Picking another TLD is tempting, but I find it confuses people, even tech-savvy people. Maybe not if you have something kinda common like a .tv, but take what I did:

My username, across the Internet, is spiffytech. I registered http://spiffyte.ch. It's fun and a little clever, but since most people haven't heard of .ch domains I'm constantly saying "w-w-w dot spiffy t-e dot c-h. No, not .com. No, put the dot between the 'e' and the 'c'. Spiffytech. Like my username.". Even to tech-savvy friends.

Sure, maybe that's an artifact of my particular domain, but I'd much prefer if I could get the .com and just tell people spiffytech.com and avoid the confusion.