Off-Topic Forum

So today was the inaugural basketball "practice (?)" for our 6 year old granddaughter. Yours truly had the honor of escorting said granddaughter and with the three "instructors" having their hands full with a total of 41 future HOF'ers. Having been involved at the high school and University level (as statistician only ) the first time out consisted of primarily dribbling drills ... right hand... left hand ... etc. Where it got a little interesting was when they gathered around in a circle where they were introduced to the Harlem Globetrotters routine of dribbling on the spot then dropping to their knees while still dribbling and finally at one point laying on their backs all the while maintaining their dribble. Needless to say there were basketballs flying off in all different directions. After an hour of a few more drills it was off to the local Tim Hortons where a cookie and chocolate milk were the order of the day. Can't wait to see what happens next Saturday.

That sounds like a fun practice to watch, PapaG! I hope this doesn't sound bad, but I've always been amused watching young kids learn to dribble a basketball. It took me so long to get my nephew (when he was about that age) to be able to dribble from one hand to the other. I started him with a mini-ball so he had more control. Once he learned the hand/arm movements with some consistency, I switched him to a full-size ball. That led to both of us chasing a lot of out-of-control basketballs. I also tried to teach him the thru the legs cross dribble. That did not work out well. He was too tall for the small ball and too short for the regular ball. Good thing he was still very young! I started him with stationary dribbling when he was about 4. He did good with that. But when I tried getting him to dribble on the move, his feet kept getting in the way of the ball. So funny. He has gotten better at sports over the years (he's 12 now). My sister was telling me a couple of months ago that he wants to play football and she's concerned. He's tall for his age but still real skinny. I told her that height is an advantage at a few positions, but build and strength are required for a few of those. He doesn't have great hands for actually catching the ball or accuracy for throwing it. Those eliminate QB, WR and TE. I told her that he could try Cornerback or Safety. He's less likely to get hit in those positions but can still make a difference. At those positions, he doesn't HAVE to catch the ball but just make sure the other guy doesn't catch it. The only time he needs to tackle is if that guy does catch the ball or if a running back is coming his way. I think that eased her mind a little bit, so that she might let him try it. I don't know if she did though. We haven't talked about it since then. We both stay pretty busy and she lives over an hour away. But I'm sure I'll hear more on Thanksgiving.

I hope everyone in a DST area enjoys that extra hour of sleep or extra hour messing with cards tonight or Sunday!

Here's some good news I had yesterday (now). As some of you already knew, my laptop fried back in August. I was a bit concerned about the hard drive from the fried one. I finally decided to connect it to my new laptop (via a 2.5" SATA Wire to USB connector) about 24 hours ago. It still works perfectly fine and I was able to download a bunch of stuff to my new laptop. I copied a few programs first as a test and then tackled the "My Documents" section of the old drive. It's great to know that I didn't lose over 9,100 pics, scans and documents that were on there! It took a few hours to move them from that drive to the laptop, but totally worth it. I don't think I had any back-ups for 2019 stuff yet. And now I have an extra 1-terabyte hard drive to use for storage too! I was so relieved when my laptop was able to read the old drive and more-so when file transfers happened. Great news for me!

After being away from sports cards for 8 months i'm back slowly uploading my doubles and boy there is a lot of them hmu with trades i'm open for biz

Great computer save. I wouldn't have clue to save mine if it started to die on me.

Sounds great Shawn.

I had to get a little help from my brother when the old one fried. They make it very difficult for the average person to get into laptops these days. Taking the screws out still doesn't allow you access to the inside now. There are also plastic prongs you have to move and then other crap to remove to get to the inner workings. Once we finally got to the motherboard level, it was obvious what happened. Somehow the HDMI port shorted out and that surge shut down the whole PC. Good thing I didn't have anything plugged in that port when it happened. Knowing it was fried, I just pulled out the hard drive and put everything else back together. That was back in August.

I borrowed the connector cable from my brother, but was still a bit nervous to connect the old drive to my new laptop. I finally decided to do it when I had some time to spare Monday night. I'm glad I did.

I just posted my 80,000th card front to the Database...only took me 9 years. I don't know if I will ever hit 90,000. I don't buy cards like I used to...maybe some day. It'll be a long time if I do.

For the second time this week, I have some good news to share. The best part is that it was a surprise! I got my paycheck today and it wasn't what I expected. I got a RAISE! Nobody told me it was coming or even hinted at it. I'm not exactly sure why either. There are only 3 reasons that I can think of for the extra 35 cents an hour. #1 is that an account agreed to a price increase (only likely for 2 of my 4 accounts at this time of the year), #2 is that I had secret inspections on my other 2 accounts and aced them (both are diff. locations for the same company), #3 is that the owner realized he could afford to up my pay and did it b/c he never has to worry about my 4 accounts. It's not a big payraise, but every bit helps. In this business, a raise usually only comes from a client upping what they pay for our services and that is not often. After not getting a raise for a few years, this is the 3rd one in just under 2 years! I'm pretty happy about that.

Billy 80,000 cards is a great milestone. All the members appreciate the work.

The biggest raise I ever got was $50.00 a week. That was at a pharmaceutical company. They have tons of money. The smallest raise was 5 cents. My supervisor didn't like me.