Talk about frustrations

So here are my frustrations for the day (in no particular order):

1) Character encoding, especially in PHP. Let's say that I basically had for some reason I don't quite remember (and hopefully won't bite me in the near future), some piece that did an encode(x,"UTF-8") ... then another piece that did a decode(y,"UTF-8) ... so you would expect that everything will go back to the way it was, right? Of course not! Everything except some characters, like long dashes worked fine. Others simply became "?"!

And character encoding always is painful on text documents, for example. The problem is that you never know what the encoding is and will be. For example, I had a document in UTF-8 and then I pasted some text from word. Suddenly my document had characters in UTF-8 and other characters in ISO-8859-1. A huge mess to fix it (because I also don't know any easy programs that just change the encoding).

In the Javaserver Faces world, the same thing is happening. At work we've tried to start working on some Japanese things on an interface that was supposed to be all UTF-8 and suddenly all our Japanese characters became HTML-escaped (&#xxxx) and would appear all garbled on text boxes! Yes, it just gets worse if you tag XML escaping or HTML escaping to it. There is something really wrong about all this, but I won't really spend my time thinking on it. I have more frustrations for the day.

2) Private communications becoming public. So, first it started with choir things. I've sent a message to a selected set of people about why I was not going to join the choir this year. One of these people replied to the message with a "life advice" type of email and decided that other people might benefit from reading it. However, it also meant that other people suddenly received my "private" email.

Now today it happened again. I've sent a very short and semi-out-of-context email to some people about a product they wanted me to have a look and analyze and suddenly I receive back an email from the Customer Rep from the company that works with the product replying to what I've said about their product.

3) Seattle residents and this weather fear... Some weeks ago, just after I came back from Brazil, the weather wasn't very good. Raining and a little cold. So everybody was in this gloom state saying "oh... Summer is over... We will only see rain from now on". However, last weekend everything changed and we are having really dry sunny days, in the 70s and even it supposed to get to the 80s today and what are people saying? "Oh... This is not going to last... Next week it is going to start raining and the summer will be over... We will only see rain from then on."

I should send an email to somebody like Paul Allen to stop investing on his "Brain Atlas" and invest on a group therapy for everybody here to stop fearing and being so negative about the weather. Weather is Seattle is great! Not perfect, but FAR from anything to be negative about.