Mike Oren.com

I wasn't feeling the whole firework thing today (I've kind of grown bored of them, although I still like them when they're set to music, but I didn't feel like searching for one in the area that does that). So I decided to stay in tonight and get a post in (as it's been awhile). Since my last update, I beat Super Paper Mario--it was a fun game, but the ending was kind of disappointing (the final fights were too easy and while you save the world from destruction, it just doesn't feel complete, partially because you never get to see Tippi's true form). So that's my nerd moment for this post.

I also ran some basic analysis of my audio game study that I ran with people who have visual impairments. The initial results are promising but not quite as good as I had hoped from the first few participants we ran. The mean scores are useless due to the high standard deviation, but the median indicates that while people with visual impairments performed better playing the game with only audio cues than fully sighted subjects playing audio only; the sighted participants playing with graphics still complete the levels a good ten to twenty seconds faster. I should, again, note that these results are in no means final--I crunched them quickly in preparation for the ICAD conference, but they do present promising findings.

Danielle is arriving tomorrow (Thursday) evening. I'm flying her out because despite a previous post about her and I being broken up and such due to opposing life goals, we both still want to try to see if we can make it work. And if it's clear we can't then at least this way we'll get better closure by actually seeing each other and spending time together than we ever would have just breaking up while miles apart. We haven't really spent much time together since January. We did spend half a day together in March, but to be honest I had completely forgotten about that half day for awhile. So it might just be that the only reason things had fallen apart was from lack of contact with one another--I had been really busy last semester preparing for conferences, wrapping things up for the summer, and preparing to move out to California for the summer and she had been busy preparing to graduate and enter the "real world". Anyway, we'll see how things go. Friday night we're going on a dinner and dance cruise that's leaving from San Francisco and then Saturday we'll probably head over to either Santa Cruz or Big Sur or something. So it should be fun at least. Although the timing of her trip is somewhat ironic. July 11th would be/is our 4 year dating anniversary and this would be the first one we actually spend together, but it's also the only one where the future of our relationship was ever really in question...

Next week Harry Potter comes out, and I have tickets to go see it at midnight at the local IMAX theater with a group of other interns (and Danielle since she'll be in town--she's an afterthought since I planned the trip/bought the tickets before she was coming to visit). I'm pretty psyched for that, although that'll mean I'll be showing up to work late on Wed. (need to get some sleep after the movie ends around 2:30 AM), which is fine as I was able to move everything important back so nothing starts until around noon.

Actually, next week will be pretty hectic as I have things scheduled throughout the day from Monday through Friday, with some days 6 hours of thing scheduled with half hour breaks in between them. So it'll be taxing, but I think it'll be a fun week overall. There's some potential that it won't be such a good week, but I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that everything will work out like it should.

In other news, I mentioned the Authors@Google talk last post, and I went to another one since that last time, this time a novel entitled The Whole World Over by Julia Glass. I haven't started reading it yet (I was finishing up the book of short stories I had received at the last book), but from her reading of it the story sounds interesting although she appears to need some serious work on writing realistic dialogue. I know it's difficult as I struggled with it for a long time, but it was really almost painful listening to her read these conversations (although, since I haven't read it the problem may just be in her inability to properly voice the characters). Still, like I said, the story sounded good and it should be a fun read for later (and I'm really enjoying the Authors@Google series--I'd list it as one of my favorite perks right up there with the free food and the free shuttle).