After much tinkering and swearing, a new design/layout/thingie. I’d really come to dislike — hate, even — the colourful one I’d had up before. Dislike to the point where it needed to go. Now. Yesterday. Immediately. So, I dug up an old Woothemes design I’d bought a while back and threw that on until I could come up with something — anything — other than the one I’d taken down.

I’m actually pretty content with this, at least for now. I had some issues getting the font for the navigation bar and headers (via @font-face) to display properly in Firefox, and then I couldn’t decide whether I wanted the bookshelf, Flickr stream, etc to be in the sidebar or footer (and, thus, the “recent posts” and “recent comments” in the footer or the sidebar), and then I couldn’t decide how I wanted the post meta to be displayed… Anyway. It’s done. A few things to tinker with here and there, but mostly done. One upside to insomnia: more time to tinker! If anyone notices anything wonky and/or amiss with, well, anything (especially anything related to the titles/headers; some older browsers don’t play nice with some of the style/CSS elements I’ve used), do let me know?

The whole thing would have been done sooner — yesterday, maybe the day before — had a friend, Phi, not introduced me to Minecraft. I’d heard about it before and watched a friend play, but I’d never gotten around to trying/buying it. Phi bought the game during Minecraft’s “Wedding Weekend,” as sort of BOGO situation wherein one bought a copy for oneself and was given a gift code to give the game to someone else. Said “someone else” in this situation was, obviously, me. And… I kind of wish he hadn’t, because Minecraft is fucking addicting. The learning curve is kind of steep — What do I do? What is this thing? Why am I punching a tree? How do I build things? …What is that sound? — but after I got acclimated to my surroundings (and asked Phi a series of stupid questions like “What is that thing that looks like a cow?” [A cow] and “Is it possible to drown?” [Yes, and I did]) and figured out how to build basic things, like a craft table/workbench and wooden pickaxe, it was pretty easy. Of course, I wussed out and turned “peaceful” mode on while I built a shelter, so the mobs/critters wouldn’t attack me at night. Of course, my luck being what it is, as soon as I turned “Normal” back on and night fell, a charged Penis Monster Creeper ambled over and blew my shelter apart.

I’m still new to the game — it’s only been three days of off-and-on play — and I’m still re-building a shelter (in the side of a mountain this time), but already the Creeper’s sounds haunt my nightmares, and I’m already allotting blocks (ha!) of time to the game and making a to-do list of things to, er, do in the game. (Such as: “ride a pig” and “build a portal.”)

So… yes. Back to Minecraft now.

And so, I move again! I know, I know, I need another domain like I need another limb¹, but when NameCheap finally reached 5000 “likes” of its Facebook page and their $1.99-for-the-first-year com/net/org domain code went live, I couldn’t resist! Plus, I still had (and have) credits from their December Twitter contest, so another free domain, at a drastically discounted price? Too good to pass up!

I initially registered “NerdMonster.org,” which I still love. As I was editing the “Domain” page of this site, though, and listing some of my related monikers, I recalled “nerdosaurus,” and, well… For the record, I did go back and forth on “nerdOsaurus” vs “nerdAsaurus.” Both seem to be “valid” spellings — each seems to have its own t-shirt, to boot — but a Google search for “nerdOsaurus” yielded more results than did one for “nerdAsaurus” (~60,100 and ~26,800, respectively), so in the end, I (obviously) with with “nerdOsaurus.” (Interestingly, Google itself does seem to side with the latter, as the “Did you mean: nerdasaurus” bit pops up each time I search for “nerdOsaurus.”)

I haven’t yet decided what, exactly, to do with Winterish. I do love the name — I love the word “winter” — so I’ll certainly not be getting rid of it. I might turn it into my site collective, replacing Nerdish.me. I do still like that name as well, but I don’t really need two domains with the word “nerd” in them, now do I? For now, Winterish just redirects here. I’ll figure out what to do with it later. I certainly have the time, as it doesn’t expire until November 2012.

Oh, and I still have ~$20 left in NameCheap credit. This after registering several domains (including Voltaged and a domain for the lovely Beth) and transferring Winterish over from Network Solutions. What to do with that credit? I could renew Nerdosaurus, or I could transfer AndRobots.org over (but do I really want to keep that domain?), or I could renew Voltaged… decisions, decisions.

Which brings me back to NerdMonster.org. It’s been registered and already discarded, and it does deserve some love. (Nerdy monsters need love, too!) So… anyone want it? Free to a good home! All one would need to do is create a (free) NameCheap account (if said one doesn’t already have one) so I can push it over. Hosting would be up to the adopter, though, as I already have several addon domains on my Stable Host shared hosting account. (Normally I’d have upgraded to a reseller by now, but that’s a slippery slope for me. Anyone remember Vintaged Hosting? Yeah, not interested in doing that again.)

1. Actually, I could use another arm or two… [↩]