I just added gravatar support to my blog, via the excellent and well documented gravatar-cache script. If you register for one, your icon will show up along with comments that you leave here. Do you need more incentive than that? I'll write a post full of praise for the first five people to leave a comment here with their gravatar.\

Bobby Convey never quite recovered from a knee injury suffered during last year's World Cup. He cut his season short in February to undergo a second operation and now expects to be ready to start training with Reading when the English preseason begins. Paul Vigna interviews Convey about his injury, and also his prospects for the future. He hints at returning stateside someday. My money would be on him returning to play for an MLS team in Philly. Of course this is still a few years off, Convey is still a yoing player and has 2 more years with his current team.

"I have just starting running and have been continuing to do my strength work," the Philadelphia native, who cut his season with Reading short in February to have surgery on his knee, wrote in an e-mail Sunday. "The doctor has said just be very patient with this injury and has cleared me to start running.

I've been revamping my Bolivian soccer blog, which I finally updated and made live tonight. In doing so, I needed to convert the data from ISO-8859-1 (back when I didn't know better about how to setup a database) to UTF-8. I was fearing the process would be complicated and tedious, involving some script to read the data and use PHP's mbstring or iconv extensions to do the work. Thanks to a post on a Mysql message board (I wish I'd saved the link, I'd give you full credit), it turned out to be a drop dead simple, or is it quick-and-dirty, 3 step process at the command line using the iconv tool.

$ mysqldump --opt --quote-names my_database > my_database.sql
$ iconv -f ISO_8859-1 -t UTF-8 my_database.sql > my_database-utf-8.sql
$ mysql my_database < my_database-utf-8.sql