Mike Oren.com

Before I get into the week's update, feel free to check out these photos of my nieces (the youngest of which was born on 26 March:

Nieces 3/31/07 10:42 PM

Since my last update I gave an introduction of my audio game project to the students at the Iowa Braille and Sight Saving School--they seemed pretty excited about it, which is encouraging, so hopefully they'll have their parents sign the permission slips so we can conduct a usability study and get their feedback on the game. After giving them my introduction to the game, I drove back to Chicago for the weekend where I had the opportunity to see my new niece (and take those pictures). I also had a chance to see Danielle and go out to dinner, a movie, and Dave and Buster's with her.

When I came back to Ames on Sunday, it was April and time to begin tying up loose ends and such, and since somebody had scheduled a viewing of my apartment for Wed. my first order of business was to clean things up because I'd really prefer to sublease my apartment instead of having to pay for it while not using it. Due to lack of cleaning motivation, that was a slow process that took me part of Sunday, Monday, and a decent amount of Tuesday evening. It looks great now though. The person who I was going to show it to on Wednesday ended up canceling, but that evening somebody else contacted me about viewing it and I just showed it to them today--hopefully they'll decide to rent it so I don't have to concern myself with it anymore.

On Tuesday, I received the official paper copy of my offer letter from Google so I signed that and sent the signed copy off to them. I also officially withdrew my application for an IBM internship--I had withdrawn my application with Garmin the previous week when they called me to schedule an on-site interview. So that concludes my internship hunt and in a way that I'm extremely pleased with--it doesn't get much better than Google--especially when it comes to user experience research

This week I also demoed the latest version of my haptic musical instrument/record player for my electronic music independent study--I think it's coming along nicely now, and I've even added it as yet another demo to show at the Emerging Technologies Conference at the end of the month. So that gives me a total of four demos for the three day forum, counting the Wiicussion demo for my class project that I'm working on with two other students.

There are now roughly three weeks left before the end of the semester and my trip out to San Jose for CHI, so I need to make sure I keep the ball rolling here and redouble my efforts on all my projects. And since I just found out the person I showed my apartment to today decided not to rent it, I now also need to redouble my efforts to find somebody to sublease it. I think everything will work out fine though.

posted by Mike Oren  # 2:02 PM