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I just filed an assumed business name registration for Oregon and it went smoothly. The website stated that it would take a day to start processing the registration and that I could monitor the progress in a queue they have on my account. No sooner than I had gone to check the queue it had moved from the pending state to the next! Fantastic!

You can now select from the domain names getYourBlogOn.com, theBlogFactor.com, thinkingBeings.com, and of course tomsWebHosting.com when creating a website.

A Macbook Pro laptop case looks like a newspaper and may just may make your Macbook Pro less of a target for thieves. One improvement I can think of... Allow the user to slip a current sheet of newspaper into a sleeve on the outside of the case.

I needed to change the character set for a MySQL database with which I'm working. It was created with latin1 and I needed it to be in utf-8. Here are some relevant links.

• http://codex.wordpress.org/Converting_Database_Character_Sets
• http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/03/17/converting-character-sets/

My need was pretty simple, convert the database without to much concern for the data itself. So my main challenge was how to loop over the tables in my database and alter the tables. I decided to use the mysql command line. Here is what I came up with...

USE databasename;

DELIMITER //

DROP PROCEDURE IF EXISTS test//

CREATE PROCEDURE test()

    BEGIN

      DECLARE done INT DEFAULT 0;
      DECLARE a CHAR(64);
      DECLARE cur1 CURSOR FOR SHOW TABLES;
      DECLARE CONTINUE HANDLER FOR NOT FOUND SET done = 1;

      OPEN cur1;

      LOOP

        FETCH cur1 INTO a;

        IF NOT done THEN

          SET @s = CONCAT('ALTER TABLE ',a,' CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8');

          PREPARE stmt FROM @s;

          EXECUTE stmt;

          DEALLOCATE PREPARE stmt;

        END IF;

      END LOOP;

      CLOSE cur1;

    END//

DELIMITER ;

This is some truly stunning art!

I found this somewhat fascinating and then a little disturbing when the robots started to entertain with a spinning plate and knife play.