Mike Oren.com

It's been a bit too long since my last update (just over two weeks) and, unfortunately, I must be brief in this posting. I am extremely busy right now preparing to move to Ames, IA for graduate school, and I have a nice list of items I need to get done before leaving, if at all possible. Rather than go into all of that though, I'll fill everybody in on what I've done recently. Since my last update the major events in my life have been my trip to Cedar Point, my undergraduate college graduation ceremony, becoming a finalist in the Google Da Vinci Code Quest (I won a replica of the cryptex, but I did not win the grand prize), and not making it into Google's Summer of Code.

I took my Cedar Point trip with Danielle (my girlfriend) in the days preceeding my graduation. We drove down there on a Wed. morning and made terrible time so were unable to make use of the Starlight passes that evening (those passes let us in the park from 4 or 5 PM until close and were included in the package; I still have them so if anybody wants them please contact me. However, Lost was on that night and we were able to watch that while drinking a bottle of wine I had brought along before heading to sleep. The next day we got to enter the park an hour early (since we were guests at a Cedar Point resort) and I was the third person that day to ride Millenium Force in the front row--Danielle was too freaked out by it to ride it (the ride goes 93 mph and features an 80 degree drop) so I ended up riding it with a random percussionist from the Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra who got his degree from Oberlin. He had been to Cedar Point MANY times before so he gave me some tips on which roller coasters were the best and which ones to avoid, so that was extremely useful. My one disappointment of the day was that I was unable to ride Top Thrill Dragster (0-120 mph in 4 seconds and a near 90 degree drop), but I think my front row experience with Millenium Force made up for that to a degree. Being a Thursday, and early in the season, I was able to hit almost all of the rides I had wanted to go on before we left for lunch, so we ended up taking a long lunch (during which the weather began turning bad) before going back to the park for a few last rides. We went to sleep fairly early and then woke up at 2 AM to drive back to Greencastle, IN for my graduation practice.

Which leads me to my graduation, which was better than I had anticipated (as I normally think of such ceremonies as boring and far too long). The ceremony, though, actually ended up only lasting just over two hours despite a larger graduating class than normal and the only low point was the commencement speaker (Evan Bayh--a US Senator from Indiana) because he chose to abuse his time by rattling on about various topics that I'm sure we'll be key in his campaign for President (which he probably won't win). I then had fun chatting with some former professors and staff members I had worked with while on campus.

Not much more to say about the whole Google Da Vinci Code Quest finalist thing, other than that I really enjoyed the puzzles and I think the cryptex finalist prize is pretty awesome (and that I didn't really want to be the grand prize winner due to the rather hefty amount of taxes I would have had to pay on $128,000 worth of prizes--more than I could afford). Likewise, I'm not too bummed about not having been accepted to Google's Summer of Code as I would have had to reduce my summer hours for my research assistantship in order to participate. Plus, I still benefited from the process as almost 20 new people downloaded my open source project and hopefully somebody will pick up my slack on that so that development can begin again.

I still have lots more to talk about, but I've spent too much time on this already as I still need to update my tech blog as well. Unfortunately, I probably won't get to that tonight but when I do the next posting will be a rant about the overuse of ads on a lot of web sites. If that sounds insteresting, feel free to subscribe to my tech blog's RSS feed so you can know when I've added a post.

This past week has been a long, fairly interesting week. It started out mundanely enough, just the normal grind of the work week, but then Wed. on my drive back from work, a minivan hit the passenger side of my car just behind the back tire while trying to merge into my lane. I stopped and they pulled in front of me and continued on. I got their license plate number though and had to go stop at a toll booth and wait (40 min.) for a state trooper to file the police report (which I did on Friday evening). I also had a nice long meeting Wed. or Thurs. discussing the current state of a Microsoft Reporting Services plug-in that the company I'm working for was building. Since the product is supposed to be released to manufacturing in two weeks, they decided to more than double the number of developers and testers on the area and just totally slam it (the plug-in had only reached a truly testable state the week before). So then Friday I had to train one of the new people working on it on how to create reports using the plug-in, and then in the afternoon I had to show EVERYBODY some of the features of Microsoft Reporting Services (since I was the person on the team with the most experience designing/laying out reports). So that was both fun and somewhat irksome, as I only have a few days left to get my tasks done before I leave for vacation/graduation. On my drive home from work thouh, I won a Q101 radio contest--tickets to the Q101 Block Party (featuring Taking Back Sunday, Angels and Airwaves, the Subways, and one other band that I don't remember) PLUS CD's from Taking Back Sunday and Angels and Airwaves--so I thought that was REALLY awesome--and that means I've won just about every type of contest now (carnival games, random drawings, internet entry games, essay contests, and radio contests). And then the week ended with me going into work Sat. for about 4.5 hours and then me making my mom breakfast for Mother's Day this morning--more of a champagne brunch than just normal breakfast...

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.