Happy Birthday AMD

Last night, was AMD's Birthday party for the Athlon 64 product, here in Taiwan. Anthony and I went, while the kids stayed back at the hotel with a babysitter. There were several other AMD - Austin individuals here in town that came with us. It was nearby at a club/restaurant in the Neo 19 building, same building as Chili's :) We walked in, and the door greeters put those glow in the dark sticks around our wrists as bracelets. Then, we were handed party "hats" or other type of headband hats to wear and then had a photograph taken. Then we went into the club, where they had a buffet line set up, with a stage up front and a space cleared out for dancing. They started the evening out with three scantily clad women dancing - I have no idea what that had to do with AMD, I mean, they weren't even wearing the AMD colors! (It's interesting here, at trade shows and anything where they are promoting a product, there will be scantily clad women with the product - say for example, a vehicle or new game on display, and there will be people taking photos of it. It's strange.) Anyway, after the dance, there were some speeches by some of AMD management and then the band started. During the evening, they had these little tubes near the stage that occasionally shot fire up out of them, yes, fire, in the basement of a club. Doesn't seem real safe to me. They also had confetti dropping from the ceiling occassionally. So not only are there fireballs coming up from the floor, there's confetti falling down from the ceiling, hmmm...seems to me that wouldn't be a good combination. But, nothing happened, just something that I doubt you'd see back home due to fear of lawsuits. The band was interesting - singing a variety of English songs - not very good, I might add - but it was still fun. There was also a movie made by some of the people here in the Taiwan office for the Birthday celebration - they did some skits and then had people in the AMD office and customers of AMD saying Happy Birthday. It was very well done, although we suggested English captions next time for those of us who don't understand Chinese. Anthony was in the movie, saying Happy Birthday in Chinese. I'm so proud :) I got to meet many of the people Anthony mentions, so that was good. We had a fun time, even did some dancing, which I don't think we've done in years. We stayed the entire time, until around 10:30. That's late for us these days!