101 in 365

Sunday, January 04, 2009 – 2:19 PM
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I came across this photo on Flickr and thought it was a good idea to make more of a “to do list” rather than a list of resolutions for the year. I didn’t really know where to start, but when I IMed April about it, she mentioned that she saw something like 1001 things in 1001 days on LiveJournal and that it seemed like a cool idea. 1001 in 1001 is a bit much, I think. That’s almost 3 years. I needed something a bit more realistic and less long term. We settled on 101 in 365 (ok, now 361 since it’s already the 4th) and started working on our lists. It’s a LOT harder than it looks! Seven hours later (there were some breaks in between) we each managed to come up with about 50. I’ve added a few here and there since, but I’m still nowhere near 101. I’d like to get the list to 101 over the course of the year though. I figure as time passes I’ll think of new things to do. Thank goodness for sites like 43Things and your100things.com because I’m not very good at coming up with these things on my own! I’m open to suggestions! Or better yet, go make a list of your own. It’s a nice little challenge!

[[Update: This list will be archived, edited, and updated here: 101 in 365]]

    New Experiences:

    Things I’ve never done

  1. Travel to a country I’ve never been (Canada doesn’t count).
  2. Try real sushi - like raw fish sushi, not crab/shrimp/veggie sushi.
  3. See at least one Broadway show that I haven’t already seen.
  4. Watch the sun set over the Pacific.
  5. Visit a place that I don’t speak the local language.
  6. Ride a Segway.
  7. Visit 3 states I’ve never visited.
  8. Go skiing.

    9. Habits:

    Things I would like to introduce to/eliminate from my daily life. (In second person because I should listen to myself)

  9. Order out at most once/week.
  10. Cook at least twice/week. (You’d be amazed at how many meals of chips and salsa or hummus and crackers one can eat in a week.)
  11. Water is your friend. Drink it.
  12. Keep your desk neat. Piles are the enemy.
  13. Blog at least once/week.
  14. Avoid senioritis at all costs.
  15. Don’t slouch, especially when you’re sitting at the computer for long periods of time.
  16. Better yet, don’t sit at the computer for long periods of time.
  17. Write more. You know, like with a pen. And while you’re at it, fix your handwriting.
  18. Don’t keep junk. You only need so many free pens.
  19. Go outside at least once/day. Pajama days are better when they’re infrequent.
  20. Don’t be a lazy typist. Use capitals and punctuation where necessary and not unnecessarily.
  21. Pick 1 day of the week and limit yourself to email and classwork-related internet use. No twitter, flickr, facebook, RSS, or other time traps. More on that later.
  22. Use the word “I” less often. It’s not all about you.
  23. Wear your hair down at least once/week or get it cut shorter.

    24. Goals:

  24. Finish my Project 365.
  25. Lose 15 lbs.
  26. Snail mail is fun: send holiday/birthday cards.
  27. Have no credit card debt by the end of the year.
  28. Read at least 3 non-school/non-major-related books.
  29. Read at least 3 school/major-related books.
  30. Become a morning person again. Up at 8 or 9AM, none of this 11AM nonsense.
  31. Keep in touch with old friends: distance and time are not excuses.
  32. Sell something on Etsy.
  33. Aim for 30-under-30.
  34. Have more dinner parties.
  35. Meet up with Natalie at least once (it’s been over 3 years!).
  36. Learn to cook empanadas.
  37. Find and organize non-digital photos from childhood.
  38. Sell a photo.
  39. Have lunch with a friend at least once/week.
  40. Master something I’ve never tried.
  41. Throw away/sell/donate at least one thing I’ve been keeping “just in case” each week.
  42. Call a friend, no matter how busy I am, once a week to see how they’re doing.
  43. Try a sport other than volleyball, soccer or softball.
  44. Try a new recipe at least once/week.
  45. Shoot and develop at least 8 rolls of film.
  46. Re-locate my imagination.
  47. Get up to date with an old friend that has drifted away.
  48. Try to complete as many things possible on the “161 things to do before you graduate Cornell” list — in one day.
  49. Go on a date.
  50. Bake more.

    51. To Do List:

    These are more finite and are easily do-able. I just have to do them.

  51. Print and frame at least 5 of my photos. What’s the point if they’re just sitting on my hard drive?
  52. Get my bank accounts in order and track where I’m spending too much money (yay Mint).
  53. Reduce my RSS subscriptions to <100 quality reads.
  54. Make a “soundtrack of the year” with 20 of the songs that I loved in 2009.
  55. Go ice skating.
  56. Eat at Serendipity 3 (thanks Lissy!)

As incentive, inspired by Lissy again, complete a stranger’s goal for every goal not completed.

On NYTimes.com

Saturday, January 03, 2009 – 7:05 PM
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Back in the beginning on November I got an email from someone at the New York Times. They were doing a feature on college collectors for the Education section and they wanted college photographers to take the photos. I submitted my portfolio along with the portfolios of all of the other Senior Photographers. Soon after I heard back from the section’s photo editor telling me I had been selected. I was asked to shoot a few wine collectors on campus. Cool!

Nervous as all hell, I set an appointment with one of the collectors (the other didn’t have his wine in Ithaca) and went to take a first round of photos. It was the same night as our first decent snowfall in Ithaca and it was pitch black out. If you’ve ever seen an Ithaca apartment at night you know that it was not an easy task. Unfortunately I couldn’t get a decent portrait, even shooting at f/1.8. Darned lighting!

I had to set another appointment - in the daylight. That was the day my car was towed. Convenient, no? Brent was very accommodating though and I ended up going back the next day instead. Daylight, new wines, and standing on his coffee table made for some much better photos.

And now here they are, on NYTimes.com. I’m not sure if either of them will appear in print - let me know if you see them in tomorrow’s paper! The full slideshow (including photos from other campuses) is here: Collector’s Items

NYTimes!

NYTimes!

Oh, and yes, this is the “other cool thing” I mentioned in my “2008 In Review” post. :)

2008: My Year In Pictures

Thursday, January 01, 2009 – 3:59 AM
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I did this back in 2006 and really regretted not doing one for 2007, so I thought I’d stop being lazy and put one together for 2008. I went through each month and chose one photo (that was posted to Flickr) to sum up that month. This year was so wonderfully crazy and I’m glad I have a photo record of most of the things I’d like to remember. Enjoy!

Hair Mail

January: New Year, New Hair
I’d wanted to get my hair cut for a while but I was so close to being the minimum length for Locks of Love that I did my best to put it off. Finally, in January, I read that the minimum was 10″, not the 12″ that I had assumed, so I immediately called up the hair salons in Ithaca to find the earliest appointment. Two hours later I had cut 11″ and mailed it off. It scared the heck out of me at first, but I grew to love the short hair and might do it again in another 6 months when my hair is long enough. Other January highlights: I spent the beginning of 2008 recovering from getting all 4 of my wisdom teeth pulled. Yay.

Erin & I

February: Spice Girls
I’m not even going to say much about the Spice Girls concert because I will just go on and on. It was the show of a lifetime. Erin and I were too young to see a concert when the Spice Girls were popular, but as soon as I heard they would be on tour I bought two tickets. Unforgettable. Absolutely unforgettable.

Crossed Lines

March: The Cornell Daily Sun
I was elected Photography Editor on March 1 and that pretty much set the tone for the entire month. This photo in particular was taken that evening at the Cornell vs. Harvard Men’s Hockey game - a huge Cornell tradition and one of the major sporting events going on that night (the other was the Men’s Basketball game where Cornell clinched the Ivy League title). That day proved to be one of the craziest emotional roller coasters I think I will ever experience and I wouldn’t have it any other way. The rest of the month was spent getting everything in the Photo Department organized and in full working order. What a task. My Blackberry was permanently attached to my hand and I don’t think I did much else other than Sun-related work. I don’t even remember my classes from spring semester anymore! I’m just glad I wasn’t the only one with this experience.

CHEESE!

April: Nonstop.
I think that’s really the only way I can describe the month of April. It started off with a bang: on April 1, I flew out to Seattle to interview at Microsoft and met up with Shannon who drove down from Portland to be a tourist with me. It was my first time exploring a new city completely on my own - I had my own hotel room and my own rental car with just over a day to explore the area and then another day to spend at MS interviewing. It was definitely a learning experience for me and it made me really thankful to have my camera because it kept me company until Shannon arrived. It was a whirlwind of a trip and when I got home it was only April 3! The rest of the month was just as crazy: the next weekend I was down in NYC for the Sun Alumni Banquet at the Cornell Club, the night I got home from that I shot Cathy’s Reflections show, later that week I hosted (along with the ISSA) a Yahoo!-sponsored Battle of the Rock Bands, and that weekend was Margot’s bachelorette party Between all of this I was doing contract work for a Yahoo! Brickhouse project. The month wrapped up with the arrival of spring and an Sun/Eclipse photo feature on all of the flowers that grow around Cornell.

Summer Digs

May: Back to California!
Until the beginning of May, my plans for the summer were to stay at Cornell and do research with a professor in my major while taking a few classes (namely CS211) to lighten my course load for the fall semester. Then, while helping a then soon-to-be-graduating friend look for a job, I stumbled across a listing for an internship with Flickr. It was perfect. Within a span of 3 (quite stressful) weeks I had applied, interviewed, gotten the position, taken my finals, swapped rooms with Margot (I moved into her room this year and she moved out), found a summer apartment online, and flew out to San Francisco. I started work on May 27 and moved into my apartment on May 31. Another crazy month.

woo!

June: San Francisco
June was all about settling into San Francisco again. It took me a bit of time to get used to living completely on my own and I really had no idea what to do with so much free time since I didn’t have to commute down to Sunnyvale every day. Luckily, Alex was interning at Google and we met up at the Haight Street Fair and hung out for the day with a bunch of his intern friends. It was a lot harder getting to know other Y! interns this time around because I was up in the city, but once I got used to that and people started to come up after work and on weekends it got a lot better. I met another intern, Joey, and his roommate Nick (who was interning at facebook) and we did the tourist thing. I love doing the tourist thing. We also found this great spot by the Golden Gate Bridge where the path is lit by a floodlight. We had way too much fun using it for photo ops. Other June highlights: tasting Best-O-Burger, catching up with other 2nd-time interns, and going to my first SFlickr meet.

I work in candyland

July: Flickr
By the time July rolled around I was completely at home in San Francisco, really began to get to know a lot of the Flickr team, and spent some time hanging out with other Y! interns. Tilly, who was also new to SF and my partner in crime for the summer, and I started to hang out after work and went to geeky meet-ups and things. I’ve always been shy about going into big crowds without knowing anyone else there so it was great to meet Tilly especially since that girl can befriend a chair or a box if she wanted to. I spent some time at Brickhouse and took the occasional trip down to Sunnyvale. Other July highlights: Rocket Wars return to Flickr, National Cheesecake Day, being on the main page of MyBlogLog, Ariel moves to San Francisco, mom comes to visit, Flickrlympics, waiting in line for an iPhone 3G the morning of its release, reconnecting with both Clare and Hollie, and, of course Sunday brunch.

light at the end

August: Lots of Moving
My last days in San Francisco were amazing. I went to the Brickhouse End-of-Summer Bash in Golden Gate Park where I had the BEST tacos I’ve ever eaten thanks to the Taco Truck - a group of people who pretty much pack a mobile kitchen into a minivan and cater events with home-made Mexican food. So delicious. I actually had it twice that month. Tilly and I decided to get a ZipCar one day after brunch and went on a spontaneous adventure around San Francisco, the best part of which was driving over the Golden Gate Bridge for the first time (in a Prius, I might add). I’d been to the other side the summer before, but we went much further north. This time we stopped at the touristy area and took some photos. Alex came to visit again, but this time we did a cupcake tour - stopping at all of the cupcake shops in the Marina and then having dinner. Some of my favorite memories of the summer were in restaurants with outdoor seating. I don’t think I’ll ever get sick of that. Just after Alex got on the bus to head back to Mountain View I noticed that the sunset was looking particularly vibrant. I rushed back to my apartment to go up to the 12th floor gym because I knew I would have a great view from there. The sunset was spectacular. It was definitely one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen and I just stood up there watching it and taking photos until it completely faded away. It was that night that I knew I absolutely needed to move back to San Francisco after graduation. Other August highlights: indulging my love for tart frozen yogurt at places like tuttimelon, jubili, and sogreen, WordCamp 2008, going home to my favorite summer foods, getting a behind-the-scenes tour of the Johnson Museum, and being back with my friends at school.

Building

September: School Days
Septembers tend to be pretty uneventful months for me. They’re mostly about getting back into the swing of school and getting used to being in Ithaca again. I think the only major event in September this year was getting a job offer from Yahoo!. It was actually a pretty major event and I would have chosen that for this month’s picture, but I don’t have a still photo for some reason - just the video. Getting the offer took soooo much stress off of me in what would prove to be an insane semester, not to mention that it was for a job I absolutely knew I wanted. It was pretty much the same reaction as when I got my acceptance letter for Cornell. Other September highlights: Collegetown Blackout, crazy Visual Imaging projects, and my favorite thing about Ithaca in September, the Apple Harvest Festival.

court

October: BUSY.
October never fails to make up for the lack of excitement in September. To start out the month, I had 2 prelims- oceanography and econ. The Econ prelim was on my birthday and the day before Fall Break. Needless to day my 22nd birthday kind of came and went save for about an hour or so that evening when Meghan, her roommate, and I went out for drinks. Fall Break was fun, though. My mom and I took a road trip down to Washington DC and did the tourist thing. The next weekend, Sarah and I went to Hofstra to cover some of the goings-on around the Presidential Debate. When I got back from Fall Break, Ithaca was at its peak autumn foliage - my favorite time of year. Other October highlights: hosting a potluck with Ally and shooting the photos for the Halloween Edition of Eclipse.

Bar tab

November: Friends
November was all about being with friends and having an inkling of a social life (and the election too, I suppose). I tried to make it a point to “get out more” and be somewhat normal. Some memorable times: Jenna’s whole house’s giant birthday party and the Sun bar tab where Meghan and Ally (in the photo above) came over afterward to play Rock Band but instead we ended up goofing off until 3:30 in the morning. Almost the entire night is documented in photo and/or video for posterity.

math and cupcakes

December: Bookworm
December didn’t really exist for me until after the 19th. Every single day before that was spent with my face in a book or notes or both in a frantic attempt not to fail the most difficult classes of my now 18-year academic career. In my many desperate attempts to procrastinate, I learned how to solve a rubik’s cube, redesigned this site, found most of my favorite childhood Christmas videos on YouTube, got my car towed (oh wait, I didn’t do that one on purpose), and wrote a rather random, but entertaining stream-of-consciousness blog entry. Once that was all out of the way (and I passed my classes!), I started winter break a day late thanks to a snow storm, and began my annual 3-day nap. Since arriving home I’ve done the Christmas thing, went to Bayonne to hang out with high school friends, and have begun to clean old junk out of my room, finding photos from my childhood along the way. I posted a bunch of them on facebook and ended up chatting with a bunch of people I haven’t spoken to in ages. And that just about wraps up 2008 for me!