HeyChristine.com

Tuesday, August 6th
On this date last year...

"FINAL Email Bulletin: Week of August 6th..."

Gus just got back from a trip to Chicago, Barcelona, and who knows where else that boy has been, lol. He said it was for his MBA program but I was skeptical... just kidding. Per usual, he got me a Pasalubong, have a look see:

Kind of weird to see Gus in my journals these days, eh? And yet TILL THIS DAY some people are still insisting that I have this huge crush on Gus. Hopefully Bill's presence will divert everyone's attention... lol! Sorry... couldn't resist that one...

SO ANYWAY.

Gus is here for the next couple of weeks and I *think* we will have his undivided attention so what this means is that there will be some significant changes taking place with regards to ORIENTED.ORG, effective immediately.

Many people are speculating that .ORG will naturally be absorbed by .COM, but actually, that ain't gonna happen because of an agreement that Gus and I made when we first came up with the idea in 1999 in that it will always be a volunteer-run, community service entity for as long as we believe that it can be sustainable.

We are honoring that commitment.

However, during our last meeting, we both had to come to terms with certain inherent limitations about this project which we can no longer ignore and have already begun taking the necessary steps to accomodate to those limitations.

To begin with... last Monday was the very last time I will have officially published the Email Bulletin since we first started this service on June 5th, 2000.

Since I wasn't sure of Gus' whereabouts as of yesterday afternoon, I sent a brief message to the .ORG volunteers to let them know that the EB won't be published until further notice and that Gus has some ideas which he will detail as soon as possible. Later on in the day Gus did ring me (just got in town) and was right on track with our schedule. I just hadn't realized that he was going to send out this Final EB and was surprised to receive it in my inbox this morning.

Turns out that he didn't think he was going to do it either but decided at the last minute to give it a go.

This last Email Bulletin marks the end of an era. Not to say that the service will be discontinued forever as we fully expect someone else from the community to step up to the plate and take over, sooner than later, but it does mark the end of an era in which I was a major player.

Here is a little walk down memory lane for my records of some of my memorable moments (and thank God for Google search and for the fact that I track this craziness!):

The actual process of drafting an issue
Publishing the EB on Christmas Day from my parents' place
Publishing the EB on New Years Eve from New York City
Publishing the EB during Nelson & Quynh's wedding fiesta in Vegas
Total # of times I wrote about the Email Bulletin
Total # of times I wrote about the EB
And finally, the Email Bulletin Archives

The cheezy part to record was an email from Jeremy, one of our long-standing volunteers, who wrote back and said, "By the way, thanks for doing that for so long. It was done very professionally, probably the best text-based layout I have ever seen from any organization...", along with two others from our mailing list who wrote in and thanked us for publishing the Email Bulletin up until now.

Not that I LIVE to be appreciated -- I ain't as high maintenance as I may look -- but when I bust my #&*% doing something that I THINK is helpful to others for 2+ years and the only feedback I received was from my own site partner, there were times I had to wonder whether anyone was benefiting from it at all. Our fault for not building more effective feedback channels, but the point I am making here is merely that the above emails were sincerely appreciated.

I busted out laughing when Gus wrote, "now THIS is a first :)" in response to a site visitor who, after receiving our final Email Bulletin notice, wrote,

"Please keep me on your mailing list."

Usually, it's the other way around! Ah the memories... LOL!

Anyway, I think it's fair to refer to these events as "growing pains", as well as the other announcements about ORIENTED.ORG that will follow suit in the next few weeks. The bigger picture, of course, is that all of the above are necessary steps for us to really move forward... and in so many ways.

To be continued...

Check out this panel of LCD monitors that I was checking out this evening at the computer market to go with my new ORIENTED machine... notice what is on the screens and multiply that by two, all of which I couldn't fit into my shot. It felt like ORIENTED.COM had taken over the whole computer store... lol!

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