with david’s assistance and doing my own reading up on things. i’ve decided to put the following on my g1 once i get a 8gb micro sd card:
latest cyanogenmod 5.x
danger spl
amon_ra recovery

update 5/31/2010:
got my 8gb sd card and yesterday i went through the rooting process, as well as installing a new recovery image and custom rom. the whole process was pretty painless. i don’t really plan on writing my own howto for this subject since there’s so much info out there already. one thing i noticed a lot of though.. was there’s lots of _outdated_ information out there. as in tons.

i waded through lots of howtos that were no longer useful. and that’s to be expected…the g1 isn’t really a new phone anymore. so there’s lots of g1 related info out there that’s no longer maintained, most likely because the author has moved on and gotten a new phone.

sources i found useful:
http://www.androidspin.com
http://wiki.cyanogenmod.com/index.php/Main_Page
http://forum.xda-developers.com

you have to be sure to check the dates of the posts on xda though. other than that i knew someone who had already gone through the whole process (david). he was a great help in introducing me to a lot of the sites and answering questions when i had them.

i’ll follow up with more details in another post.