It's 1 a.m. Sunday evening and I still have a lot of work to do but I wanted to take a moment to just chill and jot down some thoughts from this past week.

We are officially launching the ORIENTED.COM website tomorrow (actually the site is live now) with Shanghai and Taipei confirmed for this month, and Beijing and Seattle signed on for April. San Francisco is halfway there, we just need to secure a lead organizer and await the decision of one particular person whom I have approached in that area.

She'd be perfect.

Beijing was confirmed for this month all the way up until late this evening when it got postponed at the very last minute due to logistical problems. In fact, the team there was the most enthusiastic in terms of securing local sponsors and wanting promotional materials, etc. They even came up with the hilarious idea of making a drink in honor of its first event and naming it, "The Oriented Express", lol.

In any case, Beijing will not rollout until April. It's a little disappointing, but it's A-OKAY. We'll work with what we have and make up for it later.

Now let me backtrack...

Last week was an absolute marathon in terms of getting everything ready in time for this launch. Just off the top of my head, I had to...

• Pitch the idea to PEK and SFO and write up proposals for others to help us in those areas
• Wait anxiously for Seattle's answer which came in at the very last minute as a GO, nice catching up with Albert (I always thought we'd get to work together one day but not under these circumstances =)
• Collect, code, proof-read and edit everyone's profiles (I'm anal and umm... is there a hypen in PROOFREAD?! Eh who cares at this point!)
• Collect and crop their photos (hey that takes time!)
• Write up all of the site content which looks easy enough but actually I had a bit of difficulty trying to decide how to position the "About Us" section, as in, how do I explain how this happened?!
• Work into the late night hour TWICE with the web design company (GM, designer, and programmer) to get the site design finished and to format the HTML newsletter
• Make venue pages and plug in banners and maps as they came in (can't wait for this to be an automated process, did a lot of AD-HOCKING this time...)
• Set up a number of alias accounts which actually wasn't that easy
• Compose a formal welcome and introduction letter to all of the existing event planners
• Find an appropriate privacy statement to use/modify to our project specifications
• Write up the "help wanted" piece (TBD) which actually wasn't that easy to do (how do I indicate in the most professional way that stuck-up, closed-minded, arrogant snoots need not apply?! Gasp!)
• Come up with revenue-sharing calculations in preparation for local area corporate sponsorships
• Put together draft checklist for each team to use as a guideline
• Edit/check the website content, text graphic, flyer and newsletters for wording consistency (totally screwed up)
• Compose the "welcome" letter for new subscribers to our mailing list
• Design a make-shift flyer for local distribution, with Mark S.' help (thank goodness)
• Write up a brief update for my investors to explain what in the world is going on (all happened so last minute...) and why the updates to the financials and proposed term sheets won't be ready until next weekend
• And much, much more...

I sill can't believe I survived AND managed to get away this weekend for some fun but yeah, all of this needed to happen before Friday morning as I was taking off for the weekend to Kaohsiung for a --> BASEBALL GAME.

In a nutshell...

Acer Ginny's company (um, Acer) was taking a bunch of friends and family on a VIP trip to Kaohsiung to attend the first baseball game of the season (sponsored by Acer of course), an all-expense-paid-for, weekend extravaganza. Gin was kind enough to give her passes to Sandin and myself as she knew we'd want to go down and see Felicia as well. And so I took Friday off and did all of the above and had a really fun time (which I'll have to write up separately).

Special thanks to Gin for giving us such a wonderful present! =)

By Thursday evening I was really starting to hurt/panic and almost called her at every hour starting from 7:00 p.m. to cancel out on the trip, but by 2:00 a.m. I still hadn't called her and figured, WHAT THE HELL. The site was supposed to launch that night but it wasn't going to happen, I was just too tired to focus and ended up passing out on my bed face forward, and yet I was determined to force myself to go out-of-town this weekend and try to have some fun.

Suffice it to say that I managed to launch the site at 3:30 a.m. Saturday morning from our hotel room in Kaohsiung and then did the "Christine thing" (becoming famous for stunts like this...) at the baseball stadium right in the middle of the game that afternoon, i.e...

I passed out.

Nelson and Quynh... don't even start with me... lol...

Don't ask me how I slepted through all the cheering and roaring and hoopin' and hollering -- we sat in the front row, right in front of the super huge loud speakers no less -- but I did, and man did I ever need it.

A good indication of my state-of-mind this weekend but it was a lot of fun! The trip program I mean, not the mad rush to launch the site, lol...

Came back to Taipei earlier than the others, threw my things down and spent this entire afternoon and evening trying to tweak the site and was also working with one of the programmers whom I had to call for the second time in the evening to help me through this when I got the notice that Beijing was cancelling at the last minute (crisis management at its best). The programmers have been so nice, this is not the first but the second time they have had to work until late in the evening to support me (and over the weekend from home!).

I think only those who operate websites and publish email newsletters around offline EVENTS can relate to what I just went through this past week. It all looks so very easy but man, did it ever take the best out of me.

I don't remember ever working so hard in my entire life.

Logging off now to pat myself on the back for what I've managed to accomplish so far and in so little time. It's a dirty job but... somebody's gotta do it, si?

Nite nite.

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