Mike Oren.com

During the month of July I ended up with a whopping one whole post to both MikeOren.com and my tech blog, so some of you may be wondering what happened--since I had been trying to update weekly to bi-weekly. Basically, I had become fairly swamped with several "side projects"--finding a long term apartment, moving out of my sublease and into the long term apartment, finishing up the editing of the DVD of my sister's wedding (which apparently now needs to be edited some more...), etc. I'm actually living in the same apartment complex that I had the sublease from, since it was both easier and cheaper than other options I had available (plus the management/ownership changed hands over the summer so I'm hoping the new management will do a better job of maintaining the property). I'm all settled in now though with my TV, video game systems, mini fridge (that I'm using for wine, ice cream, and candy--the rest of the stuff can go into the public fridge I share with the people renting one of the other 3 rooms in this unit; so far there's only one other person occupying the unit). Of course my desktop is all set up now, but I still find myself using my laptop more--partially because I can use it from my bed and probably partially because I still need to clean up the desk a bit so it doesn't feel 'cramped'; it's currently being occupied by my old cell phone that I'm trying to sell on E-bay and various accessories that are being sold with it). I think if I were to get an LCD TV that I could use my computer with at a reasonable resolution than I might find myself using that more often--since I have a wireless keyboard and mouse already. I still use my desktop, it's just more often for recording TV programs, storing backup files, and other more server-like functionality--plus DVD burning. Mostly though, it's that I prefer to lie down then sit up as it's more comfortable for my back (and I'm probably just really lazy...

My Advanced Graphics course was cancelled for next semester, so I am now going to be taking Electronic Music Synthesis so I can use the knowledge from that for real-time sound synthesis that can be used in computer applications that I'm working on to give sound representation of data/graphical items. I've also just about finished programming version 1.5 (or 2.0--I haven't decided how far of a leap it is over the first version) of Moosic so I will HOPEFULLY be uploading the new version of that and updating the project page within the month (although I said I was going to update an earlier beta a month or two ago and I never did that... this time though it's a more permanent version and I'll try to force myself to get around to uploading it). I also hope to make a new gameplay video (in a non-Windows media format) within the next two months.

In other news, I was accepted by Kaplan tutoring company to be part of an audition for a job (4-10 hours a week, my choice how much I work) tutoring the ACT and GRE analytical writing. The extra money will be nice, but I'm mostly looking into it so I can get some more teaching/tutoring experience since the HCI program here doesn't really have any TA positions for grad students, just research positions (which is fine since research stipends are normally better and I enjoy research, but I also do want to get at least a little bit more teaching experience). That's all for now, time to go waste the rest of my day doing I don't know what yet...