It’s a few days late, but here are some of the pictures I took at the Relay For Life at Penn event.  For some more photos, be sure to check out Alyssa Rosenzweig’s Picasa album.

Full Disclosure: The rain started falling pretty hard after midnight, so in order to keep my phone from getting soaked, I stopped liveblogging after the 1:30am update. However, after I got back home I updated the rest of entry for what did happen that night.  Enjoy!

4:00am: Closing Ceremonies.  Allison and Michelle, The Chairs, get on stage and thank everyone for braving out the weather.  Carly, our American Cancer Society representative, tell us that they’re still counting up all of the money, but they’re approximating $130,000 raised!

3:50am: A decision has been made to call Relay early.  The rain continues to fall pretty hard, so we’re packing up and leaving.

2:45am: The rain is continuing to fall, so unfortunately most people have left.  A cappella groups continue to belt out songs while my team plays Apples to Apples in the tent.

1:40am: Billy and I are soundly defeated in Round 1.  The game involved six cups each, and traded off the first three cups, until the other team went on fire and nailed all three of their last cups in a row.  Should I be proud or concerned that my 11-year old brother sank two in a row?

1:30am: Root beer pong tournament begins. Billy and I look to win it all.

12:30am: Rain! Oh no!

11:15pm: Luminaria Ceremony! Cancer survivors share their stories, they turn the stadium lights off, and the luminaria bags spell out ‘HOPE’.  And now they’ve changed the word ‘HOPE’ to the word ‘CURE’.

9:15pm: Survirors Reception. The survivors have gathered to celebrate the evening and enjoy free food courtesy of Maggiano’s.

8:15pm: Opening Ceremonies! The survirors were honored and lead the first lap. Relay has begun!

7:00pm: We’ve made it! People are slowly pouring in and setting up their tents.

6:11pm: Made my way to campus. However, we’ve made a quick detour at Mad4Mex.

5:19pm: Testing out post updating from my phone. All clear, Houston.

5:10pm: Tonight is the 6th Annual Relay For Life at Penn! And what better way to celebrate the event than by liveblogging it? Well, I can think of at least five better ways but oh well. Follow me as I blog the event LIVE as they happen, or better yet, if you’re in the Philadelphia area, come on down to Franklin Field on the University of Pennsylvania campus!

Relay For Life at the University of Pennsylvania
Historic Frankin Field
TONIGHT, March 27 2008 8pm to 8am

Relay Website: http://www.relayatpenn.org/

I got back yesterday from a fantastic week at Shadow Creek Ranch in Colorado.  Here are some pictures.

So on Offworld, a gaming blog I read, they’ve started this thing called ‘backgames’, which is to describe a game backwards.

http://www.offworld.com/2009/02/lets-start-a-new-meme-backgame.html

Here’s an example:

Pacman: Pacman fills mazes with dots, pausing only to regurgitate fruit & ghosts.

I think this is awesome to the max.  I’ve come up with some of my own, and I think everyone should play along.

R.C. Pro Am: Fastest car in the world drives backwards, spitting out letters that spell ‘ODNETNIN’ until it is really, really slow.

Super Mario 2: Mario falls asleep, runs through deserts and grassy plains planting vegetables until floating up to the heavens.

Tiger Woods Golf: Ball emerges from hole and launches itself to player’s club until reaching the tee box. Repeat 18 times.

Mario Party: Players move backwards on a gameboard in a charitable quest to give away all their stars and coins until they have none.

Star Wars Battlefront 2: Stormtrooper resurrects Rebels by sucking in blastershots and bombs until there are 150 of them.

Bust-A-Move: Same-colored bubble clusters appear and dinosaur removes them until a nice pattern of random-colored ones are left.

If you post on Twitter, add “#backgames” to each of them because when you search “#backgames” on Twitter you’ll get all the posts that other people have backgamed about.

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23backgames

What other ones can we come up with?  If you have a twitter, you should twitter them too.  You have to limit it to 140 characters.

Here are some good ones from my friends:

Rhyno:

Tetris: The parts of a horribly constructed building start floating away to the heavens while rotating in a random way.

Donkey Kong (arcade): Donkey Kong brings Mario a princess. The sight of her scares him though, so Mario tries to flee down a series of ladders.

Mortal Kombat: One player puts back together the other player’s body and they fight it out until they feel perfectly healthy at the end.

NBA Jam: The basketball hoop throws a flaming ball repeatedly to Dan Majerle.

PiFry:

NHL ’94: Basically a giant game of keepaway with nets that spit out pucks.  Also, the goalies are nice enough to help people off the ice.

John Madden Football: Receiver’s revenge!  Everyone throws balls at the quarterback.  Defensive backs thoughtfully help people up and get out of the way.

Super Smash Brothers: Looks exactly the same, except people come flying in from the sides, jump kick from really far away, and ascend to heaven on glowing platforms.

Minesweeper: OCD players fix a diverse mix of tiles until only smooth gray ones remain.

Solitaire: 4 holes suck up an entire deck worth of cards, then distribute them in an odd pattern.

Marble Madness: Looks exactly the same.

Ocarina of Time: Old warrior discovers fountain of youth, abandons princess to evil monster as he returns to childhood by giving away all his worldly possessions (very Buddhist).

And finally, PiFry take a jab at my card-playing skills:
Poker: Corey accumulates money at a decent rate over a period of several hours.

Drew, who apparently has expanded this to non-video games:

Monopoly: The wealthiest players are apparently hit with antitrust laws, give everything away until socialism reigns.

Jeopardy: Players ask Alex Trebek extremely obvious questions, which he answers in the most difficult way possible.

Baseball: Random fan makes herculean 400 ft throw to strongman, who uses a stick to deflect it to a man about 60 ft away.

Pong: exactly the same as regular Pong.

Fun Fun!  Come up with some more!

UPDATE: Sweet!  The guy who started backgames left a comment and a link to his site, where he’s compiling a “Best of”.  Find it here: http://justonemoregame.wordpress.com/2009/02/24/backgames-videogame-plots-in-reverse/

Oh yes, that’s me at 0:34, predicting the win.

Yesterday was Princeton home game of the yearly Penn vs. Princeton men’s basketball matchups.

I had my camera with me for the intent of getting a good Project 365 picture, but with the structure of Jadwin Gymnasium, they don’t exactly have the court blocked off.  So for the second half of the game, I took my camera and sat on the baseline with other (more legitimate) photographers and snapped away.  Unfortunately I only had my Nifty 50 lens on me, so all the pictures are either really up close or really far away.

By the way, Penn won 62-55 in OT.

Penn during the second-half warmups.

Princeton’s Pawel Buczak (55) looks for an open man.

Penn’s Zack Rosen (1) drives down the court.

Penn’s Glen Miller looks pensive as Penn takes over the lead in the second half.

Penn’s Cameron Lewis (33) tries to bring down the rebound.  The auto-focus didn’t quite capture the shot I wanted, but you can see that Princeton is losing.

Penn’s Glen Miller explains that he would rather be arrested than put up with any more of these terrible calls. (Caption credit to Rhyno)

Princeton’s Marcus Schroeder (21) prepares to inbound.  And also prepares to lose in OT.

Penn’s Zack Rosen (1) reminds the crowd what his jersey number is.

Penn’s Cameron Lewis (33) lays down a dunk.  With authority!

The referees take a time-out during the second half to watch American Idol.  Also, in a double-whammy decision, they decided to eject Penn’s Conor Turley (44) from the game.

Penn’s players kindly point out that Princeton’s Patrick Saunders (22) should have been taking foul shots, and not Dan Mavraides (33).

Penn’s Jack Eggleson (24) drives down the court.

Penn’s Harrison Gaines (22) sets it up from the outside.

Penn waits for Princeton to come back after a time-out.  Even the Quaker looks on impatiently.

And at that point, my camera died, so I don’t have any other photos from the end of the game or during overtime.  Whoops!  Anyway, I hope you enjoyed.

UPDATE: My friend Jerricka is doing her own Project 365, and took a picture of me taking a picture.  This shows you where I was sitting for my shots.

So tonight I changed up a few things on my sites.

I decided to change up the “Recent Posts” on the sidebar with a “Best of” sidebar.  I’ve determined my “Best of” based on the posts that seem to still get a lot of hits (like my plinko post) and then other posts that focus on my various daytrips.

Over on the Project 365 site, I updated it to include a ratings system, so you can give a plus or a minus to the various photos.  Eventually, after enough people vote, the high score page will highlight what people think are the best pictures from the project.

So please visit the 365 site and vote away!

My good friend Drew has a modest proposal.  It’s called Sports New Year’s Day.

The idea came to me yesterday while trying to think of ways to avoid Valentines Day. Really, who needs a made up holiday? I resolved that instead of sulking around and thinking about being alone and heartbreak and girls on the 14th, I would spend the day celebrating the rebirth of hope: 37 pitchers and a handful of catchers, all decked out in orange and black, reporting to Orioles’ spring training in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

And so, even though I have a very lovely girlfriend (hi sweetie!) she is currently 2,508 miles away so I will also be spending Valentines Day celebrating Sports New Years.  That and getting my car inspected, but that’s neither here nor there.

I have two resolutions this year.

1. Attend a New York Mets game at their new stadium.  I didn’t get to go to Shea during the final season there.  I HAD tickets to the playoffs, but oh yeah, they blew their lead for a second year in a row and didn’t make it.
2. Be better New York Rangers fan.  This is mainly because I am consistently embarassed by my 10-year old sister who knows 90% more about the team than I do.  I’ll have two pretty solid opportunites coming up, with Flyers vs. Rangers on NBC on Sunday and Rangers vs. Blues on Versus on Monday.

Also, to celebrate, I think I’ll make Mets brownies.  I think I’m going to include the Mets logo and add the message “Dear Mets: Don’t Suck This Year”. Pictures will be posted this weekend.

I stumbled upon a really cool website which will visualize any webpage into a graph.

It’s called Webpages as Graphs and it’s wicked cool.

From their page:

blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

Here’s http://www.coreyhulse.com. You can see the main site content on the left, and my sidebar with the links on all the blue explosions on the right.

And here’s my Project 365 site, at http://www.coreyhulse.com/365/.  I think it looks like a large firework.

My brother Ryan has a site at http://www.ryanehulse.com/, and the intro page is just a picture and some text.  You can see the simplicity in the HTML structure in the visualization of his site.

My friend Ryan has an even simpler site at http://www.ryanweicker.com/.

When you put popular sites in, you can see the differences between a site with a simpler interface like Google verses a news site like CNN.

Google

CNN

What a cool tool!  I, like many people I presume, have a facination with the visualization of data.  There was a book that my colleague told me about which was full of all sorts of graphs and charts and the interesting stories behind them.  I’m blanking on the name of it, but if anyone knows of this book please let me know.

Also, if you have any sites which look really cool definately share them here.

So I am sitting here at John The Baker’s, an Italian place up in Stamford, CT. If you ever happen to find yourself in Stamford I recommend it. Fast service, friendly people, tasty pizza.

I also recently discovered the WordPress application for the iPhone. This opens up a whole world of possibilities, like liveblogging from mudane events so that my grandmom can keep tabs on me (hi Grandmom!).