The new site design ("version 1.50") has been up for about a day now. There's still a few minor tweaks that I'd like to make, specifically some shadowing for the main "page" of blog entries and something different with the entry dates. But overall, I'm very happy with the way that it turned out. Hope you like it too.

A little history about the name "Deck Monster" and the change in logo at the top of the page... I was an undergrad at the University of Illinois just a few years before the World Wide Web exploded onto the computer screens and consciousness of well, the world. (In fact, Mosiac, the first popular Web browser was developed at NCSA on the U of I campus.) Back in those days, we were using 9600 bps modems to connect to bulletin board systems (BBS's) to download files and exchange bulletin board messages (hence the name). Just like many Web sites today, the BBS systems often required a login to do anything interesting. Don't remember exactly why, but I started using "Deck Monster" for my user name.

This was also prior to graphical user interfaces, so some of us did our best making use of the various line characters included with the extended DOS character set. As best I can recreate, the banner above closely approximates the "sig" (signature line) I used to use in the BBS days...

So, when I decided to take the plunge and start this blog, there was no other name (or logo) I could've used.

OK, history lesson over. Hope you enjoy the new look of the site...

p.s. For the sake of posterity, a screenshot of the previous site design has been saved in the extended body of this message...