So how can you help? Attend one of the four “327″ drives happening in Vancouver and Toronto on Saturday, March 27 between 11am & 5pm. Don’t live in one of these cities or can’t make it that day? No problem, you can do it online as well here. What does registering involve? Hardly anything, just a bit of your time and a few of your cheek cells. If you attend the drive, you’ll fill out some forms and they’ll take a cotton swab of your cheeks to register your DNA. If you do it at home online, you’ll fill out the forms online, you’ll get a cheek swabbing kit a few weeks later, you swab your cheeks, and send it back to them. And that’s that, you’re registered!

So what are you waiting for? Go next Saturday or do it online! I did it a few years ago and it was very easy. And you don’t have to be Chinese (there’s just a shortage of Chinese registrants), they don’t discriminate. If that’s not enough to get you to register, I’ve provided a list of 4 reasons why you should register:

• You could potentially save a life. How often can you say you’ve taken the first steps to potentially saving somebody’s life? Unless you work in medicine, are a police officer, fireperson, or paramedic, likely not often. So here’s your chance to be as close to a superhero as possible. You could also find a genetically modified spider to bite you, but that’s a lot harder than attending this drive.
• All the cool people are doing it. I’ve done it already, one of the coolest people ever. But if that’s not enough, Patrick Chan (you know, Canada’s reigning men’s figure skating champion?) is endorsing this too. Now, don’t you want to be like Patrick Chan and I?
• You could get a ride my new car. There’s 1 location in Vancouver and 3 locations in Toronto that this drive is being held at. For those of you in the GTA and can’t get to one of the 3 locations, I’m willing to drive you there in my new car! So no excuses of “I can’t get there.” Plus who wouldn’t want to get a chauffeured by yours truly?
• Because you can. Too many times in our lives, we don’t do things, even things that benefit others, because we can’t. We don’t have the time. We don’t have the money. We don’t have the resources. Well, this is something you can do. It’ll just take a fraction of your time but the potential benefits for others are enormous. None of the other reasons really matter except this one. Do it because you can.

Now I finally have someplace to share all my photos! Alas, the free photo services just didn’t cut it for me. Either having limited disk quotas or limited resolutions, none of the free services on the web were up to my liking. With the freedom I have now with no space or bandwidth limitations, I’m free to share as many and as large of photos as I want! Only thing is, I need find a good photo management system or make one myself first (which is highly unlikely). So, hopefully in the coming weeks and months, I’ll slowly get my photo collection online to share with the world.

Feel free to comment and suggest anything for my website!

Communication. Things like facebook and MSN messenger are great. You’re able to communicate with people around the world. Distance is no longer an obstacle. Don’t forget about e-mail and blogs as well. Simply awesome. I’ll admit, I hated facebook when it first came out. I joined initially because a friend told me it was great. Truth be told, it sucked when I first joined. There were only 3 Canadian universities on facebook when I first joined and no features. Except poking, the most useless facebook function ever. No photos, no videos, no cool apps. It was basically an online popularity contest. But I have to admit, over time, facebook has become an excellent communication tool. Catch with old friends you haven’t seen in years, plan events and parties easily, share your pictures and videos with friends effortlessly. Good stuff.

Purchases. Get anything and everything from the internet. No longer are you bound to buying what’s close by. If you can find it on the net, you can buy. How very convenient! I especially love buying a lot of my music online now through iTunes. I’ll still buy CDs whenever I find a good deal, but iTunes is great. Not only is it cheaper, but often times, if I pre-order, I get bonus tracks that aren’t released on the CDs. Sweet!

Entertainment. With sites like youtube, how can you go wrong for entertaining yourself. Who know how many countless hours I’ve spent watching stuff on there. I love it. Not only can you entertain yourself, but you can also discover new things. One thing I never thought I’d use the internet for is discovering new music talents. I’ve always found out about new artists through the radio and friends. But now I’m discovering cool artists by just browsing the net. My personal favourite right now is Jennifer Chung. A sweet girl from Cali with an amazing voice and songwriting skills to match. Here’s my favourite song of hers:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zar6Lx9-Riw]

Speaking of entertainment, check out Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Joss Whedon + Neil Patrick Harris + comedy + musical = awesomeness. Seriously, check it out, you won’t be disappointed.

Now, unfortunately, it isn’t all good. With all this freedom opened up with the internet, it’s also given voices to people who frankly shouldn’t be talking. Hate groups and hate websites are unfortunately on the net. So are disgusting things like child pornography. I’m pretty sure this stuff only makes up a very small sliver of the internet, but it still saddens/angers me that people would put stuff up like that.

Back to the good stuff. There are many more communication tools that I haven’t mentioned, but there is one I’d like to highlight before I end this post: twitter. For those of you don’t know what twitter is, it’s basically a tool where you can post short messages about what you’re doing at that moment. Friends can subscribe to your feed and be in the know about your doings. It’s suppose to let people know what you’re doing in between blog posts. Now I’ve received a few invites for this over the last few months, but I’m still skeptical, seems like it’s a pretty thin line between twittering and stalking. Do I really want people knowing what I do on a hourly basis? Do I want to know what others are doing on an hourly basis? I just don’t know. What do you think?

So, two things: my online presence is back, and there’ll be some minor changes. This blog will be a little less random. No more “Today I…” or “I did this today…”. Each entry will have some substance, even if it’s not huge. It’s not that my blog’s been totally random, I think I’ve contributed a few worthwhile reads, but some entries have been pretty useless. So, no more of those. Plus, no more of “it’s been a while…” (this entry will be the last time I ever say anything remotely like that, I promise).

Why this change? Well, I guess it comes down to the title of my blog: “none live for themselves” This isn’t a blog to just serve myself and act as a record of my doings, but hopefully it somehow benefits you, the reader, in some small way. Whether you laugh or smile because of something written here or you think longer about a certain subject or (by some small chance) you learn something new, I hope these pages of my ramblings in cyberspace won’t just be another way for you to waste your time, but it actually adds a bit of substance to your life, no matter how tiny.

So stay tuned for something more…

—————————

preview to my next entry:

“If at the end of the day, there’s someone out there who
has a better day because of us…
then we’ve succeeded.”

bonus points to those who can guess what it’s about!

His name was “Joff” I believe and he was a very playful dog. He belonged to the lady that rented out our canoes this afternoon at Green Lake and it was so much fun playing fetch with him before heading out on our canoes. Even after we went out on the lake and river, he followed us along the banks and even got in the water a few times to chase some ducks. It was so fun watching him. Unfortunately, as we passed under a bridge on the river, he ran out onto the highway and was struck by a car.

So this is for you Joff. I’m sure you brought lots of joy to everyone like you did to me today. Though you will probably never read this, my deepest condolances to you, his owner.