I finally decided to give enough of a crap about this blog to give it a facelift.
When I first set up this blog I had enough issues with applying default github pages themes that I pretty much gave up and let it look like crap.
So I tried http://hexo.io on the recommendation of Evan You. But unfortunately the only theme I liked was by Josh Gerdes and required installing Nokogiri which has well known compatibility issues with OS X and the ruby versions I tried did not work.
I flirted with going back to Jekyll for my blog hosting but eventually broke through on the hexo to github deployment. and now you have a nice site.
Thank god for open source!