Success is the best builder of character.

Going in, we were kind of shaky a little bit. How were we going to play? What's going to happen here? The way it evolved, now, we have a much better feel for ourselves. That confidence builder will help a lot as we go to Worcester.

This was a big confidence builder for me.

What we decided to do ... was visit houses in which people had lived for a year, to find out exactly how they used those spaces, and see whether that reality was the same as that portrayed in builder model homes.

Today was a morale builder for us. We've played better and we've played worse. But hopefully, this will be the start of an upswing that can take us through the postseason.

That was really a momentum builder and I thought it would change the pace of the game for us. We got within six, but, you've have to hit them when they count, so I should've hit them in the first half.

Some softening of long-term interest rates since early December helped buoy builder attitudes. Consumer confidence has rebounded nicely from post-Katrina lows.

They're doing the right things and getting in the right areas. The professional builder market is a $400 billion-plus market. When you're the second-largest retailer, if you want to continue to grow you have to continue to go after really large targets.

It's a real confidence builder for our team, to play the No. 1 team in the country and get a point.

Matisse is a new visual GUI builder that allows developers to save a lot of time laying out their GUIs. This has been a huge problem in the Java industry for many years. This is the big, new, hot feature that the developers are really clamoring for.