Mike Oren.com

I'm down to my last week of working at Interface Software and down to about 7 days before I need to move to Iowa. Since the product release was last week for Interface Software, I haven't had as much work to do so leaving there right about now is fairly good timing in terms of not feeling guilty about leaving unfinished work around. It's a fun company with some great people and a CRM suite with plenty of features that is at about the right level of usability (easy things are easy to complete while more complicated things may require training).

As for getting everything done that I need to get done before moving to Iowa, I'm at "about the right place". Since I'm only bringing the minimum amount of items for the summer (as I want to wait until I have a permanent residence before moving everything over there), I don't really need to pack much--I'm just bringing cooking stuff, clothes, sleeping, and computer stuff and pretty much all of that is already packed with the exception of the computer stuff (as I'm still using it). There's still one more paper I want to read before going down there and I never really worked on any OpenGL, but I did review some of my old OpenGL code to refresh my memory as to some of the commands and such--although I'm hoping I'll be able to do a little more of that before I leave. So while I had hoped to get more done, I'm actually at about where I thought I would be at this point considering the fact that I've been working and had graduation and various other activities going on.

As for what I've been doing recently, this week has been fairly low key for the most part although Memorial Day Weekend I went swimming outdoors and got a decent tan to my face/burnt shoulders. I also grilled some shish kabobs and corn outdoors. I did some more grilling Wed. when I grilled some beer brats that turned out AWESOME (much better that I expected since I wasn't sure what I was doing and just sort of winged it). Oh, I also saw both the Da Vinci Code and Over the Hedge that weekend. I think the critics blew it on the Da Vinci Code as I thought it was a fairly good movie, no real complaints (although not a phenomenal movie). Over the Hedge was just an enjoyable movie to watch and you have to love Hammy. Then this past Friday (June 2nd), I walked a 5k as part of the i5k at work and got my excercise for the week... My calves were killing me afterwards, but it was fun. Later that evening, I took Danielle to downtown Chicago for dinner at Rhapsody (food was pretty good--Danielle got the halibut which was great and I got the salmon which was pretty good for salmon, but I've always found salmon to be kind of boring; I had gotten it because Danielle couldn't wanted to try both the salmon and the halibut). After dinner, we went to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO) where we saw one of the last conceerts conducted by the conductor of the past thirty years, a flute solo by the principal flutist (the reason we had gone in the first place--since Danielle is a flute player), and the last composition by the CSO's current composer (last composition commissioned specifically for the CSO)--and this was a semi-premiere of the piece (the first time it had been played was the night before). So it was a good concert to go to and we had seats behind the orchestra front row so we had a great view of everything and got to see some things that the performers wouldn't do while facing the audience (like sticking their tongues out to show relief/frustration). So it was an interesting night.

Since work is just about over, expect an update to my resume some time later this week. I'm also considering adding a biography page with general facts about me, since right now I don't have anything like that on here. Any updates to any part of the site though will be announced here.

I almost forgot... some basic stats for the site from the month of May: visitors from 27 countries, over 300 unique visitors (638 visitors overall), 15 people bookmarked the page, and more than that appear to have subscribed to the RSS feed. That blew all previous site records away (including the month where I posted a slashdot article--it didn't link to this site but they include the homepage of summary authors and people followed that link). I am very pleased by those statistics as it shows its worth the time and money (domain registration and hosting) I put into this web site. So thank you to all of my visitors! If there's anything you want me to add to this site or anything you think I can improve, please add a note to the comments below (no registration is required).