Mike Oren.com

My sister is having her baby induced on Monday, so I'll have another niece within the next 24 hours or so. I'll be seeing her next weekend, so maybe I'll add some pictures to my photo gallery. Before I head back for the weekend though, I'll be going to the Iowa Braille and Sight Saving School to recruit subjects for my usability study by giving them an overview of the project and handing out the parental consent forms. I'll be going back there in about two to three weeks to conduct the actual study.

April will be a pretty crazy month for me though, besides conducting the usability studies with individuals with visual impairments, I will also be wrapping up the Wiicussion project, wrapping up my electronic music independent study project, documenting/transitioning the H3D project since I won't be here over the summer and some new people will be coming in to work on it, packing up my apartment/trying to sublease it, preparing for the Emerging Technology Conference and (more importantly) CHI '07, and making my travel plans out to the Bay Area for the summer, etc. It's a lot of stuff to get done, but I'm actually looking forward to most of it as they're all pretty fun projects for the most part and some are just enjoyable because they're related to preparing for what should be an awesome summer.

On Friday I got the electronic copy of my offer letter from Google (the hard copy should be coming in this week). I figured the electronic copy was official enough to justify going out and celebrating, so I decided to go out and celebrate with a few friends, one of whom was celebrating getting into Georgia Tech for her PhD. So we had dinner over at Hickory Park BBQ, and I bought dessert for the group (it was a small group). I'm really looking forward to doing the internship at Google this summer though--partially because it's Google and their corporate culture is awesome--but mostly because I think it will be awesome working on a full user experience research team at a company that understands the importance of putting users first.

posted by Mike Oren  # 8:57 PM