Hong Kong (5/20 - 5/25): Irregularity and Poker

The week was highlighted by three things: bad sleeping habits, Jet Li, and poker.

When I returned from Wenzhou I made the mistake of dropping by the office on Sunday evening.  Of course, not having internet for 2 days means that e-mail and online tasks build up. So, by the time I had finished going through my stuff it was close to 4 a.m. already.  I crashed on the couch at work. But my schedule was pretty messed up for the rest of the week.  Long hours at work followed by late sleeping and late waking up equals messed up schedules.

Why so busy at work?  well, the reason was two-fold.  First, we were porting over the jetli.com user registration database to [alive not dead].  I was working on some of the more front-end type of stuff (redoing the flash navigation, setting up forwarding pages, etc.) while our manly engineers were doing all the back-end database manipulation.

On top of this Jet was also gearing up with a lot of blogging.  Daily blogs from the 19th to the 24th related to the topic of gratitude.  In fact, we're still working on putting up the video blogs from these days, but you can see what we have so far at his profile page.  Pretty cool stuff.

Those blogs were also a way for him to introduce his new project, an online Buddhist resource center primarily aimed towards a Chinese audience.  This meant that yours truly had to build the website rather quickly since it was supposed to launch on Buddha's birthday, May 24. You can check it out at cometogetherfoundation.org.

The second-fold reason for bad sleep scheduling was the various things going on outside or semi-related to work.  The first night Rosemary, Terence and Kim were hanging out at the office before and after they filmed the HK Dog Rescue video (check Rosemary's page to see it).  Wednesday night and Friday night were poker nights.  Thursday was a deadline for Jet's stuff ... you get the idea.

Terence and Chris hanging out at the office

The poker nights at Pat and Stephen's place was pretty fun though.  I'm not that great of a player, so I never really expect to win.  It's more entertainment for me than anything else.  If I think of it in terms of spending some money to enjoy the company of friends and learn some new stuff (kind of like seeing a movie or play, I guess) then I can live with the slight loss of money. 

I actually hadn't played in about 2 years so it was sort of fun to re-learn the game.  7-card texas hold 'em, of course.  Isn't that what everyone plays these days?

The first game was on Wednesday night and we had a pretty good turn out. The second one was Friday night and was more of an after-thought than a pre-planned event, but it worked out well and we had a good showing of people.

The nice thing about playing at Pat and Stephen's is that, once you're out of the game, you can go play the Wii for a while to work out the frustration after having just lost the game.

The players are all geared up

Raffi, the man who never loses

Andrew dilligently checks his alive not dead profile page

Wii central

What is poker without junk food?

And so, that's how I spent the week at work.  Friday night's game ended up going until 3 a.m. or so and I realized that it would be a good idea to spend the weekend getting myself back on track ...

... But ... I'll save that for the next blog.  I don't want to overwhelm you. 

And what do you know?  I'm almost caught up with my blogging!  Just 1 week behind the actual date!  If I keep this up I will run out of things to write about.  (not likely)