Apparently a deck consisting of:

1 x Skaab Ruinator
1 x Skaab Goliath
1 x Undead Alchemist
1 x Makeshift Mauler
1 x Abatoir Ghoul
3 x Armored Skaab
2 x Deranged Assistant
2 x Ghoulcallers Chant
1 x Ghoulcallers Bell 

And plenty more zombies. Not enough threats I suppose, perhaps not enough removal to get them through? Lost first round and I'm not sure I'll try the zombie idea again. I thought it ought to work, but didn't seem to. 

It turns out a deck along these lines can go 2-0, 2-0, 2-0

1 x Avacyn's Pilgrim
2 x Doomed Traveller
1 x Selfless Cathar
1 x Avacynian Priest 
2 x Ambush Viper
1 x Unruly Mob
2 x Silverchase Fox
1 x Cloistered Youth
1 x Bonds of Faith
1 x Moment of Heroism
1 x Village Bell-Ringer
1 x Elder Cathar
1 x Orchard Spirit
1 x Butcher's Cleaver
2 x Rebuke
1 x Woodland Sleuth
1 x Angelic Overseer
2 x Geist-Honored Monk 

Its nice to get a win at last, but its really not too much of a test of my drafting ability is it? If I had the time again I possibly wouldn't have bothered with the Sleuth. I never cast it, although I drew it a few times, and I only picked and played it as its the only relevant 4-drop I saw (apart from a Slayer). I was tempted to play the Boneyard Worm with 18 creatures, but its never worked for me before. I don't remember any misplays though, and time was nowhere near an issue, so I can take heart from that.

I rare drafted the Stromkirk Noble too, it would be rude not to.  Cards I passed at some point included Fiend hunter and Slayer of the Wicked. But that would have been for Monks or Overseers. I wish MTGO was saving my draft picks so I could look over them.  Stupid software.

If I do well next time I might actually get my limited rating up above 1600 again!

Awarded to A this week for trying so hard in everything that she does. A has grown in confidence since starting Nursery and she is delighting us with her story telling and ability to ask questions. She is clearly enjoying her learning and is able to talk about her activities during her learning. Well done A, you are a delight to teach, thank you!

Her story telling and ability to ask questions might be appreciated in school....

My darkmuse domain is currenly administered by Easyspace.  For quite a few years I've been using a separate nameserver to manage my DNS settings, but I recently changed (cancelled) my hosting and wanted to put everything back how it was initially.  Its taken a little while but support appear to have fixed it for me this afternoon.  For my own future reference, the MX record for easyspace should be:

@ 10 nicmail3.iomart.com.

For now, I'll be forwarding the domain to here (Posterous) with an A record.  

Fingers crossed

I won every game I played, but it was against people reasonably new to Magic without access to some of the more expensive and more powerful cards. I'm still not convinced I enjoy playing Merfolk as much as Goblins though.  And I'd probably have even more fun with Pox, or even a straight burn deck.  Perhaps my opponents would have had more fun too :)

Its also quite shocking to think that if I had to go out and buy these cards individually I'd be paying well over £500!  Although more than half of that is in the Wasteland and Force of Will.

13 Island
4 Mutavault
4 Wasteland

4 Aether Vial
4 Force of Will
4 Mental Misstep
3 Daze
2 Dismember

4 Cursecatcher
4 Silvergill Adept
4 Lord of Atlantis
4 Coralhelm Commander
4 Merrow Reejerey
2 Merfolk Sovereign

SB: (I can't really remember what i took as a sideboard)
4 hydroblast
3 Tormod's Crypt
2 Umezawa's Jitte
2 Submerge
2 Pithing Needle
2 A.N.Other

What a pain in the arse.

In the end the only way I could manage to post XML code properly was to set up a github account (I don't know why I didn't already have one), add a gist, and post a link to that.

Since I've spent the past few days trying to perfect a configuration to serve some simple jsp pages while also serving JSON to enable me to add REST support and an Android front end at some point, I thought I'd post it here. Its not much good on its own to be honest, you'll still need to annotate your controllers correctly and put your jsp in /WEB-INF/jsp/.  Maybe I'll post such a controller soon...

Well importing all the old shite from a very old version of wordpress in posterous without the articles that had shed loads of spam comments turned out to be a pain in the arse. Wish I hadn't bothered now.  Isn't technology fun?

Why oh why does iTunes always do this?  It pretends to be your friend, it lures you in with its nice looking interface and promise of easy reward.  Then it kicks you in the nuts with its unexplained overloaded checkboxes, makes your current sort order affect its operation and just generally behaves how a piece of software shouldn't!

Today I was trying to burn an MP3 CD for use in my car.  I have a newish car and the CD player is capable of playing mp3 data cds and of traversing directories in order to make the whole experience nicer.  So, I think, iTunes will do nicely; insert a blank CD, set up the playlist I want and click the burn MP3 CD button.  The result being a cd with no directories and all mp3s in the root.

Attempt 2:  Search the Internet and find a page that states that you need to click on the Album column heading until it says Album by Artist.  Who even knew that happened when you clicked it?  Anyway, I burn another mp3 CD and find that it did almost exactly what I wanted (apart from numbering all the directories, whats that about?).  Expect, of course, for Compilation albums which are obviously special cases and which noone in their right mind would want sorting into 1 directory for each artist contained on it! At least this highlighted that the ID3 tag for 1 track on 1 album was wrong!

Attempt 3: So, I think, maybe I didn't want to sort it that way, I probably want to just sort by album (not "album by artist").  And its almost correct now. Except I would like a combination of the attempt 2 behaviour for non compilations, and attempt 3 for compilations.  It's not hard because:

Next time I think I'll just take the directory structure direct from the iTunes directory since under the covers the program can manage to sort things the way I want them on a CD, without numbering them to force an order I don't want and which will presumably show up on my CD player display!  Stupid, stupid, stupid program.

Lets hope so. Music venue in Leamington