Please excuse our nearly three-month absence from posting, O Vast Readership! No good excuses; just busy and perhaps feeling a bit under-inspired.

But this week we experienced two major nerdgasms!

The first one involves Google+ (G+ among the cognoscenti). Jon was not only invited early in the process, he was able to log on pretty much immediately. On the other hand, it took most of the week for Marian to first successfully receive an invitation, and then once that arrived, to get G+ to let her in.

We are enjoying exploring the new paradigm. It seems a better solution for us, at least so far, than Facebook. But who knows? Perhaps sometime in the unknowable future we will be dissing it with ironic commentary, too.

The second exciting news of the week was of course that the San Diego Comic-Con has released its event schedules for the four days of the Con. Preview night is Wednesday, July 20. We will be there picking up our passes and registering for next year, and then we will be back bright and early Thursday, July 21, to savor one of our favorite alternate realities.

We can usually be found attending various TV show panels, but will also be cruising the convention floor looking for oddities and inspirations. Give us a shout out if you will be there, too!

We started using NameCheap as our registrar at about the time it was implied that even women who excel at their fields (race car driving, personal training, etc), need their breast ogled by nerds. As proud nerds we would like to make it clear, breasts can be many things, many of them delightful, but decision criteria for domain registration ain’t one of them.

Now there comes news that the CEO of GoDaddy has gone from standard middle-aged compensation methods (fast cars, objectifying women, Viagra) to more extreme methods. He shoots elephants because they really really deserve it.

So we are moving every active domain, including those that won’t renew for years. As we do it, we realized that there are many opaque parts of the process. Here are some explanation we hope help others:

• Where are my domains?

When you start the checkout process at Name Cheap and type on all the domains you want to change, you may not see all the domains you expect. That’s because the domains may be “locked” at godaddy (it’s the default). Log in to GoDaddy go to the domain screen (https://dcc.godaddy.com/Default.aspx?activeview=domain&reset=0&filtertype=1) and hit the icon that looks like a lock. Click on that to unlock the account. Do this for all the domains you want to transfer.

• What’s an EPP code?

Once you get all your domains unlocked, you’ll go to the invoice screen, and you’ll probably be asked for an EPP code. That’s a code that your current domain registrar gives you to prove that you’re the owner of the domain. There’s a good explanation of how to get your EPP code from godaddy here: http://reviewboss.com/finding-epp-code-on-godaddy-com.html

• Is there a discount code I can use?

There sure is. Use BYEBYEGD and right now you’ll take the price from $8.99/site to $5.99/site. While it ticks me off to pay to transfer a domain I’ve already paid to transfer, and that I will eventually pay to re-register, at least for now, $1 per transfer goes to help elephant populations.

There is a real problem with some rogue elephants in Africa. As elephant habitats shrink due to encroachment, global climate change, and natural migration there will have to be some solutions found. Maybe allowing middle-aged white guys from the US to play out their fantasies of White Man’s Burden is one way. We are willing to pay to see if there are other ways, and to do that in part by changing our domain registrar

Here are two projects we’ve been involved in recently. Check them out and let us know what you think—nerdy enough?

http://completewaveguide.com/

http://mekey.com/

Rebuilding a database (7 hours and counting), testing a newly launched website (it’ll be public soon), and working on some reports tracking statutes of limitations.

Oh, and the Chargers are 4 points behind the Ravens with 3:33 left in the 1st half.

Sunday, when you own your own business.

According to Merriam-Webster (online, naturally), a nerd is “an unstylish, unattractive, or socially inept person; especially : one slavishly devoted to intellectual or academic pursuits.”

I think the first part of that definition’s a bit unfair, but the second half makes a certain amount of sense–if still rather disparaging.

Yesterday I put “our” fall TV shows in a spreadsheet so Jon could more easily program our two TiVos and our backup DVR. And today we went to see the movie 9 and were enthralled by it. Then we went to Ikea and tried to recycle the alkaline batteries we’ve been collecting for the last 2.5 years, but alas, they no longer accept them.

I dunno–do we fit the definition?

This blog of ours will let us thrill you with our nerdish exploits. We hope you enjoy reading about them as much as we enjoy having them.

Jon, over to you.