How was everyone’s Christmas? Mine was insanely hectic as usual. Everything from the typical multiple family dinners and events, to winter break camp with work. Thankfully I only had to work the first two days of the winter break, and luckily I ended working on fieldtrip days. My my last day I was one of the drivers and I got to go to the movies with the children. It was great. I watched A Christmas Carol. It was a good movie, especially since I got paid to watch it.

Then from there was a whole slew of various family dinners. Christmas eve was again another eventful evening of running around. We headed to my Aunties house for dinner, only to find out she put everything in a little to late and everyone ended up eating at nearly 10pm – though there was an endless supply of appetizers and mini meatballs. Bryan and I had to leave at 9 to move on to our next holiday gathering at his Aunt and Uncles house. Only to arrive there and there was more appetizers to be had. – One of these years we will make it somewhere and actually have a nice dinner on Christmas eve.

Christmas day was great – went to my mom’s place did the whole present opening thing and had breakfast there too, then we headed back home to our place and did our own present opening adventures. That night we did more presents and had the traditional turkey dinner at Bryan’s mom’s place. It was great.

We will be leaving tomorrow night, or perhaps tomorrow morning for Green Lake for New Years eve. A friend of ours has a cabin there and we go and do some snowmobiling and partying it up. This year however there will be no heat in the cabin, as there was a situation last year and it has not been repaired yet. I did however buy myself some amazingly warm long underwear. – I shall be toasty warm. As it gets to be negative 30 at night sometimes, but this year the weather network is saying that it will be warmer than last year at an average of -12 at night.

I am looking forward to using my new Kodak Zx1 and getting some great video clips of our adventures. Keep posted and I’ll be back in the 2010! Happy New Year Everyone!

I Love you Daddy and I will always miss you. R.I.P.

October 15, 1949 – December 24th, 2001

You will be missed always.

I am just making a quick blog entry to make note of the unusual happenings that have occurred tonight…

I was out to dinner with the ladies of my family – and I went to access facebook (using m.facebook.com) on my cell phone (Nokia 5130) so I could send my cousin who had to leave the dinner early a quick message. I went to post something on her wall, so I went to bring up her profile – I went to serach friends – typed in her last name (as it is shorter than her first name) and pressed “search” the results that came up were not of my list of frirends. I pressed the home link and it brought me face to face with someone elses profile. All I can recall is that the user’s name was David F. (??) I had full access to their profile. I refreshed the page a few times and it was the same thing. I then decided to update the status – as I wanted to know how much access I really had to this unknown David’s profile. I managed to successfully update their profile status to “???” it was not a big message, but I did get conformation of the status update on the page – and I was able to fresh the page once again (by clicking on “profile”) and the status update there – I then closed my phone and put it away, as I was in the middle of dinner with my mom, aunt and grandma – this left me feeling a little dazed and confused.

Once I was on my way home about 45min later, I quickly sent out a phone call to my celluar provider – to see if they could give me the URL that I had accessed to the profile that I had seen as there is nothing kept on record on my cell phone. The guy in technical support informed me that they keep no record either, and that he had told me that he had something similar happen to him using his computer – and that he had some “fun” with that person’s profile – anyways long story short – the guy I spoke with was little to no help, but left me a little confused and frustrated with facebook’s security and privacy information.

Fast forward 20min after I got off the phone with the Rogers Tech Support guy. I am messing around with my cell phone again as I was wanting to tweet (using m.twitter.com) about my unusual happenings with facebook. It would not connect to the server to send my tweet so I scrolled down the page to bring up the option menu. I noticed that the feed had nobody that I knew on it. It was not my twitter feed. Once I got to the bottom of the page I saw that I had option to view the @ of a totally different user! – I had made a mental note of a few of the names on the twitter feed and tried to remember the user’s name that I had seen on the bottom of the mobile browser page. After a little bit of sleuthing I found the twitter user and sent them a message on twitter – hopefully they may have a similar story to share.

I swear to all of you I have not been drinking tonight – I am completely baffled by all of this. The only thing that these two events have in common is the fact that I had accessed both of these websites from my Rogers Wireless Nokia 5130. I am worried that someone out there has the ability to perhaps by chance accident have access to my accounts. – This is very unsettling.

I have always been involved in wanting to better my community, and the world since I was little. I take great pride in my roles and charity events that I attend and participate in. Though I am always wanting to do a little more. Since it is the season of giving, I have been really starting to think about the world around me a little more closely. At work for example I am trying to organize a food drive for the Richmond Food Bank, and last summer I participated in Paddle for Kids and helped raise money for the BC Childrens Hospital where I was able to raise $350. As I continue to grow I will always want to volunteer within my community, and make myself a better person.

On the global issues I am an advocate for our oceans and global warming, I would love to volunteer for a few months on the M/Y Steve Irwin with The Sea Shepard .

The other day in the grocery store I saw this book – “How to Be an Everyday Philanthropist: 289 No-Cost Ways to Live a Generous Life” it had a wide range of great ideas, I wish I had picked it up but of course being low on funds I will probably just support my local library and find it there.

What are somethings that you do to help out and contribute to your community? Do you do anything daily?