To my surprise this blog is still read by people whose profession involves Python. To all of them I'd like to remind that the second Russian PyCon starts in just two weeks and you might want to consider going. There'll be smart and important people abound and, if my experience is any indication, Python conferences is where it's fairly easy to get to talk with such people. If I were going I'd probably try to corner Armin Ronacher to explain how completely wrong he is about all this Unicode stuff :-). But I'm not going so instead you can do it!
Good luck!