Tuesday, May 30, 2023

All I blog about is shows

 Sometimes it seems like all I blog about is card shows.  Must get tedious for my readers, right?  If I was a better human, I would try hard to fix that, but I am not, so here is another card show post!!

This show was all about dime and quarter boxes.  I had to search hard, and in one case, negotiate, but I ended up finding a lot of quirky and fun stuff.

Let's start up with some wonderful dime box baseball:

That top row might not be knocking it out of the park 'value' wise, but I really like all three cards.  The second row, at least to me, DOES knock it out of the park 'value' wise.  Miggy pre-RC looks somewhat valuable on COMC, and an Arenado and Verlander RC for a dime?  Sign me up for that!  And the last card in the scan used to be worth $20 at your local card shop, but the deadline on the MVP Buyback program was March.  Still, I was tickled to find this in a dime box.

Now some dime box basketball.  I found pretty much every star card from this NBA Jam Session set sitting in a dime box.  I hate trying to store these cards, but I always liked them anyway.  These 6 are a few favorites I pulled out to scan.

And finally, some dime box  weirdness:
I guess these were giveaways at the National?  I don't pass up Jordans and some of these others for dimes, so when I found all five of the cards from this set in there, I grabbed them.  Anyone interested in these?  I will not be keeping them.

On to quarter box finds...I came upon a guy with a box marked as "$1 - 75% off".  That seemed a little vague to me, so I asked if it meant these were originally $4 and were now $1, or if they were originally $1 and were now quarters.  He was pretty confused, but decided that they should be dollar cards.  I looked through a few and didn't find much I wanted at a dollar, so I started to walk away.  He called me back and said that he'd give anything in there to me for a quarter.  Since that made it much more worth my time, I went through the whole box, and was glad I did.

He had a TON of Royals in there, that might have been worth something once, but now were less interesting.  Many, many serial numbered cards of Whit Merrifield, Alex Gordon and Billy Butler.  Those didn't really catch my eye.  But almost 2 years ago, I blogged about deciding that I wanted to build up a little collection of Zack Greinke.  And there were a ton of him that I liked in there!

These are nine of the 28(!!!) Greinkes I added from these quarter boxes.  Suffice it to say, that my Greinke collection is no longer lacking.  All of the cards I grabbed were serial numbered, usually low numbers, or nice refractors.

And here are a few Non- Greinke cards from this box:


A different quarter box yielded a ton of cards of another player I have been trying to build up a small collection of, Larry Fitzgerald. 


Shockingly, all of these are numbered under 299 and were all quarters.  Now I just need a nice RC of Larry and I will feel good about my Fitzgerald collection.

And to finish it off, a couple of non-quarter bargain vintage cards I picked up.



The Martin was $5, which might not be a steal, but I was happy.  The Mays is a 1969 Globe Imports Playing Cards - Gas Station Issue.  Don't know much more than that, but I love playing days Mays anywhere I can get them.


Thanks for reading!

Tuesday, May 9, 2023

Check it out giveaway

 OK, as promised I have a little giveaway for those who were willing to look at my video in the last post and respond with something constructive for me.  

Here are the people who commented, and are eligible at the moment (read on to become partially eligible!):

The Angels In Order
Jon
Jeremya1um
Chris
Crocodile
Johnnys Trading Spot
night owl
Matt
Damien

Now 'constructive' is a pretty vague way to put it, so I will leave it to them to determine if they were constructive in their comments, lol.

Each of those commenters above can pick up to 6 cards from the scans below as their reward.  Use the usual method, scan/page number-card number.  So if you want the "Ron Hunt All Time Mets" in the second scan below, then you would select 2-6.

**Now it's not too late!  If you want some of these cards, but didn't comment on the previous post, you can still go there, watch the video and leave me a constructive comment on that post.  Then you can come back here and choose up to 3 cards from the scans.  Only those in the list above are eligible for picking 6 cards.

The cards will be sent in a PWE, and won't probably go out until mid-next week.  I am going to be out of town for a bit.

Some cards are beat up a little like the Bench in the first scan.  Hopefully the scans show the condition OK.

Page 1

Claimed - 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9
I kinda doubt the auto on the Warren Giles is authentic, but you never know.

Page 2
Claimed - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7
Syndergaard is serial numbered on the back

Page 3
Claimed - 1, 3, 5, 6, 7

Page 4
Claimed - 3, 6, 7, 8

Page 5 - a little weirdness
Claimed - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Page 6
Claimed - 4, 5, 6, 8, 9
Cabrera is serial numbered on the back

Page 7
Claimed - 1, 2, 3, 5

Page 8
Claimed - 1, 2, 3, 4

Page 9
Claimed - 4
The Sutton is serial numbered on the back


Page 10
Claimed - 2, 5


Saturday, May 6, 2023

Check out what I made!

 


Hey guys, I know there are not a lot of folks who read this blog, but I would appreciate a few minutes of your time to check out "The Diamond King - Card Collection Tool" and give me feedback!

Here's the idea:  I love the TCDB concept, but it takes me forever to get my cards in there, and it doesn't give me some features I want. 

Features I want are the ability to quickly search, sort and report on my collection, and to have scans of my personal copy of the card right there.  I also want to be able to customize other things.  And so, I started putting my cards in a SQL database.  That solution had usability issues too, so I have created The Diamond King Card Collection Tool as a front end for that database to make things easier.

In a nutshell, I made my own card collection cataloger.

Now I am not a programmer, and this thing needs a lot of work.  I don't plan on anyone ever using it but me though, so as long as it meets my needs, that's all that really matters.

But I would really, really love your feedback on it!  So I did a short(ish) video that shows the program and it's basic features.  It's viewable on YouTube at this link:

https://youtu.be/JYZ6vdbovFY

I doubt this would be very easy to view on a phone, as the program takes a lot of screen real estate.  A computer monitor would be lots better.  I really tried to keep it short, but the video is about 7 minutes long. If you can spare that time, I would really welcome any and all feedback, questions and especially criticisms!!  Features you think it needs are welcome too.

I imagine there is already something out there that I could download or buy that does all that my program will do and better.  But I have had a lot of fun trying to figure out how to do this, and make my own.


As (hopefully) motivation for some of you to spend the time and give meaningful feedback, I plan on making a post later this week, or next week, with some freebies for people to claim.  But to be eligible for the freebies, you need to comment here with something that you think would be helpful to me on The Diamond King Card Collection Tool.  Just saying "That's cool!" or "You really aren't a very good programmer" is great, but to be eligible for the giveaway, you have to try a little harder.  No deadline to make that comment though, if you see the giveaway post and have not commented, you can come back to this post and comment then.


Thanks!!!

Friday, May 5, 2023

Stuff in the mail

 I went through a bit of a drought on getting cards in the mail.  But that has ended due to three packages in the last week!

First up is a PWE from gcrl.  I had mentioned that I didn't have any Julio Urias RCs, and poof, these just showed up!

These 2 cards had the honor of being the first 2 cards I added to my card database using a new tool that I created.  That's just a tease, I will post about it soon!

Thanks a bunch for filling that Urias sized hole in my collection gcrl!


And I won some stuff from Johnny!  As has been the pattern lately, I got some Diamond Kings.  Good variety and players.

And as a bonus, Johnny sent this!
I love it!!  But strangely, even though I have been all over my home state, Walla Walla is someplace I have never been.  I guess I better listen to Alf and get my butt over there.  Thanks Johnny!


And Night Owl makes an appearance too.  He claimed some freebies from me a while back, and must have felt the need to reciprocate.  And boy did he!

Some great variety here.  Love old Finest, and that Gwynn is wonderful.  And getting McGwires I need in the mail???  That almost never happens!!

On to some shine and some RCs:
Three players I definitely collect, all refractory.  Great stuff.  And we finish off with a couple of PED users, lol!  But RCs I want and need, thanks a bunch Greg!!

Keep em rolling in!!


Wednesday, May 3, 2023

a show

 Quick card show report here.  This show wasn't great.  Which really stunk, because I was supposed to go bargain hunting for Matt who won my Card Show Cheapie contest.  Don't worry, I found him some stuff, but it was definitely a down show.

Let's go Football, Basketball then Baseball!


Football - These 3 cards make me happy!!

The Taylor is just a BEAutiful card.  And from my research, it looks like this insert set is quite sought after.  As much as I like looking at it, this is one of only 2 cards in the post that is up for trade.... shoot me an offer!   The Sanders caught my eye in a dime box.  Barry is probably my favorite footballer of all time, so it was a no brainer.  And another stunning card, the Wilson is even better looking than the scan shows.  Too bad he stinks now that he's a Bronco.  But that's probably why I could afford the card in the first place.


Basketball - one card, the newly crowned MVP!
This is a card that I don't know much about.  Some sort of Black Prizm Refractor from the 2022/23 Panini Prizm Monopoly set.  The only 2 on COMC.com right now are a LeBron, sale price $107 and a Kristaps Porzingis for $15.  Seems a bit high, but if you are interested, this is the other card that is available for a trade.  Let me know if you are interested.



Baseball - I grabbed about 40 baseball cards at he show.  Here are a few of my favorites.
Sweet shot of Ichiro, even if it is 'just' a base card.  I'd like to get my hands on a refractor of this.  Old Row 0 insert of Boggs was a good deal.  My first Nomo RC!  And three great looking cards on the bottom row.

And I found some more nice Griffeys.  My favorite dealer charged me 50 cents each for these.
Some of them are quite nice!  The Authority Figure is serial numbered /1750, I think.  I've always liked the cool Pacific inserts, and the lightning really looks great.  That Topps Tek is one of the difficult to figure out patterns, but I think it might be one of the little more valuable ones.  Not sure I care enough to put in the effort to find out.  And the one with a map in the background is a "Eyes of the World" insert, and I think it is pretty great.

So for a so-so show, I guess I did pretty good!