I’m looking to expand what I sell at the OSR Magic tournament and have a few ideas.  For about 6 years I’ve sold “grab bags” that started as 3 rares, a foil, and 50 commons and uncommons for 5 dollars but abundance of cards has upped this to 7 rares, 3 foils, and 70 commons and uncommons.  Normally when I buy a collection I just skim the best cards off the top and turn the rest into grab bags which has vastly increased the quality of these to the point where they now contain planeswalkers, mythic rares, and a Mox Diamond.

To Add:

  • Dollar packs – 2 cards of each color + multicolor and an artifact and one rare ($1).
  • Color packs – 40 cards of a specific color, 5 rares, 1 foil ($5).
  • Pile of Lands – 10 lands of each basic type ($5).
  • Megapack – 35 rares, 10 of each basic land, 350 commons and uncommons, 15 foils ($20).

Now I just need to summon the hours to make these.

I was asked to come up to camp to repair a printer that stopped functioning.  I asked if it was connected to the network.  I was told yes.  It was not.  I’ve done enough posts about outrages over printing and computers so I’ll have one of my periodic compassion-spasms.

Before I left as Assistant Camp Director, Nick Gramiccioni helped me with a project whereby we labeled every damn cable in the camp office.  You know that thing you do when you teach a kid to read and label door “door” or if they’re learning Spanish “fantasma bloqueador”, we did the same thing but with computer cables.  “USB Cable #6” and “To Network Port 4 from Office Manager PC” tabs were everywhere and for a brief shining week, I could say with confidence I knew where every cable went.  The chain of events that lead to breaking a printer spans 2 years and 48 network ports and goes something like:

  1. Cables in perfect harmony with computers.  Druidic ascension reached in terms of network.
  2. Network equipment put on slightly higher shelf, port assignment rearranged to make cables just barely cover distance.
  3. Port blows in building, patching now done through second cable, switch added, no labeling.
  4. Cluster of cables no longer tenable, they form trip traps and garrote wires.  In fit of rage, cables rearranged in daring midnight raid.
  5. Computer removed from network, thoughtful person removes cable marked “2nd Office Computer” is actually printer cable.
  6. Person sees “OKI printer cable” is plugged in but no printing happens.  I get call.
  7. I see that the cable marked “printer” has different ends on each side.
  8. I plug in unplugged cable.
  9. Clouds part
  10. God reveals self

New set releases are tough at camp as we get our cards from another vendor and Wizards releases only a certain amount of product for each store.  I wanted to up that amount as OSR would probably go through four cases of M11 in a week so I wrote to a Wizards sales agent outlining the camp’s needs, how many participants we get and a link to semi-posed pictures of kids having more fun than should be legal playing Magic.  I never got a response and with trepidation called Cyborg 1 on the release day to see what their stock was.

Me: So, how many cases did you get in?
Cyborg 1: Our initial order was 9 cases, we were expecting 2, but we got all 9.   I guess they produced more M11.

I checked with other vendors who got their usual two cases and OSR was flooded with the M11 that’d make the kids heads pop off.

Thank you, Wizards.

Because of the Council Dinner we had to hold the Magic Tournament in Handicraft which is the old dining hall, an old dusty building that uses benches instead of chairs.  I sniffed and sneezed my way through the evening damning the acoustics and difficulty in controlling traffic and at the end of the evening I was looking forward to moving back to the Dining Hall.  Then I noted that the tournament ended at 9:49 PM and that my car was packed and the site was cleaned by 9:55 PM consuming 1/9th the normal amount of time as we had to do no mopping and I could back my car right up to the door.  With some Claritin, I think I can deal with the new site and reclaim some of my Tuesday evening.

During Saturday retreat I took a pano of the staff both at parade rest and saluting the flag and was rewarded with my planning a gap into attending units I got these:

20100703-1523-StaffPano

2010 Camp Staff

I then decided to a print of the above which turned into a 13″ x 82″ print.  I started the print around 1:00 AM and finished around 4:00 AM.  The actual print time was about 15 minutes, so why the delay?  The Epson R2880 is a spectacular printer which has generated prints I feel that I was only tangentially involved in taking.  The problem I kept running into was that every time there was a printer error like forgetting to tell the printer to use the fed roll stock and in all cases the printer would clear… all 82″ which would have to be rerolled… by hand.

In the end, the print came out splendidly except that there are few good ways to view or display an 82″ print.  So, I set two records: one for largest print I ever produced at home and another for having wasted the most ink.