This past week was a total doozy but I'll have to document the details tomorrow. This entry is a very special one because of the following reasons:

• The future of ORIENTED.ORG

  Over lunch at Chili's, Gus and I came to terms -- both figuratively, and literally -- with the future of ORIENTED.ORG. I didn't expect it to be *this* way, nor did he I'm sure, but in the end, our agreement gives us both what we have always wanted without compromising the current services to our site visitors. I can't go into further details here (official press release to be issued soon), but I wanted to document this day for our records.

  The best of luck to him and his endeavors, and the best of luck to me and mine...

• ORIENTED.COM Community Outreach Program (COP)

  The COP is a new program that we've been working on in which we invite different community and/or service organizations that are aligned with our mission to take turns co-hosting our Happy Hours with us. This program is very easy to manage, and it serves three specific objectives which fall very much in line with our overall mission:

  1. It promotes local service organizations to over 1,500 people in our database who are based all over the world.

  2. Our constituents have the opportunity to learn more about other community/professional services available to them in their local area, since the most we are offering in terms of offline events are these monthly Happy Hours.

  3. We provide further networking opportunities for our attendees (as well as for the members of our Guest Host organization) at each locale.

  Our newest organizer in Beijing, Kirk Tang, threw me off guard today when he confirmed our very first 'official' participant for our COP (maybe because I was so darn focused on something else at the time).

  For our July event, we will be "ORIENTED with Wang & Li" in Beijing.

  The idea of establishing the ORIENTED Community Outreach Program actually came about from the efforts of our team in Shanghai when they informally arranged to co-host their Happy Hours with the Shanghai Drink Club a few months back. Our COP is such a smart idea and benefits so many and makes SUCH great use of the name, eh?

  I lit up when I read Kirk's email today. I guess this is really happening...

• ORIENTED Happy Hour Homepage (HHH)

  Another exciting event that happened today was getting most of the files from my web developers for the new designs of the HHH. Some touch up is required, but I do believe that come Monday morning, the new designs will be up and running.

  As the original HHH was thrown together ad-hoc, this new layout gives us the flexibility to add more services as the demand for them arise. It was a bitch and a half to pin down, but we are all now very happy with it. May we never have to make any major template changes again...

After the Board Meeting on Wednesday evening, I was planning to do absolutely nothing for the rest of the week since I really feel like I need a break!

But given the above and then some... that obviously didn't happen.

Next on my agenda is communicating to the volunteers of both .ORG and .COM what they can expect going forward, and then drafting the press release -- which ain't gonna be easy -- to formally announce the changes to the general public.

MAN am I ever busy... but doing well... errr... I think...

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