Mike Oren.com

Last weekend, I was given a CD of research papers from Dr. Harding to read in order to help prepare for beginning my research assistantship this summer. I've gotten around to reading three of them--one on sound based interfaces, one on multi-modal interface, and one on haptic interfaces. This is probably weird, but I am really enjoying reading them. It's only been about five months since I finished classes at DePauw, but I've grown quite bored from not reading anything intellecutally stimulating--the newspapers clearly won't cut it and the drabble at slashdot. I suppose I could have picked up a novel to read, but I had too many side projects going on over the past few months to really dedicate myself to a novel that would be as stimulating as House of Leaves or any similar highly complex novel (another good example is See Under: Love). Although I do greatly wish to reread both of those. But besides giving my mind something more challenging to wrap its synapses around, reading papers about research topics I'm interested in also help spark new ideas and approaches that I can take in my own work (which makes sense since that's one of the main reasons to read/write research papers) and that's always a good thing in general.

My commencement ceremony is in just over 2 weeks (on the 21st), so I made another tweak to my graduation gift list (I added a vacuum because I realized I'd probably need to vacuum my apartment at least once over the next 5-7 years...) On the 17th though I'll be leaving for a short trip to Sandusky, OH where I'll be spending 2 days to enjoy Cedar Point. I also went ahead and submitted a project proposal to Google's Summer of Code to add a pen based application launcher to Ubuntu for TabletPC users. I'm expecting my proposal to be rejected, but it'd be neat if it got accepted as I think there's a serious lack of applications for pen users in the various flavors of Linux. I suppose I could just do it on my own time, but I lack the motivation for such things when there are other projects I can do (some to earn money, others for intellectual curiousity, etc.)

So that's the news of what's been going on lately. Also expect a new post on my tech blog some time this weekend.