I’ll start off this week’s post with a picture of my daily wear watches.

The watch on the left is the Casio G-Shock GW9200-1 Riseman. It is a solar, atomic watch that gives temperature, altitude and pressure readings. I like it because it looks futuristic like a Gundam. The watch on the right is a Seiko SNK809 that was modified by a guy in Hong Kong called Yobokies.  I bought this watch because of its affordable price and similarity to the Sinn 656:

Justin and I spent most of Tuesday studying for our midterm on Wednesday.

Vinny noticed something funny about a business card I picked up at the local STA Travel. They should probably change that caption.

On Thursday, David Y., Sean and I went to midtown for a Microsoft tech talk.

The offices looked really nice, but the talk fell short of a real tech talk. It was more of a presentation of the features in the Bing search engine.

When Sean and I got back, Vinny, Sean, and I played a few hours of pick up sticks with the set we got at the tech talk.

A beautiful sunset I captured on Friday while waiting for the elevator in EC:

Friday evening was Dim Sum night that Jim and Tim organized. We had authentic Dim Sum dishes and live performers. The event was a success. People really loved the variety of foods we had.

Saturday was the start of the HackNY fall hackathon. It started with talks by almost a dozen startups. They showed off their APIs and datasets and suggested how we could work with them.

We then went to the 13th floor of the Courant Institute at NYU where we would be hacking all night.

Columbia had a great showing and we ended up taking up most of the space in a class room.

After spending more than 12 hours in the same room:

Our project ended up getting really complex and taking up 6 boards:

The sunrise over the NYC skyline:

One of the buildings nearby had pipes on its roof that made it look like an organ.

The project that Ryan, Hans, Jacob, Andrew, Vinny and I worked on was called “BarFight”. It was a location based rock paper scissors game. The game would pair up challengers based on the venues that they checked into on Foursquare. I worked on the icon, graphics and UI. Jacob and Ryan wrote all the server side code using SQL and Ruby on Rails. Hans and I did the UI using jQueryTouch. Vinny worked on some jQuery for the buttons. Andrew helped with rules and text. This is what the app looked on the iPhone home screen:

This is what the app looked like:

Unfortunately, we could not get the app to work. We didn’t have a good enough variety of abilities and hit a few major setbacks. I can’t wait to try harder and make something that works when the next hackathon comes around.