by Matt | Mar 21, 2012 | Personal
I’ve fallen off the grid for the past couple days because I’ve got one of the worst flues of my entire life. Friday night I was feeling just generally run down and after putting the kiddo to bed I laid on the couch to watch some TV. A couple hours later the wife asks if I’m ready to go to bed and put her hand on my head, I was burning up. My fever hit 103 on Friday night / Saturday morning and continued for most of the weekend. I got all the standard awesomeness that goes along with it. Fever, chills, body aches, cough, congestion, I was a festival of misery.
Monday I went to the doctor and he said it was too far past when it started for TamiFlu to do anything, and I’d just have to ride it out. Monday, Tuesday and today I’ve just been sleeping. I’ve still got most of my symptoms, minus the fever which thankfully seems to have broken.
The worst part of it was sequestering myself in the bedroom away from my wife and kid. There was no way I was going to let them catch this, so I tried to keep my distance. It’s been heart breaking to hear my girl on the other side of the door saying “Dada, dada!” and I can’t run and pick her up.
Anyway, I’m fighting this thing the best way I know how…
Hopefully I’ll start feeling better soon.
by Matt | Mar 12, 2012 | Personal
So, a last week as I’m talking about custom cards and how I’ve always wanted to do some (and actually print them), Chris from Varsity Trading Cards stops by and says “hi”. We exchange a few emails and turns out that he’s got a really awesome business going on. You probably know Chris from his card blog Crackin’ Wax, but over at Varsity Trading Cards he’s combining his love for photography and design and creating some really neat stuff for high school kids. Not only is that an awesome idea, and one I wish I had thought of, but he’s producing some really nice cards.
While professional and college athletes have long been the standard subjects of trading cards, we give High School student athletes the opportunity to be part of trading card history. Unlike yearbooks, class rings and Letterman’s jackets, our cards are made to be shared with family, friends and fans. By using in-game photography and actual player statistics, our cards offer a unique view into a special moment in each student athlete’s lives.”
Now that’s cool, and a completely awesome idea. I think Chris has hit the jackpot on this one. I know dozens of photographers who shoot for Little League and parents just eat up those 5x7s. I even know someone who brings a dye-sub printer to the field, with a generator, to crank out pictures on demand. There’s certainly a healthy market for it, but once the kids grow up there seems to be nothing in between until they get to college (or get drafted). I think Chris is filling a great need. I know I would have wanted my own cards when I was a kid. Hell, I still want my own cards now, lol. I even talked to him about that. He might be making me a tiny run of memorabilia cards at some point. Now those are truly works of art. Anyway, if you have a kid in school, playing any kind of sport, check out the Varsity Trading Cards website, Chris has some great looking stuff.
I wonder if he has franchise opportunities, lol.
by Matt | Mar 5, 2012 | Aggravation, Personal, Web
A quick apology, mostly to Greg, but also to anyone else that’s tried to email me recently at this domain. Apparently, in a fit of spam-related rage, I turned on some ridiculously strict anti-spam measures. I had SpamAssassin set at a 2 (1-10, 1 being the strictest), I had BoxTrapper installed and a mandatory white-list in place. I don’t even remember doing any of that. So, if you were wondering why emails weren’t getting returned or why it was taking days/weeks for me to reply, there you go. Everything I was being sent was either waiting for confirmation that you’re a real person, or was sitting in a spam bucket, waiting to be deleted. Sorry about that. I put everything back at a non-paranoid level, and email should be returning to normal. Carry on.
by Matt | Feb 27, 2012 | Personal, Web
I’m assuming by now that my old readers, my college and high-school friends, have all but given up on me and that my new readers, my baseball card bloggers, have no idea this isn’t a 100% card blog. It wasn’t always this way. Before 2011 there wasn’t a single mention of baseball cards. Actually, it was mostly video games, web stuff and little slices of life where I bitched and moaned about anything that crossed my mind. Part of me recognizes how my interests have changed and how, quite honestly, they’re allowed to. The other part of me wonders where the “old me” went and if he’s coming back. I’ve always been conflicted about blogging. What to share and how much. I’ve been doing it for so long that it comes in cycles. I’d write a lot, tons and tons of posts, then it would goes dark. Then my moods change, I discover something new or interesting, and I can’t shut up about it. I’ve also always tried to explain my thoughts as best I could and to make my website distinctly “mine”. I don’t know if I’ve ever succeeded in that, or if anyone even notices, but that’s been the idea for all these years.
Just a little back story for folks, I started this blog, albeit in a different form, way back in 2000. It’s logistical story is very similar to the history of blogs in general. For some perspective, I started this the year after Moveable Type and Blogger came into existence. I’m not saying this is the oldest blog around, but it’s up there. I started with Moveable Type, realized it was a pain in the butt, switched to Blogger, ran that for 2 years or so, then jumped into WordPress just after version 1. At the time I was self-hosting the site on a server with a bunch of my friends. My good friends had built a server so prone to dying they actually called it the Hindenburg. Those were the glory days of the internet. When a bunch of guys could literally host a server, and a site, in some other guy’s living room in the middle of nowhere New Hampshire. Sometime in college, in what I can only imagine is the single most ironic thing to ever happen, Hindenburg, the server, burst into flames during a hosting fire. I didn’t lose much, just a month or two worth of posts. In the end it was trivial. Thanks to their careful planning and backups, everyone was up and running shortly there after.
I was leaving college at this point and planned on jumping into my own business, which thankfully I never did, and I felt I needed a site that could potentially host shopping carts or some sort of client base. I didn’t want to burden the newly rebuilt server with any potential traffic jams, so I left to find other web hosts. At the same time, after taking numerous “professional practices” courses, I thought it would be prudent, especially for times when I was seeking employment, to have separate sites for my portfolio and my blog. In 2003 this domain was born. Why DocHoloday? Well, it’s been my screen name for longer than I care to remember. It’s literally been my only monicker in the digital age. It was taken from a post-modernist cyber-punk book published back in the 1990’s (that should explain a little bit about some of my crazy interests at the time), called How to Mutate and Take Over the World
. In it, the authors “St. Jude” and “R.U. Sirius” hacked networks and generally had a good time, occasionally doing a little hired (digital) gun-slinging, wild west style, with their friend “Doc Holoday”. Holo, as in hologram. That reference, plus Tombstone hitting theaters a couple years later all but cemented it for me. While I never became the deviant internet hacker I wanted to be, I did enjoy the uniqueness of the handle. I’ve never encountered it before or since. It’s mine. Back when handles meant something, that was a big deal.
After I finished school I continued to blog about life, what I was having for lunch, what video games I was playing, and what I thought about, well, everything. I’ll admit, I had a lot of anger issues when I was younger. Comparatively, I was probably just your average New Englander. I believe the term is “salty”. I like a good story, a good argument and a good fight. The combination of the three means I probably had a pretty good weekend. At some point, without really having a good reason or a conscience decision, I just started to mellow out. Maybe it was youthful exuberance wearing off, maybe it was “growing up”, maybe it was a combination of all that and more. I started writing more from the heart than from the tongue. Through my wife I started attending church and met a lot of really good people. A couple years ago I felt moved and accepted Christ and was baptized. A couple years after that, we had our baby girl, who is the absolute joy of my life.
I don’t really know why I wanted to write this today. I was just doing some reflecting on where I am and where I’ve come from. I can’t honestly say I’d change any of it because, it turns out, it all changed me. I think, in some small way, writing my thoughts out for all those years helped me deal with a lot of things. I didn’t bore anyone with tiny details about my problems (at least I hope I didn’t), but it was a way for me to voice my bigger concerns and frustrations and opinions and have my friends, who’s opinions I trust implicitly, give me feedback.
A blog isn’t just a journal. It’s not just a collection of stuff. It’s not a bunch of baseball cards I have, or movies I’ve seen, or games that I’ve played. It’s a small piece of me. Some days I feel like writing, some days I don’t. Some days are sunny, sometimes it rains. It’s always here to come back to, and it’s never far away.
As I said, I don’t really know why I felt like sharing that. I guess it’s to illustrate the point that, while hobbies and passions and interests may change, I’ve always appreciated the opportunity to have and to use this outlet. I was actually going to apologize about the amount of baseball card posts recently, but writing what I just have, it makes me realize that at this point in my life, it’s something I enjoy and I enjoy talking about it. I can’t artificially post my interests in another topic simply to have a more “balanced” blog. It would be fake. It would be a lie. I don’t actively intend to ignore the discussion of my personal life, but it’s simply not that interesting. By comparison, my hobbies and interests are. So, I’ll make you this promise: Whatever I’m interested in will always be the topic du jour here at my blog. My close personal friends, I will strive to write a little bit more about my day to day adventures, but please don’t leave if I mention baseball. My baseball friends, please realize that this isn’t a 100% card blog. It never was and most likely it never will be. If that means you’ll never come back, and that you feel the need to remove me from your reader feeds, I understand.
Take care, and sincerely thank you for reading.
by Matt | Feb 14, 2012 | Personal
Unless you read my “About” page, you may not know this, but I’m a photographer and designer by trade. Baseball cards actually combine those two fields with my love for everything baseball. So, for me, baseball cards aren’t just pieces of cardboard, their little works of art.
Since my day job is mostly web design and webmaster/maintenance work at the moment, I like to take a little break every now and then and stretch the ol’ Photoshop muscles a little.
That leads me to “Custom Baseball Cards”. If you actually put that phrase into Google, you get a wide variety of absolutely astonishing or completely terrible cards. It’s clear who is a designer that likes baseball and who is a teenager with Photoshop, making cards for his garage band. Everyone has their own style too. Some people are creating beautiful cards that could, in all seriousness, go into production tomorrow. Some people are creating cards with large blank spaces so they can print them out and take them to a game to be autographed, creating their own completely custom collection.
Me, I like the artsy ones. My all time favorite cards are Upper Deck Masterpieces and Topps Gallery. If I’m feeling a little retro, nothing can beat Goodwin Champions or early A&G.
So, with that in mind… I came up with these.
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