Mike Oren.com

It's been awhile since my last update, mostly because I've been extremely busy with the end of the semester, conferences, and preparing for my summer internship. Unfortunately, my body seems to be rebelling against all of that as Monday night I managed to catch a fever and while that's gone now, I still have a cold (that was pretty bad at one point, but now it's calmed down) that has me fairly congested. I didn't have any time to rest though, as I needed to finish my preparations for moving out of Ames--transferring knowledge to people starting this summer, finishing up some usability studies for my audio game, packing, trying to sublease my apartment (unfortunately, I failed to do this), and transferring utilities over to somebody else in my apartment unit.

End of the Semester

Let's start with the end of the semester projects in this update. Jeremy, Adam, and I pulled an all nighter the evening before our final project for Computational Perception was due because we wanted to overhaul based on feedback from Saturday when we demoed it at Iowa State's VEISHEA celebration. I actually showed up a few hours later than them though as I was at the Iowa Braille and Sight Saving School conducting usability studies for the audio game. Anyway, the hard work we put into the project paid off, and we ended up winning first place for the class competition (voted on by fellow classmates), which gave us $50 we used to buy dinner. The project web site, which includes a link to the Google Code project as well as a YouTube video is here. My other big final project was 3DJ, a haptics enabled musical instrument I created for my independent study in electronic music. I ended up with A's in all my classes, but really the important thing is that I was able to take something out of every class I took this semester and, what's more, I even have something tangible to show for each class. Incidentally, the HCI class I was writing blog posts for is turning the blog into a book (sold online by one of those companies that prints them on demand, so it's not really in circulation, but it's fun anyway). I'll post more details about that as we finalize the plans.

Emerging Technologies Conference (ETC)

I demoed both of these projects at Iowa State's Emerging Technologies Conference (ETC), although Jeremy and Adam were the ones who took care of the Wiicussion demo for the most part. I also demoed my audio game and the Haptic and Auditory Surface Manipulation (HASM) project there. As expected, I did not win the HCI student of the year, although I am still pleased I was nominated. The winner was a person who I both nominated and voted for--she was the VP of the HCI student group and the "social chair". I did get a chance to have lunch and dinner with Donald Norman when he was here, and while I think he's a fun presenter--lots of amusing anecdotes and a very energetic personality; I was a bit disappointed by the fact that he seems a bit too pro-Microsoft, understandable considering Steve Jobs fired him years ago and Microsoft is paying him a decent amount as a consultant, but still disappointing. Guy Kawasaki also gave a great talk on entrepreneurism, and I had him sign my MacBook (but the signature has all but rubbed out already...) I also enjoyed the sub-conference called IgniteIT, where I gave a 5 minute presentation (20 slides, 15 seconds each--the required format) on the rise, fall, and rise again of Nintendo. I also participated in PowerPoint karaoke, where I was given a random PowerPoint presentation and had to make up talking points for them on the fly. It was a great sub-conference and I also had the change to finally talk to one of the Engineering Distance Education administrators about possibly using DyKnow Vision in the classroom (DyKnow Vision is an interactive presentation/groupware system originally developed at DePauw University, and I worked on it one summer as part of a Research Experience for Undergraduates project).

CHI '07

Within a couple of days of ETC ending, I was on a plane out to San Jose, CA for Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) '07. This was my first CHI, my first conference I was attending alone, AND the first time I've ever flown alone. There were no incidents, and I was actually even able to share a shuttle from the airport to the conference with two girls from Georgia Tech's Master program (one of whom is a fellow Google intern), so that was kind of nice to meet a fellow intern ahead of time. I was at CHI to participate in the Student Research Competition, and while I was not one of the three graduate students they chose to go on and give a presentation, I enjoyed the experience (and to be honest, I was somewhat relieved I didn't have to give a presentation, as I was already feeling the fatigue of two conferences in a row--and I probably would have gotten ill much sooner had I had to do a presentation due to the extra stress and fatigue that would have put on me (I'm pretty sure my illness has more to do with fatigue then "catching" anything). While there, I also got a chance to meet with my host over at Google (that's the term they give to the intern mentors or whatever term your most familiar with). She gave me a really awesome Google User Experience shirt, and I had a chance to talk to her a little bit about what little she could disclose about the summer project (without me having signed an NDA yet), so that was good. I also got a chance to meet one of the people who conducted a phone interview with me, and she commented about reading my blog (mostly about how maybe I shouldn't have said on my blog that I'd prefer to work at Google over IBM while also interviewing with IBM--I was aware of this at the time, but I guess it never really bothered me... I suppose I should stop thinking of this blog as just for family and friends though and treat it more professionally, at some point anyway...) Speaking of people reading my blogs, one of the people I met at CHI had actually read my blog, so that's pretty cool to randomly meet somebody who has read my posts. And even cooler, I met a professor whose student cited my audio game in a paper or something for a class. One step closer to guru status (in my dreams at least). I could write a lot more about CHI, but this is already going to be a record long post for me. So I'll end it, by talking about the Wednesday night parties hosted by the various companies at CHI (officially their called "hospitality events"). I skipped the Microsoft party, but I did go over to Intuit (two free drinks and some cheese food), Human Factors International (one free drink and some Indian food), and IBM (no free drinks--or at least I never got any free drink cards--and no food; I didn't stay there long at all... there weren't many people over there and nobody I knew, whereas I met people I knew at both of the other events). Three drinks, some food, and about an hour and a half later, I headed across the street to Google's party at the Tech Museum. And that one really was a party--they rented out the entire three story Tech Museum, had unlimited free drinks, about 6 different main course food items (Asian food in to go containers, pulled pork sandwiches, grilled cheese with tomato soup, mini burgers and fries, what looked like paella, and another dish or two). Of course there, I mostly stuck to the juice and water (I figured more than three drinks within a 2-3 hours period might be pushing it--especially when my drinks were wine and cocktails, not beer and when I'm supposed to be networking, not getting drunk...) The Tech Museum was a pretty cool place though (I might actually pay admission to go there and fully explore it when I'm in San Jose this summer) and because just about everybody at CHI went to Google's party I met quite a few people I had met throughout the conference and a few new people, so it was a great time (and everybody who went got a Google hat on the way out).

Drive out to California

I finally finished planning my trip out to California. I seem to have lost my cable for my GPS, so I'm driving the old fashioned way (sort of) with paper maps and all that (although my GPS is still useful for the general route out to San Jose). I actually planned my trip with Google Earth, where I was easily able to split it into legs of the trip and zoom in to get an idea of where hotels are in an area as opposed to performing searches for them--I just zoom into an area that I figure is at about the right place to stop for a day and then scroll around until I find an actual town (amazingly enough even though both southern Wyoming and central Nevada have a whole bunch of nothing for huge stretches, I managed to zoom in on actual towns--the fact that Google Earth has indicators for actual towns is besides the point... more amazingly the number of miles I'm driving on the first and second day are almost identical--maybe a 2 mile difference between the two). I also used Google Earth because I am able to view the maps while offline, which will be useful to me on the road--I can pull to the side of the road and check things out if necessary. My two stops are in Cheyenne, Wyoming (Saturday night--I decided to leave on Saturday morning, one less hotel to worry about and gives me more time to pack) and Elko, Nevada. If anything interesting happens along my drive (doubtful) then I'll blog about it. I amy take some pictures of things along the way and post those in a Picasa Web Album to share on here though. Well wish me a safe trip and my next post will either be on the road or while in California (whenever I have time or feel there's something to blog about). As I stated before, I won't be blogging about work, just my experience living/working out there for the summer.

posted by Mike Oren  # 10:00 AM 0 comments links to this post