Moxalicious - Mox Jet Tournament report - 7th!!!!!

Ok, I can’t slow roll this, I came 7th. I am rather stoked about that, it is by far my best tournament result ever.

Firstly the deck list:

Beta Coaster

I upgraded to the Beta of Ubuntu 8.04 at the end of last month. I was happily surprised, naturally my wireless is broken, everything seams to work, but the tick box to enable the style of security we use doesn’t jump out at me. I’ll wait till the release of 8.04 before bothering to fix that though.

The good surprise though was that the default installed copy of Firefox 3 Beta 4 had a working flash install right out of the box, even on amd64. Previously I had to install the 32bit version of Firefox to get flash to work decently, but the default install of amd64 Firefox worked even smoother. That is until this morning when I installed the next round of updates, which included beta 5 of Firefox 3. Which is a piece of shit.

Flash doesn’t work.

It randomly crashes.

Why oh why did I install these updates, argh.

Update

Just posting to say the below post has had a lot of extra info put in, including some pointers towards future directions for the deck.

A-Bomb Highlander - Revel in the Ark

Played in the A-Bomb tourney today, I believe I was playing for Mind Bogglers of Croydon, but who I was playing for wasn’t all that important to me (sorry guys). I’m going to lead you guys on a bit of a story before I bother getting the tourney report.

After seeing the general goodness of Reveillark in both Standard and Extended I felt that the concept of a highlander Flash combo deck needed to be done with updated Reveillark tech. I felt the deck now had enough redundancy in combo pieces that I should be able to manage a version of the deck that just overloads with combo pieces and comes out with the win somehow. Here is the decklist skeleton I started with:

Combo Cards: (12)
Carrion Feeder
Mirror Entity
Flash
Protean Hulk
Body Double
Volrath’s Shapeshifter
Sparkmage Apprentice
Dakmor Ghoul
Highway Robber
Imperial Recruiter
Reveillark
Natural Order

Photo hosting

I’m about to start putting pictures into my posts about my holiday. Should I just be using WordPress hosting for them or should I use a third party?

Any opinions peoples?

For reference this is what a WordPress hosted image will look like:

Example

Hrm, it appears that only smaller images can I use a thumbnail for :( So suggestions are needed.

KL + India #1 - Ariving in KL

Over the next few days (read weeks) I’m going to be posting bits and pieces of my trip to the Pro Tour in Kuala Lumpur with a short trip over to India added to the end. If you want to read all of them and nothing else follow my India tag, people that only want to read judging things can follow my judging tags and skip the other bits. Chances are though that the post will be long enough that they involve many topics each.

Feb 12th
Arrive at the airport over 3 hours before my flight. Check in my pack with attached day pack. Trundle off with my (read mums) yellow carry on suitcase to buy my self a novel to read and a hard case for my sunglasses. I pick up the first book in a trilogy that I read the end of on a recent trip, I wasn’t happy to learn it was book 3, I had spent a lot of time checking that it wasn’t apart of a series. Some times you look very hard and still manage to not see what you were looking for :(

Firefox 3 Beta 4

I’ve been using the current beta for a few hours now and am loving it. They want to claim that it is up to 3x faster than Firefox 2 at complex web applications, now I can’t put a quantative number on it, but it does feel faster.

Yeah I know placebo effect and all that, but it does.

I recomend giving it a look, it can’t hurt right :) Linkage.

Hrm, well that would be a link if the link creating window didn’t appear to be broken, I wonder what caused that?

Words from the Gadds

I don’t commonly post links to articles on magic sites, but this one is worthy of the linkage. Some (very few) were complaining about the way the Melbourne preleases were run, so one of the important players from the region posted this article as a response. One of the paragraphs is worth quoting though:

“Things happen at pre-releases that aren’t as frequent at higher level events. Firstly, there are a lot of mistakes made by players due to the cards being new and unfamiliar. This presents an opportunity for players to become more accustomed to calling judges and more importantly, to gain experience at interacting with judges. Don’t try and resolve issues that come up yourself; it’s a bad habit and will only get you in trouble at other events. When you call the judge over, you will get a chance to gain knowledge about the rulings process and how to relate your side of situations in a credible way. I see people get the short end of the stick in tournaments all the time because they were either confused about whether they should have called a judge in the first place, or unable to relate their questions to a judge in such a way to get the information or ruling that they needed. If you are playing in your normal tournament area, calling a judge can have the additional bonus of giving the judge experience in answering questions, which means that if they happen to be judging the next PTQ in your area, you will be more likely to receive a correct and fair ruling from them.”

Read the full thing here.

Hiatus

This little blog will be on hiatus for 4 weeks till I return from India and KL. Enjoy the silence.

Limericks-R-Us

The dude at xkcd has setup a site to let people submit and vote on limericks.

Looking through the random submissions I found my favourite pair:

A bitter limerick connoisseur
Distressfully said “I concur
there’s no start more rank
than ‘There once was a blank’.
That’s something that we must deter.

Linky

With a suitable follow up of:

There once was a [person] from [place]
Whose [body part] was [special case].
When [event] would occur,
It would cause [him or her]
To violate [law of time/space].

Linky

Nothing like meta comentary in the form of the subject :)

We Three Kings

I love when C&H touches on religion, its so funny.

Leaving on an Aeroplane

For a count down till when I leave: Linky

Or for when I return: Linky

What follows ‘Sorry’?

“I hope that now the momentous decision to say a collective ’sorry’ has been taken, it will be followed by a collective speech from the indigenous peoples telling us that they forgive us.
There will be just as much debate on the indigenous side with that as we had with the ’sorry’ declaration.
If they can decide to forgive us , they’ll also have just as much problem with the wording as we did.”

That’s a quote from the comments of an article on ABC news website by someone going by the name of ‘antob’. So what does follow ‘Sorry’?

Mummy I wanna be an Artist

Dan of Dan’s Data recently posted an article about Genetic Modification of Humans. While its not the most informative piece, at least for those who understand genetics in at least a high school way, it does have several good links and provokes some interesting thoughts.

What would you change about your self if you could wave a magic wand? The first things I would change would be purely physical. Convince my body to not store more than 1% fat, in the modern western world we have no need for fat reserves. I wouldn’t do anything about my physical appearance beyond getting a perfectly healthy body, although I probably would reverse a bit of hair loss.

STOP-PRESS: Posting On Web Forum Has Effect

Weekend before last I spent most of it reading the back issues of Questionable Content. All 1050 odd comics, great story. Once I finished reading them all I subscribed to the RSS feed and got my first disappointment: it had the same title and link for every entry. Sure the full content of it included the comic it self, but I use the igoogle interface for my RSS feeds. If it doesn’t have a specific link or a different title I will never know when there are new comics.

So I thought it was worth trying to see if I could manage to do anything to change it. All I could think of was to post a request on the comics forum. The big surprise came this afternoon when they finished updating the RSS feed with a nice new fully featured feed with title and specific links.