Just in time for me to leave for World Fantasy. Life is like that sometimes.

For those of you into geekation about these things, the monitor is one of these. It’s my second Dell monitor, the first being the one that recently explodinated on me. But then it outlived its warranty and was excellent right up until the moment it went kerplooey, so I can’t complain overly much, and this particular monitor got mostly very good reviews — when it first came out there were some color calibration issues, but they seem to have fixed that, as the color on the one I have is fine. I briefly considered getting a 27-inch monitor, but I have a small desk, which means I would have ended up very likely frying my eyeballs right out of my head, and also it cost twice as much. I believe in buying the best you can (and then running the object into the ground), but my inherent streak of cheapliness kept smacking me around every time I looked in the 27-incher’s direction. Seeing this monster sitting on my desk, I really do think I made the right decision.

And now, as noted, I’m off to the World Fantasy Convention. I leave it to my daughter to break in the new monitor with multiple games of Left 4 Dead 2 and to give me a full report when I get back. Additionally, while I do intend to update from the convention, don’t expect huge numbers of updates. Best to keep up with the Twitter feed, which the astute of you will note is back up in the sidebar.

See you a bit later.

As some of you were noting the site’s new look is a little monochromatic, here’s a color splash for you, namely, last night’s sunset. Don’t say I never do anything for you.

A couple of notes on the new Whatever theme:

1. I like it, so it’s very likely to stay.

2. I’m not quite done tweaking it yet. There are a couple of things I personally prefer (like having the comment link at the bottom of an entry, not the top) that I need to incorporate, and I want to make additional adjustments to the look and feel of the theme.

However, many of these are likely to have to wait until after I get back from World Fantasy Convention, for two reasons. One, so I have time to look at the backend code; two, because the back-up monitor I’m currently using is crappy (the site looks white, not gray, on it) and by that time I’ll have my new monitor.

As for why I decided to change the theme: First, I’ve had the same theme before this for two years, which is the longest time for the site to have the same look, and I was getting bored with it. Second, the old theme, being old, couldn’t incorporate a lot of the new features built into WordPress, while this theme, released as it was just yesterday, can and does. It’s good to have a little more flexibility, both on the front and the back end.

In any event, expect a few more tweaks and changes over the next week or so. But by and large, this is what Whatever will look like for the time being.