Epic is holding our annual User Group Meeting this week. This is the time when we meet with our customers, update them on our development plans, listen to their concerns, and give them an opportunity to learn from each other. It’s always been important to us and it’s becoming increasingly important to our customers. This year, over 2000 customers travelled to Madison for UGM.
Yesterday, I attended the UGM General Session. I took a shuttle from my office in the First Business Bank building to the Orpheum (downtown) for the General Session. The General Session is the one time a year that Epic employees are required to wear business formal. It was quite an unusual experience driving up to FBB and seeing a crowd of Epic Sleuths (“Mystery in the Midwest” is our theme for UGM this year) all dressed in suits.
Judy Newman of the Wisconsin State Journal attended the General Session. So did Mike Ivey of the Capital Times
Christine and I went to a Brewer’s game with our Life Group last night. We tailgated before the game, which was a lot more fun than the game itself. (The Brewers eventually lost 7-5.) We’ll have some pictures online in a little bit.
This morning I read some good news about the Madison housing market. Hopefully this trend continues for when we’re ready to buy a house in 2-3 years.
UPDATE: Our latest pictures can always be viewed at Flickr. The Life Group pictures can also be found there.
Christine picked me up from work yesterday evening and I dropped her off at Blackhawk. She volunteered to help with their AWANA program and the team met for the first time last night. She was originally planning on helping out with the Sparkies, but switched to the Junior High group. I’ve been in contact with the Audio / Visual group at church and may start volunteering in that capacity. I’m also interested in working with the web as well.
While Christine went through her orientation, I started The Mystery of Capital. After reading the first chapter and a half, I think it will be a fascinating book. I’m planning to outline it as I read, noting important facts, figures, and quotations. I’ll read slower, but I’ll have a good resource to refer back to whenever I want to talk about what I read. After I finishing outlining The Mystery of Capital, I plan to do the same thing for The Real Lincoln and The Constitution of Liberty. I read a lot of good books, but I’ve needed to do a better job of remembering what’s in them and being able to use the knowledge. I think a disciplined system of note taking and outlining will really help me.
Finally, a work related update. I received notification yesterday that I passed my Chronicles exam with an 85%. That’s the first step towards receiving my Chronicles Certification and a pay raise. Next week I’ll be retaking the Visual Basic exam and taking the ActiveX exam for the first time. The following week, I plan to start taking my Resolute exams. Those are the exams related to the Epic application that I work with: Resolute Professional Billing. There are five total Resolute exams I have to take and two projects that I’ll need to have graded. Hopefully they aren’t as scary as they sound.
