I’m very pleased to announce that I’m officially a member of the DZone team! It all started about a month ago when I was contacted by Rick Ross. To my surprise Rick had actually seen my blog and happened to read a post about me possibly seeking some freelance work. So he recommended that I got in contact with Matt to see if they had any coding work. Well I wasn’t quite qualified for the code work that needed to be done so I figured that my chances of working for DZone were gone. Luckily around that same time Rick contacted me again about a job within his department. He basically said that he liked how I was trying to get the DZone community more involved with my link posts and he then offered me a position for link moderation. We agreed that we would give it a month to see how things went. As you can assume it’s been a month since then and I’m now officially a member of the DZone team. (There is MORE to the story which you can read by clicking the link.)

There's a question that comes up on Stack Overflow every couple of months: "How do I strip diacritic marks from Unicode characters?". Popular variants include "How do I remove special characters" and "How do I convert Unicode to ASCII", but the underlying motivation is the same: characters that don't have their own key on an American keyboard have no place in modern web software.

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