I'm wondering how this'll handle for cases where the system doesn't support UTF8.  My coworker just told me that Debian 6 doesn't apparently support UTF8 by default.  Will this just explode?  Because of the lack of unit testing I can't easily figure out the answers to these so I've had to bounce it back to you for some research.

Oh, and is utf8_general_ci the built in mysql default for collation?  I know next to nothing about this area of MySQL so I have to rely on you to make sure we don't surprise anyone with this change!