Fun with screencaps

 While I no longer type in each card after each scanning wave (something I actually miss now) I do still update each person's total. That will never change. A recent change however is that now I screencap the leaderboards after each wave, something I started doing with the 14th wave and something I now wish I had been doing since day 1. These are a lot of fun to look at! The NBA and NASCAR charts don't show much change...I started screencapping them too late for that, everyone is pretty much already established where they are going to be, although there is some movement depending on if I scan a batch of somebody. 

Where it's really fun is the NHL chart...since I'm still fairly new to the sport, and the scanning is still very much in process, not nearing the end like my other two sports, there is some massive fluctuation. 

Today the idea hit me to open them all up and take a look at them compared to each other. Naturally, I screencapped that, too.

as you can see (and I recommend clicking on it to make it bigger) Henrik Lundqvist has been leading since I began screencapping, although it's probably inevitable that Wayne Gretzky will pass him some day. That won't be any time soon. But let's take a look at the progression of 3 of my other favorite players:

Mats Zuccarello starts at 12th in the 14th wave, before jumping to 8th in the 15th wave, then moving up to 2nd in the 16th wave! He dropped back to 4th in the 17th wave. My favorite skater in the league, he simply doesn't get enough cards to maintain a top 5 ranking for very long. I only have 2 more awaiting scans, one of which I got as a gift after I finished the most recent typing wave. He didn't have even a single card scanned in the 17th wave, which I completed typing in last week. 

P.K. Subban was 24th in the 14th wave, but jumps all the way up to 6th in the 15th wave, thanks to my winning a contest on the Trading Card Database where the prize was a pack of P.K. cards. He dropped a spot to 7th in the 16th wave, thanks to Mats moving past him. He's now in a tie for 8th with Marc-Andre Fleury, but Marc-Andre will pass him soon, as I have more cards of Marc-Andre awaiting scans, including 3 I got just this week. 

Brent Burns started out 26th, fell to 28th, then jumped back up to 23rd and now 20th. For being a favorite player he certainly isn't leading the way in card collection rate, but hopefully I can get him into the top 10 at some point. 

Another player I like to keep an eye on is Vincent Lecavalier. My friend who gave me over 2000 hockey cards back in 2015, that's his favorite player, and when I began collecting the sport officially in 2017, Lecavalier was 1st in my NHL collection, as my friend Ricky gave me all his duplicates. If I had thought to start screencapping when I began collecting, you would have seen Lecavalier in the #1 spot. By the 14th wave, he was 21st, before jumping up to 18th (on the strength of the cards Ricky sent me getting scanned, I have only gotten 1 or 2 new ones of him since then). By the 16th wave he had dropped down to 30th, and now in the 17th wave, he doesn't make the leaderboard at all! I didn't scan any cards of him in the 17th wave. 

Interestingly, only one player has held the same position in all 4 waves I've screencapped, and that is Henrik in first. 

I normally do two waves a year. I typed wave 17 from January 16th through 27th. Because I spent the second half of last year working solely on models, not scanning hardly anything at all (only working on cards when it was raining out and I couldn't work on models, and it was a drought, so maybe 3 days from August to November) I only did one wave in all of 2020. I probably don't have enough time to do another wave before the modeling season starts again but I can't build in the summer, it's too hot to open the windows...remember I have trouble breathing in the heat. What I am trying to say is that I hope it's not another 11 months between waves like it was between wave 16 and wave 17. 

I made one other change in this wave, something I knew I would always end up doing, I just hadn't done yet. While I'm not typing the standard size cards into the chart, I AM typing the oversized cards in. Since they can't be stored in the boxes with the other cards that I label if they are scanned or not, I type them in...no ambiguity of "have I or haven't I?" there. I added in columns for when the card was typed in, which I am debating whether or not to continue to maintain. That's mostly to help me sort them to when I left off because I sometimes have them sorted otherwise. The column I knew would eventually be created is the date I added the card to my collection. It's always been the plan since I created the Overall charts and I finally decided to add it in now. Eventually I will fill in the info on ALL of my charts- well, all that I can, I don't have that information for every card- and that is something I'm looking forward to. For 2013 and older, the date I got the card is stored only in one place- in my hand written paper listings. Beginning in 2014 I've tracked it on Excel. Even so, I only started keeping track of the dates in 1999 and I have not always maintained it very well, with many NASCAR dates before 2007 not recorded, no Non-Sport before 2010, and vast swaths of the NBA, especially from 2000-02 and 2004-06 not recorded. Since I began collecting in 1988, that's a lot of info I don't have...although I do have a few random dates before that, mainly special events like Birthday and Christmas where I just KNOW the date because it was such an important event in my life. The earliest dates I know for sure are Christmas 1992. When it's all said and done- and that won't be this decade, most likely- I will be able to sort my collection by date added to my collection, and for some reason, I'm really looking forward to that...but like I said, it's a long way off. Based on some calculations I did today, I still have some 46,000 cards awaiting scans, and they are arriving faster than I'm getting them scanned. I'm now under 20,000 NBA cards awaiting scans, but my hockey collection vs. percentage scanned dipped from 50 to roughly 40% or less, since I didn't scan for months. That's just a guess on percentages, no hard numbers, and I have I would guess 90% of baseball and football still awaiting scans. I've got no idea what percentage I'm at for NASCAR and Non-Sports. Instead of worrying about trying to figure that stuff out, (or playing Angry Birds, which I've been doing most of the day instead of anything actually productive) I should be working on scanning.

Willie O'Ree was the first sports card I typed the date I got it in, but I did the Non-Sports chart first. I didn't remember what year a promo card I had gotten was, so I had to pull up my Card Collection Acquisition Chart. Since I had the info in front of me, I figured I might as well include it. Some day it'll all be there....although I have no idea when.