Mike Oren.com

I've come to the sad, but late, conclusion that my web site has become a blog. When I bought my domain and started this web site, it was meant more as a place to keep my weekly calendar and provide the latest news about my life to my family and friends--plus providing a place to have my resume online to be found by prospective employers. However as time has passed, i have noticed that the majority of my family rarely, if ever, looks at my web site and while a few of my friends look at it, the vast majority of my readers I know nothing about. Even wit this realization though, I have still kept my blog posts mostly about the happenings in my life (this is mikeoren.com after all), but as I am planning on expanding my scope a bit, I am curious: why do you people come here? My life isn't all that interesting and while I have the audio game that draws a little bit of attention and, of course, a lot of traffic these past two months comes from those searching about internship information for companies I've interviewed with. Still, there is a decent group of people who visit my site and bookmark it or revisit it later. It is these people I ask: what do you want to see more of on my site/blog? What annoys you? What suggestions do you have to improve the site?

With that out of the way, I return you to my weekly update (being posted a couple of days early). The biggest news is that my second niece was born on Monday so there's another March birthday in my family that already has birthdays crowded around late February and March. I'll put a picture of her with my first niece in my photo gallery later this weekend, but I think she's a cute baby.

I also found out I have been nominated for the HCI student of the year award, a new award program started by Iowa State's HCI program. I will find out at the end of April if I won, but I'm assuming I won't win (this is my first year in the program and the winner is determined by peer votes--I voted for one of the people I nominated rather than voting for myself). I still think it's kind of cool getting the nomination though. For those interested the person who nominated me gave the following justification: "Michael Oren is deserving of the student award because of his service and research in the HCI program. In his first year of the HCI program, Michael has made more of a positive impact on the program than any other student. Michael is one of the most active students in the HCI Student Organization. His involvement in the organization has led to changes in the future direction of the HCI program. Michael's research excellence includes a user study on gaming for the visually impaired which was accepted to the student research competition at SIGCHI 2007. Michael's excellence in the HCI program has also led him to a summer internship at Google."

Today I will be heading over the Iowa Braille and Sight Saving School to give a short presentation on my audio game and recruit participants for the usability study. You may notice that I've finally updated that page (partially to remove all links to the SourceForge project and video--since I don't want them to have prior exposure to the game), but also because an update was long overdue.

I also recently did my first demo of Wiicussion to the ISU electronic music student organization, where I was able to get invaluable feedback regarding how to design the future iterations. We got the general idea right of how people would try to play it without having any knowledge of the controls, but it was different enough that our idea of mapping the motion to the different drum sounds isn't feasible. Instead, we're going to use the direction they point at (determined by using the IR sensors) and replace the Wiimote/nunchuk combo with dual wielded Wiimotes (the people who tried it said they think that will allow for more versatility as well as having a better feel to it). This means that the maximum number of players will be cut in half, but there was a general sentiment for fewer players at once anyway (with several people indicating they'd even prefer solo play--but since this is for the forum, where lots of people will be going through, we're keeping with the multi-player). In about another week (hopefully) or two (if things take longer), I'll have a few more people who have never played it try it out and get feedback for the next iteration. The audience had a blast watching the volunteers try it out, so that was very encouraging, and those who tried it liked the idea of it but were clearly frustrated by the controls (which, as I stated, we're overhauling and hopefully the controls will be significantly better in the next iteration).

posted by Mike Oren  # 9:18 AM 0 comments links to this post

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 0 comments links to this post

I just received an e-mail last night informing me that Google has selected me to be an intern on Google's user experience research team! Needless to say, I'm elated about this opportunity and celebrations will commence after I get the official offer letter in 1-2 weeks. Just thought I'd share the great news!

And on a now irrelevant note, I had my last interview with IBM yesterday morning. I think it went well and their internship program for user experience engineers (as they called them) sounded interesting. My preference though is Google, so once I get the official offer letter from them, I'll let IBM know that I chose to accept another position and withdraw my application. I'd do that now, but I do not feel it would be wise without a signed offer letter in hand from Google.

posted by Mike Oren  # 4:54 PM 0 comments links to this post

As many of you know, I had my second phone interview with Google on Wednesday for the user experience research internship. I think it went well, but you never know for sure until you hear back from them. This was the final interview though--they don't fly intern candidates out for on site interviews so I'll be finding out within two weeks if I have the internship or not. The interview style was significantly different than the first interview--it was more role playing what I would have done if I had been a member of the user experience research team at key points in the development of popular Google products. I had been feeling kind of out of it during the day leading up to the interview (I had a lot of built up tension that was effecting me adversely) but luckily I think I was able to shake most of that in the minutes leading up to the interview, which is good because the interview required a decent amount of thinking on my feet that I don't think would have worked so well for me based on how I was feeling earlier in the day. I enjoyed the interview though, even though there was some thinking on my feet, I still felt it was a more relaxed interview than some other ones I've had in the past, which I feel really helps me be myself and not just somebody spewing rehearsed answers for an interview (although I'll admit I do have a prepared answer for why I want to work at Google, but without that I feel like I could ramble on for the entire 45 minute interview with my reasons for wanting to work there).

In other news, I was contacted by the hiring manger of IBM's Rational Software division (the people who created the UML specifications) out in Raleigh, North Carolina regarding a summer internship with them in a user experience position. Since Google is still up in the air, and IBM is also a great company to do user experience work for, I've scheduled my interview with him for Tuesday morning. So that's always good that I potentially have another internship option if Google doesn't work out (of course, I could also just stay on campus for the summer and do my research, but I'd like some more industry experience).

This week is/was (it's almost over) spring break. My original intention was to spend my time creating the two conference posters I need to do plus finish building the spatial sound system for the C6 demo that I foolishly volunteered to help with. I've found, however, that I've struggled far more with the poster than I had anticipated--you have all this space with lots of things to say but you can't say all of it because that's not the purpose of the poster. It's really quite frustrating. It also doesn't help that my poster topic ( my audio game) doesn't lend itself very well to a visual poster. I've gotten some feedback now though, and I think I've got a good plan for revisions. I'm also hoping to get the first prototype of Wiicussion built this weekend (just basic motion mapping to pitch). We'll see how all of that goes. At the start of break though, I went home and had a great seafood buffet to celebrate my younger brother's birthday then went to Melting Pot on Saturday for my birthday (they appear to use broth instead of oil for their fondue, so I found it to be very interesting and quite enjoyable overall). Sunday evening and most of Monday I spent with my girlfriend, whom I hadn't seen in about two months--I had to go about four hours out of my way to see her, but it was an enjoyable trip. Tuesday I returned to campus, and I've spent my time since then rearranging/cleaning my room (I bought a new 32" Westinghouse LCD TV that I'm also using as a computer monitor--since I record TV shows on my desktop--so I had to change my setup to get that to work) in addition to working on the posters and preparing for my interview.

So that's all the news there is for now. Hopefully I'll have some good news in the near future regarding internships. I'll keep everybody posted.

posted by Mike Oren  # 12:13 PM 0 comments links to this post

Over the past week, my group and I have been working on finalizing our proposal for our computational perception class. We will be connecting up to eight Wii remotes to a computer running GlovePie to handle the communication between the Wii remotes and the computer. The program will have a jam session component, where you can do a free for all session to create music--with different remote gestures creating different notes/sounds and standing in different locations will allow you to play different instruments. If you're feeling more competitive, then you and your friends can compete in a game of HORSE. One person starts out by creating a simple pattern of sounds and then the action continues as the other players try to repeat the pattern and add on to it until only one person is able to perform the pattern. If you're in the Ames, IA area and want to try it out, then just let me know. We're going to be doing trial runs with groups of potential users with each prototype as we create them, so there should be plenty of chances to try out one of the prototypes and give us your feedback. The finished game will be demoed at Iowa State's Emerging Technologies Conference on April 25th.

According to my Awstats report, I had over 500 unique visitors (about 150 over the previous record) to my web site last month, with an estimated 30-some percent of visitors bookmarking the page. With that said, the increased traffic/bookmarking is almost assuredly from my posts regarding geting a phone interview with Google. I think there are better entries about interviews (I don't really discuss the questions), but if people enjoy my posts, then that's always good.

Speaking of interviews, I think I might have another interview with IBM in the near future as well--I just found out on Thursday that the IBM representative I spoke to on campus found out the hiring manager for the IBM internship I'm interested in and contacted him regarding my application. I'm, of course, most interested in the Google internship, but I've never believed in putting all my eggs in one basket and if for whatever reason things don't work out with Google (my 2nd interview is March 14th), then I feel that the IBM internship would be a great experience as well. While IBM does not have quite the same focus on user experience research that Google has, they still have a decent focus on usability so I think it would be a great experience for me.

Hopefully over spring break I'll get a chance to work on the redesign of this site, and I also upgraded my hosting service so I can add some new features, new content areas, etc. If there's anything people want me to add to this site or to see more of then just post a comment and let me know. Thanks!

posted by Mike Oren  # 6:28 PM 0 comments links to this post