New Numerous Notes

Another "notes" post to update you about miscellaneous things I've been doing.  Ideally, this would come in between real posts about deep subjects involving cards or sports, but except for mocking the current downturn in the (greatly inflated) card market, which really only involves high dollar graded cards anyway, I've really not had much to post about.  

Aw, your Gem Mint 10 Ohtani rookie isn't still worth
6000% of what it lists as a raw card any more?

I did get some mailings from Night Owl and a few others, but a while back a lot of people said that "Look what I got" posts were boring.  One Trading Bases member just destroyed my 2021 A&G wants with a huge stack of base, inserts, and short prints.  He was celebrating a cancer-free health report from his doctor apparently.  I still have minis and other things to trade from A&G.  

I'm also awaiting the other four parts of a five seller order from SportLots.  It was shipped yesterday.  I originally went on there to knock out the last few cards from some of the most recent sets that I had narrowed down at the National, but ended up with more from several years ago that really didn't clear many set entries from my lists at all.

Not my dog or house

Aside from all that, I'm immersed in my YouTube addiction (music, cars, dogs, cards, etc.) and the NFL season.  I thought I did OK in my fantasy draft - got all the guys I wanted.  I stayed away from anyone I had last year, with a couple exceptions.  Now those are the only guys that are scoring high.  Oh well, it's early yet.  And of course, my Washington team had to go to Plan B after the first game.  I like Taylor Heinicke and I hope he can stay healthy and keep us as competitive as he showed against the champs last year.

On the brighter side, the old Buick is back in action.  I cleaned out the filter at the carburetor and it started and ran much better.  Took it to a show at an airport museum about half an hour away last week.  Have another one Sunday here in town.  Last week's show had most of the parking lot filled with classic cars, plus the museum's collection of vintage (mostly Fairchild - the building was the old Fairchild assembly plant) aircraft.  Also around were fire trucks of varying ages, military vehicles, and a few motorcycles.  For $150 donation, you could take a 30 minute ride in one of a few different vintage airplanes.  No thanks, but it was nice to see aircraft and things again.

My latest musical obsession.  Nightwish performing Ghost Love Score at Wacken Open Air 2013.  Floor Jansen is one of the most incredible vocalists on the planet.  Around the 8:00 mark, she takes it to another level.  Gives me chills every time.

 

Not Found On Google

You may be having trouble looking at my want list site.  The link over there to the right is probably not giving you my pages.  (Bleep bloop it in the comments as to what you're seeing, I'm curious.)

Google has shut down their "old" style websites in favor of a new version that seems to be limited to six themes or templates, all of which are excessively generic and not geared to the kind of pages that work well for plain text lists.  

I tried to convert my site into the new format, but found it incredibly labor intensive, since the conversion ruins all the formatting (which I am very OCD about), distorts all the fonts and combines certain text with adjacent paragraphs that must be manually separated.  After trying to make my Home page into something feasible, I got too frustrated and gave up.  

It is now impossible to embed pictures into your text.  On these pages, images are either the full width of the text page, or in their own isolated column, which pushes the text into a narrower field.  The football image above was meant to be that way, but the smaller one belongs much farther down the page.  Another image did stick about halfway down from there, so I have no idea.

This screenshot also shows the editing view and three images that were previously embedded and now wander aimlessly at the beginning of the section.  Conversion divides the text into sections when the spacing changes.  This would be useful if you did one for each set, but that would probably prove way too time consuming and cumbersome.

I had experimented with putting my lists on additional pages here on the blog, and so I spent several hours updating and pasting in the rest of my Baseball page last night.  You may have already seen the Baseball Wants tab above this blog page.  Unfortunately, even though the editing is similar to the old Google site, the page width is smaller and not indicated very well on the editor, so I kept having to go back and tweak a lot of listings for spacing and wrapping.  And then I had to go through and manually color each set heading and the text so it is easier to read against the black background.  In places where I used small type for descriptive details, etc., it shows here as another couple sizes smaller.  I changed a lot of it to regular size, but didn't get it all, so I'll just leave it for now. 

It'll do.  Once I get the other pages up, the level of work will decrease dramatically.  I don't think adding and subtracting things should be too bad.  Though I kept feeling like each time I saved and previewed the page, things would change.  I suppose I shouldn't be so OCD about how it all looks, but I like to keep it neat and readable.

So for now, this is what I'm going with.  I also put some baseball sets into my Collection on the Trading Card Database.  Now that you can add a whole set at once, and then go in and click out what you're missing right into your want list, it's not such a tedious process.  But if I'm at a show or shop, I want to see all my want lists at once so I can scroll up and down, and the Database can't do that (at least not that I've seen).

If you guys know of another simple free website service that works well, let me know below.  I saved all my pages before they got locked down, so I have all my data.

And thanks a lot, Google....