This is just a note for future reference or a possible quick fix for those who experience the same problem: after upgrading to WordPress 2.6 earlier today, all my special characters became a garbled mess. As I use quite a lot of them—don’t you just love crème brûlée and em-dashes?—that is quite unacceptable. Commenting out line 7 in wp-config.php (change it to //define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');) seemed to fix it.
For a client at work, I’ve done some WordPress (Mu) hacking in the last few weeks. One thing they wanted was to display all users with a specific role in the sidebar. I (crudely) hacked something together right in the sidebar template to do that, but while searching for some information, I came across several requests for something similar. If I can find the time and motivation, I might just upgrade that hack to a plugin.
While I might have some time off next week, I doubt it’ll happen then. I’m in dire need of break at the moment, and not just of WordPress.