Bye soda!  I miss you so much already!

Man, I really want to get rid of that double chin.

This is day zero.  I have not run yet, nor have I done any exercise at all.  Tomorrow (Wednesday) I will run at least 3 miles, and I will do as many situps as I can stand.  I'll keep it up, and post a new image next week to see the progress.  God, I hope I can look better soon.  I look terrible!

So I figured I would simply walk through the hallways until something was familiar.  This was a terrible decision.  I found myself standing frozen at the door to another business, locked in disbelief.

She sat still, silent.  I looked to the psychologist.  He too was silent.  I said it again: "If you do not want me, please, set me free."

The more quiet they got, the louder I got.

"Please," I said, "I cannot come home to a woman who despises me.  Please, I'm begging you."  And then I raised my voice, "If you are no longer attracted to me, let me go!"

I moved alongside the couch where she was sitting, and knelt next to her.  "DO YOU LOVE ME AT ALL?  DO YOU FEEL ANYTHING FOR ME?"  She didn't turn to face me.  She kept looking forward, silent.  I shouted, "PLEASE LET ME GO!"

Eighteen years of marriage, everything I had known my entire adult life, was collapsing.  I admit, it broke me down.

"PLEASE!  PLEASE!"  I was beating my fists into the armrest, sobbing.  I couldn't stand to be locked into a marriage filled with hate and animosity.  I knew I could just get a lawyer and file for divorce, but I also knew she had told my mother that she would "take three quarters of his paycheck" if I tried it.  I was desperate for something that didn't end in a bitter legal battle, and I saw it slipping away from me.

There was no love, no marriage, but no way out.

"PLEASE LET ME GO!  PLEASE LET ME GO!"  I was sobbing.  A grown man, gulping down air as my chest heaved and I cried.

Finally the psychologist spoke.  "Tony, keep your voice down.  There are other clients here."

I stood.  I stared at him in shock.  My marriage was falling apart right in front of me.  I tried one last time.  "If you do not love me, let me go!"

No response.

Not once did she say, "But I do love you."  Not once did she say, "I am attracted to you."  Not once did she say, "I will leave the other man."  And not once did she say, "Okay, let's find a peaceful way to end this."

I slammed open the side door and rushed out into the hallways, still gasping for air, and unsure what to do.  I ran out into the parking lot.  I must have looked visibly ruined, because a woman driving by in a van stopped, and with a look of great shock and concern on her face said, "Sir!  Sir! Are you okay?"

I mumbled something about being all right and took off down the street.  I headed home on foot.  Shortly thereafter, my wife would arrive home and talk about the day as if the counseling session hadn't happened at all.

I never did make it to my eye doctor today.  I just stood at the door to the psychologist's office, and then quietly, I went back to my car and sat for a long while.

Create a simple form in HTML -- don't specify DOCTYPE (or limit it to HTML 4), don't specify character set, etc.  Just the minimum needed to create the form in semantically correct markup.  However, you absolutely must add enctype="multipart/form-data" as an attribute in the form tag.  That's usually used to create forms that take uploads, such as the form to take photos on Facebook.  However, we don't need to create any upload fields.  We just need to create 2 text fields.  Throw some code in there somewhere to log the data that comes in.  Next, fire up Internet Explorer 6 and view your creation.  In the first field enter the word, "Hello."  In the second field enter the word "they’re."  What's important about the second word is that it has a curly apostrophe.  Copy & paste my text if you need to.  Then, submit the data.

Poof!  The word "Hello" never made it!  No matter what you put in that first field, it's lost.

The discovery

So the data isn't coming in.  Where is it?  Well, I fired up SmartSniff.  It's a packet sniffer, which can watch the raw data that Internet Explorer is sending to my server.  I'm watching because I want to see how the data is coming in -- is it funny somehow?  In an unexpected format?  It turns out, it's just broken.  Each field in a "multipart/form-data" form is sent wrapped in a boundary, which is typically a bunch of dashes and a random string of letters/numbers.  This is done so that each field is cleanly separated and the server can then view each field and correctly handle it.  But as you can see from my screenshot below, the first field doesn't have the boundary that the other fields do:

The solution

The bug appears to rear its ugly head when UTF-8 data (or actually any data beyond ASCII), is sent as part of a multibyte form (a form that has upload fields).  This is what makes the bug so nefarious -- it will only appear on a form that has upload fields, and only if the page isn't specified to be UTF-8, and only when someone pastes in some UTF-8 text.  So one person might see the problem while another person with the same browser on the same system might not.

The fix?  Add this attribute to your form tag:

accept-charset="UTF-8"

Now when non-ASCII data comes in, IE 6 will expect the multibyte characters and handle them properly.  Yay!

The domain name should appeal to anyone doing online ratings systems, or for any "best of the best" product.  Outshine is a simple, short dictionary word, so I'm hoping people like it!  I've had the domain since 1998, and it's well-ranked on Google.  If you know someone who is interested, put them in touch with me.