HOLY CRAP? IT'S HOW MUCH?!!!

Being in Cranbrook I'm pretty bored, so I was looking around on eBay tonight and stumbled across something that totally blew my mind.

http://cgi.ebay.com/KNIGHT-RIDER-BELT-BUCKLE-VERY-RARE-MINT-CONDITION_W0QQitemZ290193086448QQihZ019QQcategoryZ2622QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

Some guy is selling a Knight Rider belt belt buckle on eBay and the bidding is up to $162.50! I have that exact same belt buckle. Mine is actually from the Gray Creek Store on Kootenay Lake and I think cost $10. I also got an A-Team belt buckle from there as well. They also had Atari Asteroids pajamas which were unfortunately too small. It originally came with a red belt attached to it, but I cut it off as it's too small and then had a new belt custom made for it. I've since put on weight and the belt doesn't fit anymore. But hey, it's not like it cost $162.50...haha what a sucker! The guy selling it will be laughing at the way to the bank.

Boxing Day!!

No, I didn't go boxing day shopping. Not like there are that many places to go shopping here in Cranbrook. I know some stores have sales with some items having limited numbers, but boxing day sales last all week, so why get up early to buy some crap you don't really need. I may check out Wal-Mart tomorrow, but only because I'll be bored and will need something to do.

The X-mas haul was relatively small this year which is good because I already have enough things I don't need and don't use. I got Super Mario Galaxy and Medal of Honor: Heroes 2 for my Wii and a few DVDs, it's not like I was going to leave the house anyway. I also got a few items of clothing, maybe they'll even fit. My brother got lots of clothes and like 10,000 pairs of socks...haha! I got a couple books, and they have lots of nice pictures, I haven't gotten around to actually reading the one book yet...so many words!

My Puchi Puchi arrived on Monday too. If I had left like five minutes earlier I would've missed it, but I got it in time and it's a real Christmas miracle. As for the Puchi Puchi itself, it's a little bigger than I thought and the actually "popping" doesn't live up to the real thing, it does feel a little fake. Maybe because it's not loud enough, but I think you can adjust the volume on the back. Remember I can't read the instructions, so I'm just guessing.

Well I'm off to have a nap or something similarly productive.

Twas the night before Christmas...

I'm back home in Cranbrook right now as I drove down Calgary today. The roads were okay up until the Crowsnest Pass where it had snowed. The roads had some snowy sections, but mostly were just wet. I went through a ton of windshield fluid and I got like three new chips in my windshield. Dammit! I think I should start flying back just because I'm getting to hate the drive. It's not that I don't like driving, I just don't like driving that road. I've driven it too many times and it's so damn boring it's starting to put me to sleep and that's not a good thing.

I'll be in Cranbrook until the 28th when I head back to Calgary. I'll definitely be bored, so I brought DVDs with me to help pass the time. I burned the first 18 episodes of GekiRanger on DVD. I burned it as just a plain data DVD, but when I tried it on my DVD player at home it played, but the sound was all choppy which was weird because it worked fine on the computer. I brought it with me and when I tried it out on my parents' DVD player (which I bought them) it worked perfect! Damn, I'll have to swap my old cheap player for a new cheap player. Even thought it's a data DVD it loads to a menu screen where you can select which ever file you want to watch. And the files look awesome! The video quality is really good, better than some DVDs I have. I don't want to buy a new player, but maybe next time I come home I'll just swap my old one for my parent's. They won't mind!

I'm off to bed cuz Santa is coming!

It's what kids want!!

Do you really want to eat something called "Chokies"? It's almost just asking for trouble. I went back to T&T Supermarket to get some more 3+2 and saw these cookies and couldn't resist getting them on their name alone.

They're actually similar to Oreos and come in three flavors Irish Mocoa, French Vanilla and the ones I bought, Swiss Choco. The packaging is kinda weird as it's a package with ten packages inside each containing three cookies. I guess this type of packaging is good for lunches. The cookies don't really taste the good, they're just some inferior Oreo knock offs and taste like it. But the name is funny!

I couldn't resist looking at the movie store and all it's bootleg DVDs. I saw the Simpsons movie and 30 Days of Night which isn't even on DVD yet! They always like to sell DVDs sets based on prices like $3/disc. I bought this CSI: NY set which was 3 discs and set me back $9. I'm not sure what season it was, but it looks like they manage to cram lots of episodes on the discs, even though when I try to select some of them they don't even work. The video quality was crappy, kinda like a VCD but the funniest part is that the episodes bear the network watermark down in the bottom right hand corner of CTV HD. Haha, it's recorded right off TV and made into DVDs. Classic!

'Tis the season.

I officially finished my Christmas shopping a week ago, although I'm still waiting on one thing to come in the mail. Now that I'm all done my shopping comes the hard part...wrapping! Yes, I suck at wrapping gifts. Even it's a square I can do it, it just looks sloppy, but it if anything but square then it just gets ugly. I went about bought some gift bags this year to make it easier and faster to get things done. I did buy this huge gift bag to put something for my parents in, but when I got home the gift for the bag wasn't quite as big as I thought it was, so the bag is still way over sized. Check out this picture in which I put a box of Cocoa Puffs next to it for scale. BTW the Cocoa Puffs are choco-tastic!

It might be funny to put a pair of socks in it for someone. They'd see the huge bag and get all excited until the picked it up and it's basically empty. Ha ha! For Logan's birthday I wrapped up his DVDs and a toy and put them in a cereal box. When I gave him it to him he just looked at it and put on the table and took off. I was like "Hey, aren't you gonna open it?" Then he opened it and said "This isn't cereal!" I feel so smart tricking a five year old. Maybe I should put his presents in it!

Speaking of Logan's presents I got him a commissioned piece of art (how ritzy!) from Takeshi Miyazawa. It was originally supposed to for his birthday, but Tak didn't get it done in time, so now it's his Christmas present. I got myself a picture too and they're not just sketches, they're inked and toned and all that and look super sweet. I want to put it in a nice frame, but something with some flash to it because he'll be bored with a plain old black wooden frame. I bought this frame with a red border from Ikea, but it is the cheapest piece of crap ever! I'm telling you the entire thing is made of card board and a picture that nice deserves better. I'll hold on it as a last resort. Oh, check out the picture below. The upside down Spidey is Logan's and the Spidey bust portrait is mine.

Click pictures to embiggen.

This weekend YTV will be airing a bunch of cartoon Christmas specials from years past. There are two that stand out that are worth watching. On Saturday the 15th the He-Man and She-Ra Christmas Special will be on and Sunday the 16th is the Smurfs Christmas. The website lists air times, but doesn't say what time zone, so check your local listings. I'll be setting the VCR to tape both of these. I'm kinda scared to see how Smurfs stands the test of time as I have not seen it FOREVER! For a complete listing of cartoons airing checking the YTV site:
http://www.ytv.com/programming/zapx/

Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without an advent calendar. I almost bought of those cheap 99 cent advent calendars with 24 days in them, but was holding out for a good one which I found a Toys'R'Us.

Turtle power! Oh yes, 32 days of chocolate! It has Christmas AND New Year's. The good thing about the small chocolates is that they are too small to get a real good taste of the chocolate because if you did you probably wouldn't want to eat any more. I remember once upon a time when the advent calendars had the small chocolates for all the days leading up to Christmas and then on Christmas the door was twice as big and so was the chocolate. They need to do that and then need to make advent calendars every month of the year not just December. Then I'd more pay attention to what day it was.

In other Turtles news I downloaded these Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Japanese OVAs that were fan subbed. The show in general was a little weird, but the turtles themselves still looked like the US versions. April was a little more anime-d which made her look better. The fan subbing was probably not a direct translation as in the second OVA one of the turtles calls this ninja guy a "dumbshit". I know that's not what he said, but it was still hilarious.

Smurf ya later!!

Bestest movie ever?

Check out this trailer for a new Japanese movie called The Machine Girl. It looks pretty insane like only the Japanese can do. I can't wait for this to get released here.

I tried posting this with a different embedded video player, but for some reason the stupid thing wouldn't work. Below is the link to the same trailer with slightly better video quality.
http://www.lolitron.org/2007/12/09/the-machine-girl/

Mix it up

I've been trying to make a mix CD which is pretty hard because I really suck at making mixes. I can never get the songs to flow, so the finished product just feels awkward. In an effort to try and offset that I decided to make a cool intro and outro for the mix and I think I really out did myself too.

Some thanks go to Cam who helped me with this. Way back when I had Cam hook his tape deck up to his CD recorder and record some old school storybooks on tape onto CD. I got Droid World, Planet of the Hoojibs, Return of the Jedi, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Tron all put on CD. I actually have way more tapes than that, but at the time of recording I only had access to those ones.

I downloaded a trial sound editing program called WavePad, so I could trim out whatever bits I wanted. I ripped ROTJ as a loseless wav file, sad thing is that out of all the files the ROTJ file sounded the worst. I trimmed it up the way I wanted, WavePad had some nice feature like normalize and one that would remove any hiss which really helped clean it up.

I only took a few minutes and I had my new intro and outro files saved as mp3s. I thought the outro file was a bit long, so I made another one from the end of the Indy file. It's much shorter and I think maybe a better outro. I need some help on this one, so check out the files and let me know which one you think is better.

intro.mp3
outro.mp3
outro2.mp3

Enjoy, and if you want me to make something similar out the other "books" just let me know and I shall do!

It's cold out

Holy crap, it is cold out. For some cruel reason it seems the coldest place in our suite is on the couch in front of the TV. Why oh why?! Plus I'm sick, so the cold isn't helping much. Today was my day off, so I went out to try and get the last of my Christmas shopping done. All I have left is to get my sister something, but unfortunately I have no idea what to get here.

Christmas shopping has been costly this year because I seem to spending more on myself that on gifts for other people. Today when I was out trying to my sister's gift I ended up buying more crap for myself. I went to the Pacific Place mall to check out Utsuwa-No-Yakata, a Japanese tableware store. They have lots of pretty stuff. I saw this bowl and couldn't resist buying it for myself.


Haha, a monkey dance bowl! I wasn't sure what I could do with it as it's too small for me to eat out of, so it's my new change bowl. Yo Cam, yeah this is the same mall across from where you stayed. Did you get a Monkey Dance bowl too?

In the same mall there is a Chinese grocery store called T&T and I went in looking for these crackers called 3+2. Kelvin, a Chinese guy a work brought some and they were pretty good. I'm not sure if they're called 3+2, but it was the only English on the package.

I bet you can see why it's called 3+2, three crackers plus 2 layers of icing. It's weird because they're soda type crackers with icing, but it's surprisingly good. They have different flavors like a chocolate/vanilla, yellow (it's not a flavor I know), and the pink which I hope is strawberry. Bonus is that the strawberry package comes with a metal pencil case? which some boy band on it. I think it's a boy band, a couple of those guys look more like girls. Still good crackers though...

After that I went downtown to Chinatown and ended up buying yet more crap for myself. I got a Kamen Rider Ryuki figure in Rider Kick pose and a Kamen Rider watch.

The watch is a replica of Kamen Rider 2's henshin belt. That little logo thing flips open to reveal the digital display. It's actually kinda cheesy and cheap, but it was half price because the battery was dead. The Ryuki is cool, I like the display stand. It was in this store on the bottom of a display stand with some other Rider figures and monsters that were covered in dust. The monsters were only $2, so I may go back at some point to get some and judging by the amount of dust on them they aren't going anywhere.

So what's with all the Asian stores I was checking out? Well, I was looking for the newest toy fad from Japan called Mugen Puchi Puchi. You know that plastic bubble wrap and how we all love to pop the bubbles in it? Bandai has come out with toy that replicates exactly that. Mugen means "infinite" or "unlimited" while the puchi puchi is the sound it makes. Totally useless that you will no doubt be bored with in five minutes, but still you know you want one. It does mix it up a bit as every 100 pops it will make a different sound like a bark, meow, fark, or door bell. Sad thing is that I wasn't able to find one anywhere, they all looked at me like I was some crazy. I found some online at Yes Asia, but they're $15.99US. That isn't bad considering you get free worldwide shipping plus depending on what the dollar is doing you get it for more or less than 15.99. Check out the official website and the commerical via YouTube.