Turning MySQL data into utf-8 from latin1

Recently, I found myself moving a MySQL database from one MySQL database server to another, causing all sorts of problems, mostly with random characters being replaced with foreign characters. I determined the problem to be related to how the data was encoded, UTF-8 or latin1... and worse, sometimes a mix of the two, arghh.

I thought I had it bad, but think I've escaped lightly,

Derek Sivers writes...

"Did a raw data dump (mysqldump) of the data to a regular text "dump.sql" file.
(85 tables, millions of rows, an 8 gig dump)"

60 hours later, here is Derek's solution.

Derek continues...

"LESSON LEARNED: KEEP EVERYTHING IN UTF-8, ABSOLUTELY EVERYWHERE, FROM DAY ONE.
You'll be glad you did some day."

Technology really shouldn't be this hard.