HeyChristine.com

Thursday, November 2nd

Help! Mom's psycho!

I got up incredibly early this morning and couldn't get back to sleep, so I ended up cleaning up my room which for the past few weeks has been out of control. It's nice to get up early and get some things done... I also made another attempt at the eye make-up gunk. A rare occasion for a non-occasion.

So I get in to the office and check my emails. My mom sent me and my brother one with the subject heading, "my computer has a halloween spirit built in". Body text is as follows:

    I have never mentioned this, I often hear this noise sounds like someone
    is opening the door very slowly, its squeaky sound came from my computer,
    and then sometimes it sounds like the door was being shut in a hurry.
    Rather spooky sometimes. It has been acting this way for a long time. At
    the beginning, it used to make my heart jump. Now I am kind of used to it.
    How weird. Is it normal? Some spooky character is in my computer. How
    do you explain (this)?

I busted out laughing and could not stop for the life of me. Now my eye makeup is ALL SCREWED UP and of course I don't have my eyeliner pencil with me! How many other immigrant Chinese mothers in America send emails like this to their first-generation Chinese kids? I still remember the time she emailed her condolescences to the Royal Family at the death of PRINCESS DIANA. GOds...

Post Your Event on ORIENTED!

I was on the phone with Gus earlier this morning, frustrated over the number of erroneous submissions we get to our Events announcement system on the site. Here we are thinking that the date fields we've incorporated are universally intuitive yet time and time again, people get it wrong. We do not know why.

One may think this events calendar is a minor component to the .ORG site, but in actuality, it's been the ultimate testing platform for .COM. We have learned a LOT through it about what it takes to get community organizations to use it. I've seen many online newspapers and community sites that have added this component too thinking that just because it's there, everyone will use it. Wrong. There are very specific steps that must be taken to make this work effectively that have nothing to do with the component itself, and I know exactly what they are (wink wink)...

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I'm in love again...

I now have a functional sound card. Yay. Apparently the original one was defective but I was not aware of this until the Computer Man from Acer stopped in last week to fix a colleague's computer. It wasn't that big of a deal but since he was here, I invited him to take a look. Computer guys are so cute. You put them in front of a PC and instantly they give it their undivided attention. I feel like they are taking good care of me (it's that damsel in distress mode I get in sometimes) and I fall in love with each and every one.

Well almost. Every once in awhile I get this dingbat who has no idea what he's doing, clicking like mad on every single icon on my desktop and leaving my PC in worse condition than he found it which really annoys me but I digress. What I really want to say is that I was finally able to use the Internet telephony thingy to talk to Lis using that Hearme.com software. We've been trying to do this for months. I cannot express how AWESOME it was to hear her voice over this thing. I was most definitely impressed. Can't wait to hook up with her back in the States.

CAPT Social Hour at the Hard Rock Cafe...

The CAPT social was definitely fun, per usual. I saw everyone there and stayed for quite awhile. Ran into Marc S. whom I haven't seen for awhile and met some new folks too, including a woman named Jennifer, who totally freaked me out. She was a spittin' image of Jenny, so much so that I could not help but stare. The minute I saw her at the bar I literally froze. I instantly thought, what the heck are you doing here, how come you didn't tell me you were coming to Taipei and WHY are you now three inches shorter?!

AND, it turns out that Jennifer just got here from the East Coast and actually knows Ray through Arthur M.! That freaked me out even more because Jenny, Ray, and myself have remained very close friends ever since we met on the Loveboat almost a decade ago. They are the two people I always, always hook up with whenever I'm in New York. I just couldn't get over the resemblance, the irony of it all, and the fact that this world is SHRINKING.

In any case, I most definitely felt connected with her. It's amazing how much closer I feel towards new people just because we have mutual friends.

The night is NOT young ladies!

Laurie and I had dinner there with Marc S., Stacey H. and Simon. I have to say, Simon is a very interesting person to talk to. Lots of passion behind his words. Anyway, the food was a lot better than I thought it would be but I was really dying to get home to finish working on this site. It has turned into a monster of a project but is loads of fun.

Laurie and Adella, however, had something else in mind.

By 11 pm, they were itching to go DANCING and were trying to drag me out with them! Guys I am BUSY. GIMME A BREAK. I finally had to shut my door on them so that I could concentrate and said, "Have fun girls! Nite nite!" just as Adella takes a final stab with a "Come on Christeeeen... I'll give you some GLITTER, okay?"

They were out of control.

YESTERDAY | THE NEXT DAY