I registered my first domain with GoDaddy about five years ago. They were one of the few companies back then to offer reasonably priced domain registrations, for around $10, while competitors like Network Solutions still charged $40.

I’ve continue to register domains there over the years, and now have about ten personal and twenty for my work. Over time, they’ve added more and more bloat, and it’s taken more and more clicks to actually purchase a domain. Their management interface is overwhelming now, and the page design itself is quite the eyesore.

Junior year of college, I built my first HTPC. I had all these movies, music, and pictures and I wanted to watch them on the television I had just bought for our college apartment. So I built an extremely cheap computer, hit it behind the television, hooked it up and installed software called Media Portal which would serve as a front end and let me browse and watch all of this media from the couch.

It was really cool, and I was constantly tweaking Media Portal. A few years later, after the popularity of HTPC’s grew, I bought a sleek Shuttle HTPC. More recently, I installed new software called XBMC to replace Media Portal.