Monday, June 18, 2012

Father's Day Gifts / Display Idea

I had two big goals when I decided to re-enter the hobby.
  1. Accumulate Cubs cards faster than they come out (to make up for past years I missed).
  2. Get and stay organized.
When we bought our house a couple years ago, I took over the very small room for my office/den/mancave. A lot of my autograph collection is signed books. I worked in a bookstore for quite a while and picked up a bunch of them through book signings in my store or other contacts in the industry.

Then, I started picking up cards again last year and my wife stressed that she didn't want to just look at a bunch of white boxes. As a good husband, I agreed. Plus I wanted to be able to look at them easily so I put them into binders.

I'm sure its the same with most of you, but my wife is generally a lot more supportive of the second goal than the first. Occasionally she'll ask to see what I got in the mail but I'm pretty sure she doesn't actually care. She has no idea what I have or don't have or want when it comes to baseball cards. So when she asked if there was anything I wanted particularly for Father's Day, I went easy on her and gave her an idea that would help with Goal #2. Win-win.

I'm still a new kid on the block when it comes to the blogosphere but I think I came up with a pretty revolutionary idea for being able to keep a closer eye on my cards. The product itself isn't new but I haven't seen or heard of anybody else using them for this purpose. So now that I have over-hyped it to the point where it can only disappoint, I am going to insert a very rarely used "jump" and make you click to see it.

My extras are still in boxes because I find that to be the easiest way to pull them quickly for trades. I think binders are a better storage option than boxes for my keepers, but still not the greatest for display purposes. I have been trying to scan all my cards as they come in and then tackle older cards as time allows. So they're in my computer, now what? Sure they make for easier access for a blog post. But how can I see them all the time? Like this:


So my normal process so far has been scanning the card, cropping the photo, updating my master spreadsheet of "haves", updating my want list, possibly doing a blog post depending on how I acquired it and then filing the card(s) away. Now I'm adding one more step which is to copy the cropped photo onto the "photo frame template" file I created and saving that as a separate jpeg file. 


So I'm curious to hear from what everybody thinks. Good idea? Meh? Maybe you'd try it? Not for you? Let me know!


4 comments:

  1. Wow, sounds like a pretty nifty idea to me. Nice thinking Matt.

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  2. I might ask for some of these for my birthday or Christmas. Great idea!

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  3. i like it! i need that for my desk at work! although, i might not get anything done.

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  4. Nice idea. I can certainly see why having two or more of these would be desirable!

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