As always, I've been working on a random side-project, and lately, I've been learning to appreciate Unicode. Specifically, the rude awakening of having to deal with various character encodings rather than plain ASCII text. Of course, now I can say something silly like Oh '0x92', this must be good ol' 1252.
But having to carry this sort of arbitrary knowledge around is a bit silly now, and will be all the more silly as people interact more across languages and cultures.
For now, it's a fact of life, and I know we can all learn to deal with it. But I'll be working toward the day when, we'[ll] take Unicode for granted and cheerfully accept things like perl variables called $¶, the URI http://alþing.is/þjóð/, and people named Zoë.
Until then, you can wear shirts like this one. Now, I'd like to point out here that the so-called Mac version is more correct. The diamond with inset question mark is actually a unicode character for "replacement character" (U+FFFD). Both Windows and (Gnome) Linux get this wrong (for now).