or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Unicode

I used to be firmly in the camp of:

"Üñî©Ø∂£ is teh suck! ASCII 4ever!"

But that is mostly because I didn't understand it. A crash course in dealing with Unicode yesterday changed that. I've read what Joel has to say on the matter, so I had the basic understanding of it all, but you never really get it until you're up to your elbows trying to translate a bunch of Windows-1252-encoded web documents into UTF-8, in accordance with the new site's templates, all on the fly, during a huge content migration. How they ever worked in the first place is beyond me, actually. All their existing templates claim to be using iso-8859-1 as their charset. Bizarre.

Besides, it's not like I didn't want to be able to express my admiration of Dürer's work, or thank my friend Jesús for all his advice on stuff. I just couldn't be arsed to figure it out before. Sometimes, work for pay changes that.

There's a building in Alexandria that's home to the very odd Snack Food Association.

Shots from Fredericksburg, VA.

Thanks, Gizmodo! As if I didn't already want one so badly.

Jobsess (job-SESS) v. intr.:

To have the mind excessively preoccupied during the time zone difference between EST and PST, awaiting word from the MWSF Keynote: "I couldn't get any work done Tuesday morning. I was Jobsessing over the new headless Mac."

"HDTV is exactly like regular TV, except it sucks at a higher resolution." -- me

Four of our local network affiliates offer a High Definition broadcast. While we primarily watch DVDs, I hooked up the antenna to try and pick them up. Crystal clear crap.