 and DOM2 sidebar tabs, to the Sidebars area of the DevEdge Toolbox. I also published a technical note on fixing list-item marker size in the NS6.x series.

Over the weekend, I not only dug into more XSLT (which almost made me pound my head against a wall, again), but I wrote some Javascript bookmarklets to help manage the administration of css-discuss. It’s been a while since I thought of myself as a programmer, and I certainly am no expert—but it’s been good to stretch those mental muscles again, after so long. The neural paths needed for exploring and using CSS and structural markup aren’t the same as those needed for programming. The sense of achievement I felt when I figured out how to do what I wanted to do was a welcome change of pace.

It’s really cold in our house right now, but at least the shaking and banging of workmen dismantling our 82-year-old boiler has stopped. Kat and I are sort of sad to see the old beast go, but since it had suddenly started leaking enough carbon monoxide to form its own atmospheric system, we don’t exactly regret replacing it. The replacement boiler is almost ridiculously smaller than our old boiler. I have trouble believing that it can heat the basement, let alone the whole house.

Kat wrote up a short account of our recent trip, which includes a detailed review of the resort where we stayed in case you’re thinking about heading for Cancun. I marked it up and scanned in a few pictures to make it prettier. It’s all in the “Miscellaneous” section.