So now that I started playing Magic again, I’ve had the actual urge to go back and finish cataloging the last year’s worth of cards, which have been sitting in somewhat sorted piles in a corner of the downstairs room. The way they’re stored is in folders with 9-card sleeve pages in them, and I use a printed out checklist to keep track of which cards we have. (Part of the goal of all this was to try and collect at least one and no more than four of every card ever printed.)
The old way I used to make these checklists was to take the official checklists from the WotC and drop them into Excel, format them there and then copy them into Word. Well, that stopped working when I tried it. And that whole method was a pain in the ass, anyway, so I decided to install MySQL, PHP and other stuff onto my Powerbook, dumped all the card data into a database and made a web page that I formatted with CSS to make look like I wanted.
I managed to print out all four of the sheets I hadn’t done yet very quickly. They don’t look perfect, but now, doing further sheets will be much easier. And I also have a working PHP/MySQL install on my laptop, which is fun!
On a completely separate, yet equally geeky note, you are all ordered to watch Serenity. Of course, the hard-core of you have already seen it last night or today, but I’m not going until tomorrow afternoon. But, yeah…. go! Unless you’re trapped in the middle of Montana or something.