Holy cow, has it really been two months since I updated?

Yes.  Yes it has.

Things have been crazy busy as of late.  There’s been a lot of travel the past two months, especially in August, where I logged over 8,500 miles by airplane.  September, while not as crazy, still had three trips by plane and included a very crazy weekend of moving out of Center City Philadelphia to a new home in King of Prussia, PA.

And even though I haven’t updated the Project 365 site in a while, I’m still taking pictures, and look to hopefully have some spare time in the future to get them all processed and uploaded.

In the meantime, I wrote a feature on my other site, Awesomeopolis, about the new facial recognition features in Picasa 3.5, so you should check that out.

I went to my first ever Mets game at Citifield last night, and it was a good time, especially since the Mets broke a tie in the 8th and beat the Diamondbacks, 6-9.

A lot of offense by both teams, including a beauty of a grand slam by Angel Pagan.

And, as luck would have it, I was able to snap a picture as soon as it left Pagan’s bat.

All in all, a good time.  Let’s Go Mets!

In the spirit of the recent 4th of July holiday, I have decided to put together a post which captures pictures of fireworks that I’ve taken over the past five years.

After combing the desert to decide on the pictures, I’ve come up with 36 of them.  Enjoy!

2005 – 4th of July – Philadelphia

2005 – 4th of July – Philadelphia

See more pictures after the jump!

[Read more →]

So, my attempt at chronicling my life week by week has fallen with a flop, with little chance of being revived anytime soon.

However, one things I have been able to keep up on is my Project 365 site, a photography project I started in January where the goal is to make sure you take a picture every day.

And here it is, July 2, and out of 181 days, I’ve only missed two so far.

You can access the site here and look at things in reverse chronological order. However, one of the great things about doing the pictures in WordPress is that I’ve been able to tag photos so that they can be grouped together into different themes.

For example, here are some of my favorite tags:

• Animal
• Before and After – (Currently only one set, but I’d like to do more)
• Bowling
• Chicken Tikka Faces – (What happens when I play with my food)
• Fail – (For the days when I goof and don’t take a picture, I make a photoshop to commemorate the fail)
• Food – (43 of the pictures from the first half of the year are of food!)
• Outside My Window – (Looking out of my window on the 18th floor of my apartment building)
• Roots – (I had a baby spider plant that I put in a clear glass, and I’ve been taking periodic pictures of it over the past few months.  You can really see the roots develop!)
• Seasons - (The goal is to take a picture from the same spot in Rittenhouse Square during each season, and I have Winter and Spring so far)
• Self-Portrait
• Technology

I’ve also been inspired lately by a story about Jamie Livingston, who took a Polaroid EVERY DAY from 1979 to the day he passed away in 1997.  Mental Floss has a very nice write-up about the site if you’d like to read more about it.  This would be really awesome if I could keep this up for 18+  years.

And, for your viewing pleasure, I’ve used the collage feature of Picasa to put together a quick grid of all the pictures that I’ve taken so far.

Then that means you made it to the new server!  Congrats!  Give yourself a high five!

Here’s my week ending 2009-05-17:

• Started the week in Las Vegas to celebrate Kristine’s birthday.
• Saw Phantom of the Opera.  It was alright?  Lots of blinding indoor fireworks.
• After my bad In-N-Out experience the week before, followed it up with a very tasty In-N-Out experience.
• Tried country fried steak for the first time ever.
• Lots of travel! LAS to PHL (2173 miles flying), then PA to NJ to MA to NH to NJ to PA (820 miles driving) .
• Bowled a 490 in the last week of the season, our team got crushed 17-8, and we didn’t make the playoffs.
• Had McDonald’s for the first time in a long while.  It was a bad choice.
• Watched my younger brother graduate college from Franklin Pierce.
• Got roped in to clearing out my brother’s dorm room after the graduation ceremony.
• Took my siblings to a local park in New Jersey.
• Tweet of the Week: “My brother Billy, 11: ‘Why doesn’t the iPhone keyboard flip when you turn it sideways when texting?’ Good question, Billy. #iphonefail”

Here’s the exciting stuff going on in my life for week ending 2009-05-10.

• Bowled a 645. In my league, there are four quarters, and the champion of each quarter plus the two runner-ups in total points make it to the playoffs.  We’re currently in second place and there is one week left.  There are 25 points up for grabs, and we need to win by 9 points to take first place and make the playoffs.
• 2260 miles of flying this week.  PHL to BNA to LAS.
• Awesomeopolis went viral with our “Badass TV Character Bracket” when we got linked from a USA Today blog post.
• Had a bad experience at In-N-Out.  The grilled onions were burnt and ruined the burger.
• Slowly catching up on Season 3 of How I Met Your Mother.

Well, this past week wasn’t a terribly exciting one, but in the name of science, I must press on with these posts.  This week my main activities included eating and watching sports.

My Week In Review for 2009-05-03:

• Made a batch of pasta sauce and ate pasta on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.
• Had some funky tasting chicken at Pei Wei.
• Watched the Rangers play a hard fought game 7 but lose to a beautiful goal in the last three minutes by Sergei Fedorov of the Capitals.
• Enjoyed some delicious Maggiano’s chicken parmesan.
• Watched the Mets walk in the winning run against the Phillies.
• Watched the Pacquiao-Hatton fight only to see Hatton get lit up after two rounds.
• Watched a 51-1 longshot win the Derby.
• Bought Mets tickets at CitiField for a game in August.
• Shot a 517 in bowling and the team is 7 points off the lead with two weeks to go.
• After 2+ years of owning a Wii, I finally broke down and bought Wii Points so I could download Guitar Hero tracks, and purchased “We Are The Champions” by Queen and “Salute Your Solution” by The Raconteurs.
• Decided to keep the playoff goatee going by turning it into a “make the bowling league playoffs” goatee.
• Tweet of the Week: “Dear 2007 Corey: Thanks for hiding $50 in your desk. I just found it. Love, 2009 Corey”
  

Given that I’ve launched a new website to talk about awesome things with a wide appeal to everyone, appropriately called Awesomeopolis, I’d decided that my own personal site will get, well, more Corey-centric, appealing to those who I already know.

With that in mind, I’m launching a weekly segment called “My Week In Review”, which will be a place where I write down things that happened to me during the week, mainly for my own memory.

So without further ado, here was my week in review for the week ending 2009-04-26:

• Created a Google Profile.
• Picked up my new glasses.
• Bowled a 608 series.
• Concluded a lovely visit from my lovely lady.
• Kept score by hand when the machine stopped keeping score.
• Shot a personal best of 49 on the nine-hole Nelson D. Clayton Memorial Golf Course in Glen Mills, PA.
• Was sad to discover that Wally’s Wiener World, the hot dog shack across from the golf course, has closed up shop.
• Spent a fun Saturday evening with friends in Atlantic City where I ate my money’s worth in shrimp and walked away with the same money that I came in with.
• Watched the Rangers take their 2-0 series lead against the Capitals and drop three of four to be forced to play a Game 7 this upcoming week.
• Trimmed my playoff beard to a playoff goatee so as to be kempt for work.
• On Wednesday, it rained for five minutes, and I got caught outside in it.
• Discovered frozen mango pieces at the grocery store and promptly made mango smoothies with them.
• Had my desktop die on me, and after three hours of messing with it, discovered it was a half-burnt-out connection to the motherboard.
• Promoptly backed up all of my data after getting the desktop to work again.
• Went to Ants Pants for the first time in forever.
• Rediscovered Picasa.
• In Picasa, realized that “favorite” information for the photos is embedded right into the metadata of the photo itself.
• Used Exifer to update metadata EXIF information on a bunch of pictures where the date was incorrect.
• Discovered I have over 18,000 digital photos on my computer, all taken since my junior year of high school.

The Stouffer Dutch Auction is a yearly event held at Stouffer College House, my former residence when I attended Penn, which is a fundraiser held in honor of Melissa Sengbusch, a former Stouffer resident who passed away from leukemia.  Money raised at the event goes towards the Melissa Sengbusch Inspiration Scholarship Fund, a scholarship awarded to a student in the School of Nursing at Penn.

Each year residents put up goods and services to auction off in both a silent auction and a live auction, and this year, like every year, was a lot of fun.  Here are some pictures from the event. For some more pictures that aren’t mine, check out Alyssa Rosenzweig’s Picasa album of the event.