We had a pretty big product go down for a coupple weeks due to this guy. In short, when Firefox 3 makes AJAX requests (XMLHttpRequest) and uses createDocument(), it sets the default character encoding to ISO-8859-1.

Which is fine, except for when you’ve got old, fragile code running that relies on its files to be in UTF-8. Then Firefox chokes, the XML file is returned as blank, and then pages show up empty. “No element found” errors popped up in many circumstances.

There’s a hackish JavaScript fix, though its reportedly ‘10x slower.’ The best thing to do is check and clean things on the server side.

Check out the Bugzilla entry, and Encoding issue with XMLHttpRequest and Firefox 3 for a PHP function to clean up your encoding headers.

But first, a gracious thanks for all of your messages. Most of my access to the internet has been at work, which inhibits me from responding to them at my leisure. But I sincerely appreciate them and hope you might keep them coming :D

The trip itself was incredible. Pops road shotgun, and we toured ten states of three and a half days. A net 34 hours of driving time. Along the way, we stopped at lots of roadside diners, attractions, and landmarks. We saw things I’d probably never make the time to see, otherwise. Mount Rushmore, the Badlands, some ideal fishing spots for road trips later to come. I experienced just how much this country changes a few hundred miles up the road. The scenery is so different from where I’ve lived in the Southeast; absolutey gorgeous. I’ll post some photos once I get my machine up and running.

Last Thursday, we arrived in Seattle. We toured the city by car, and took a ferry across Puget Sound to get a glimpse of the city from the water. Such a lovely town. Everything is surrounded by dense forests of evergreens. Lakes, mountains everywhere. It’s cooler weather, for sure, but I’ve always been a cold-blooded animal. It’s been mostly sunny out, despite all the rumors of rainy days. But I’m sure that will change come October. People in this area seem so personable. There’s this awesome sense of community to this town that I love. People are friendly and helpful, but not really in that cheery, all smiles sort of way.

Living situations have sucked. I’ve been living out of hotels for about two weeks now. They’ve mostly been very nice, but having all of your worldly posessions in the back of your car has been irritating. Later this afternoon, I’ll be moving into my place downtown. It will make for a longer commute to work (Redmond is across the lake, up to 45-60 mins depending traffic), but I’m told the busses come packed with free Wi-Fi. More reason to finally buy a laptop, right?

Work has been absolutely grand. My team members are all talented and intelligent, and have lots of wisdom to bring to the table. Our team lead is a visionary, and very passionate about what he does. Everyone works long hours not out of obligation, but out of a creative desire to build more and do bigger and better things with our project. My first week was fairly light; I came in toward the end of this development cycle, so I’ve bigger tasks ahead on the horizon. The Microsoft environment (Visual Studio, C#, Volta, Silverlight, etc) has taken some time to adjust to, but I’m growing comfortable with it. Most of my work avoids the inner programming guts, anyhow.

For now, it’s time for me to move in and get settled, finally. I’ll be posting more once I get service to my apartment.

Until just this past Wednesday. I was offered a job at one of the biggest companies on the planet. They’ve summoned me out to their lab in Redmond, WA to help build their next generation web app (psst.. it’s even got a codename). I’ll be doing front-end development under the super sweet title Web Developer III, my voice booming like The Wizard of Oz.

Upon receiving this news, I jumped up and down until my heels began to swell. Never before have I made screaming expletives into such a jubilant spectacle. I am overcome with a feeling so terrifyingly exciting; a Molotov cocktail of adrenaline (which would be a stellar name for an energy drink, bro).

First day of work at Microsoft is on June 16th. My plan, then, is to skip town next Monday or Tuesday for a good ol’ fashioned road trip. Twenty-four hundred miles, split up by lots of stops and sights, and good conversation with hospitable strangers. Time to load up my portable media player of choice!

It’s a twelve-month contract gig. After that, well… we’ll see if any Louisville companies decide to take a chance on a guy with no .NET experience.

You know, I’ve always had a soft spot for Louisville. I distinctly remember sitting in UK’s student section during their football showdown against Auburn. It was in Lexington, mind you. I bravely sported orange & blue that day, and caught plenty of lip for it. But more so, I remember being twice as excited when Kentucky scored a touchdown.

(Might be due to the fact that a UK touchdown is twice as rare as an Auburn touchdown, but this ain’t a sports blog.)

Auburn was awesome. Incredible. A great experience, a solid education, and a challenge for me on a multitude of levels. Just what I needed.

Of course, there’s part of you that would love to stay forever. A Peter Pan-esque dream of just bumming around a college town for the rest of your life doing what you seem to enjoy. But you can’t listen to that. Off in the distance, you hear a bugle chirping away. A call to greatness, to aspire to loftier goals and, ya know, do something with yourself.

And with that, Jonny’s coming home. I’ll be departing within the week. War Eagle, friends, it’s been exceedingly real.