Straighten out character encoding

[wbushey]

Part 27 of 'omg, I hate character encoding'.

The Internet loves utf-8. Should we try to do as much as we can in utf-8 (i.e. write files in utf-8, save to db in utf-8, use unicode variables with utf-8), or are there issues with going this way?

[sethwoodworth]

utf-8 everywhere. Django and python 2.5+ do this ok. Prefix python strings with u (u'asdf')

[wbushey]

u'Alright'