We recently switched this Laughing Squid blog theme over to the GPL compliant Genesis Theme Framework by StudioPress, making some design tweaks along the way as a follow-up to the recent streamlining of our layout.
One of the reasons we chose Genesis is because it uses child themes which allows the main theme to be updated without losing any of your customizations. It also uses WordPress hooks, which help extend functionality.
Special thanks to Lance Willett for all his help with CSS hacking on the theme.
We also finally migrated the blog over to our cloud hosting infrastructure. It loads much faster now and should perform much better when under a heavy load of traffic.