Highlights

Cytoplasmic Writings - January 2008 Archives

2008 already. Two more years until 2010: A Space Odyssey. Wow. Still no flying spaceships and interstellar travel. At least there's a larger focus on the environment. January was too quick. Too much snow and too cold. It sucks that the statuory holiday is at the beginning of the month. Bleh.

Wednesday, January 30th 2008

The temperature went for 8 degress celsius yesterday to -10 degress celsius today (without the wind chill). These crazy temperature changes must be wreaking havoc on people's immune systems. I'm just glad I'm not in a pile of snow 6 feet deep. I love snow, but shovelling the stuff can be tiring.

Wow, February is almost here. One month down in 2008. That means tax season is coming and it means more taxes for the man. At least this year I have some RRSPs to help with my deductions. Work has been getting busier and busier lately and I hope I can finish all my work. There are days I wish I could just shut myself in a room and do work without any one bothering me.

Oh yeah, with the sale of my Marvel Masterpieces sketch cards I opened the remaining three boxes and pulled some decent sketches as well. Not amazing like the NAR sketch but I got a Mat Broome (woot woot!) and a few others. I'll have to scan them in and then post the breakdowns for all six boxes. Probably next week. Cheers!

DRAGONCRYPT 1/30/2008 10:28:40 PM

Sunday, January 27th 2008

After a two week nightmare, I finally was paid for one of my auctions and I sold another to another bidder (at a much lower cost). I really hope the bum-bidder gets his account suspended or removed. That person has over 2000 feedback but he deserves losing his account. If you can't pay for the purchase, at least have the decency to reply to my messages. I dislike dead-beat bidders, but I hate non-responsive dead-beat bidders. So the damage is down and I will end up re-listing only one of my auctions. I probably won't get as high of an amount as the first time but it should still help pay the bills.

I saw the odds for the Heroes trading cards. Wow. What a reversal of odds. Everyone thought that the costume cards would be the most difficult to find but instead it's almost four costume cards per case and the rest would be autographs and sketches. The quality of the sketches have been somewhat lacking. Even the prices for the great sketches seems a little low. I saw a Russell Walks go for $120. That is pretty cheap compared to some of his other sketch cards. I'll be picking up my Heroes cards this weekend. Hopefully it's a good case break and not some of the really horrible ones I've seen online.

I also finally opened my two Donruss Americana boxes. These were quite expensive but I think I did okay. I pulled a Director's Cut signature of Ron Howard with him also writing "Music Man (1962)". Pretty kewl stuff. I also got a Steve McQueen memorabilia, William Shatner and Adam West memorabilia and a whole slew more. These are some nice cards for sure. Although a master set is a little ridiculous to complete.

DRAGONCRYPT 1/27/2008 10:54:56 AM

Monday, January 21st 2008

Working the later shift this week. Got my Motorola Q from Red Flag Deals today. Oh yeah, did I mention that I won a Motorola Q from Red Flag Deals?! It's pretty awesome since I really don't win too many things. Yes, I have a BlackBerry that does way more things but it's just so cool to win things. I'll probably give it to Jenn to use as an MP3 player or something. Don't want to let it go to waste.

I'm going to talk about comics and the horrible event that was entitled "One More Day". It was the restart of Spider-Man, reversing his marriage to Mary Jane and countless other events that happened over the last 30 year. Editor-in-chief Joe Quesada thought it was stupid to have Peter Parker married and decided it was a good time to break up the marriage. That's okay with me despite the slap in the face to all those Spider-Man fans. What was really bad was the way Marvel executed the plan. Making Mephisto this all-powerful demon that Peter makes a deal with totally is out of Peter's persona. Not to mention that after the reboot, the rest of the Marvel Universe stayed the same. WTF?! So is Spider-man still on the New Avengers? Why the hell is Harry Osborne alive? Is Norman Osborne still this crazy loonie running the Thunderbolts? Nothing makes sense. Bleh.

It's times like this that makes my want to cancel comic books. DC is doing the same thing with their Countdown tie-ins. Too much crap cramming the shelves. This better be the final Crisis and there better be only ONE fucking universe. Destroying all those Elseworld stories and killing off their characters was a horrible idea. Anything to make the money for the shareholders right? I know after the next Crisis, if nothing changes, I'm dropping a ton of books. The only mainstream gem at DC right now is Green Lantern. The Sinestro Corps War was a crazy read and mix it in with the awesome artwork and it's a sure-fire winner.

DRAGONCRYPT 1/21/2008 10:20:02 PM

Sunday, January 20th 2008

Wow, another long time between posts. I've been scanning my comic books nightly so I can sort them and then take them back to Toronto for storage. So nothing really to report I guess. I ended up playing a lot of Civilization 4 and Call of Duty 4 (the ending was interesting). Now I remember why I do not play too many video games. I just keep wanting to play more and more until I finish the game. My addictive personality at it again.

My Ebay auctions sold for beyond my expectations. Unfortunately, I've only received payment from one buyer and the other three cards still have not received paymnet. The buyers have not responded to my countless emails to them asking for payment so I opened a few buyer disputes. I do not understand why people bid on items and then choose not to pay and not to respond to sellers. What really irks me is that one of the buyers has a fairly high feedback and is still selling and buying cuz the feedback still increases. So this individual is actively choosing to ignore my payment requests. That's just...rude.

Man it's definitely gotten a lot colder recently. I keep forgetting my long johns in Toronto so I end up wearing the same pants over and over again. I've noticed recently that my clothes are really really outdated. I guess I've never really spent much time updating my wardrobe. The majority of my clothes are from my university days or 4-5 years ago. Once I earn some more income, I'll take a look around.

DRAGONCRYPT 1/20/2008 11:04:02 PM

Tuesday, January 8th 2008

Hope everyone had a good week after the end of the holidays. I spent last week scanning comic books like a madman. I couldn't believe I had over a thousand covers to scan into my database. Has 2007 really come and gone so quickly? I know the holidays came and went pretty quickly. I am already missing the days where I sleep in and do nothing all day long.

Over the holidays, Jenn started watching a show called "How I Met Your Mother". She found it hiliarious and recommended that I also watch it. I was reluctant at first but the show is really funny and enjoyable. An added bonus is that it has Neil Patrick Harris as a supporting cast member. Legendary! The show is on it's third season and I highly recommend it to all. It's a mix between Cheers and Friends I guess. Great dialogue and characters and the stories are pretty interesting. I'm pretty sure the Bob Sagat is the voice of the older Ted.

Last Friday, my laptop at work broke. It looked like it was the hard drive. As the laptop was out of warranty, I was in line for a replacement laptop. Woohoo! Just got it today and man, it is ten times better than my desktop computer. Even the native resolution is better than one of my LCD screens. Awesome. I haven't hooked it up to my 22 inch LCD at work but that's going to be Awesome as well. I just can wait!

Anyways, I'll try to post a few more updates this week. Jenn and I are staying in Waterloo for the weekend. I want to limit my travels to Toronto for now. Saves gas and there really isn't too much to do right now since we're both trying to save money.

DRAGONCRYPT 1/8/2008 11:19:00 PM

Tuesday, January 1st 2008

Happy 2008!!

I hope that every one had a good New Year's Day for 2008! Woke up a little later than expected today and I totally did not realize how much snow Waterloo was supposed to get. Great, another day shovelling snow by myself. Since my roommates are away and Jenn is in Toronto, it's just me doing the shovelling. Took a good hour to shovel the snow. After shovelling, I decided to go the gym as well since I didn't go on Sunday.

At the gym I was watching the Next Iron Chef. It's a pretty good program and it was interesting to see 8 professional chefs competing with each other. I know that Chef John Besh actually competed on Iron Chef but I don't know about the others. I was so curious about who won that I went online I found out the winner. Not the person I thought who would win.

Back to work tomorrow with no more holidays until Family Day in February. I'm so glad that there's a new statuory holiday in February. It's always been a drag working after the holidays until the Good Friday (March) holiday. I usually try to take a few vacation-day-made long weekends to tie things over. I'll find out in the next couple of weeks how our re-organization goes at work. Oh yeah! I officially be 6 months in my new role starting tomorrow. Time has flown by pretty quickly and the future will be interesting.

2008 seems to be looking like a marquee year for me. I think both my personal and occupational portions of my life will be changing. There will be more trips abroad and hopefully more controlled-spending on my part on hobbies. Let's try to make some money instead of just spending it hehehe. Bring it on 2008!!!

DRAGONCRYPT 1/1/2008 9:37:36 PM