Big thanks to everyone who attended my talk at PyCon today, Unicode In Python, Completely Demystified. It was an ambitious title; I highly doubt I "demystified" everything, but I was happy with how it went. There were a ton of great questions — even some I couldn't answer, of course. If you have any other questions feel free to comment here and I'll try my best to answer.
For those who couldn't make the talk or those who just want to refer back to the talk and / or source code, I've posted the slides here: http://farmdev.com/talks/unicode/. The audio / video should be available soon so I'll re-post a message when that's available.
Also, for reference, here is the primer:
This talks aims to make every single last person in the audience understand exactly how to write Unicode-aware applications in Python 2. If necessary, we will move to a Birds of Feather gathering, to the bar, to your hotel room, I'll start hanging around your cube at work -- whatever it takes -- until you completely "get it." But it's really simple so bring an open mind, a notepad, and get ready to create bullet proof Python software that can read and write text in Arabic, Russian, Chinese, Klingon, et cetera. As a citizen of the Python community you have the responsibility of creating Unicode-aware applications!