I have been insanely busy lately. Of course, I haven’t the first thing (and perhaps only thing) that suffered from this was my barely-existant blog. Sorry to all zero of my readers 
! Thought I’d go ahead and post an update now that I have a lazy sunday and I’m waiting on a dist-upgrade to finish.
On the MTG front:
My new decklist has been performing insanely well. I have managed to go 26-3-1 in matches since the new set (titled: Conflux) was released. Here’s the list (the previous link will take you the the MTGSalvation thread about the deck, which I am banned from) :
GWU ROCK by Wesley Hall
4 Noble Hierarch
2 Birds of Paradise
4 Rhox War Monk
3 Shorecrasher Mimic
3 Vendilion Clique
4 Rafiq of the Many
4 Cryptic Command
3 Negate
3 Path to Exile
3 Bant Charm
1 Loxodon Warhammer
3 Jace Beleren
4 Brushland
4 Yavimaya Coast
4 Flooded Grove
3 Mystic Gate
3 Forest
2 Island
3 Treetop Village
This deck has really boosted my DCI Rating to a new high and actually given me hope to one day qualify for a pro-tour event based on rating alone. This is the first time I’ve ever been nationally ranked in anything (that I know of), so it’s a lot of fun for me.
bazookatooth's dci ratings - 3/22/09
The only problem is — winning this consistently is actually starting to make the game boring for me. I’m considering taking a break until the type 2 season rolls around. One of my magic pro buddies has been trying to convince me to go to the Indy $5k tournament this coming weekend & I’m tempted…. we’ll see. I have to agree w/ his thoughts on my break idea though : “you will probably never become as good as you could if you take 4 breaks a year.” I guess the question is “How much do I care?”.
On the work front:
I’ve become absolutely obsessed w/ jQuery, a javascript framework that is awesome for bringing existing sites into this century. The last two sprints have had me doing “performance/gui enhancements” to an existing (and very big/complicated) build manager page within our product. I looked into a couple of different tools (mooTools, jQuery, prototype, YUI, etc) and wound up choosing jQuery for the job. Here’s an example of what I’ve done so far:
old:
new:
Despite looking so much better w/o really even having to think much on style (just pick a theme for the jquery.ui extension) it is nearly 3x as fast on load time. Being able to fairly easily make things so much better is a LOT of fun to me.. and the only limitation is the amount of time you want to put into it. I’m nowhere near done w/ the enhancements (even the one pictured) but I think when this code is finally rolled out, our users will be happy about it. I know the developer is quite pleased. 
Progress: My friend Chris and I found the coolest house for rent when we went looking on Friday. We met w/ the landlord (he seemed very cool) and he approved of us as tennants. However, I have to come up w/ about $1400 to get moved in before he rents it to someone else. I really, really, really want this place. Hoping it works out…
Going to get some work done now… peace.
