yes, i'm talking to you. unless you've been living under a rock for the past few days, you've doubtless heard that a tsunami washed away the lives of about 65,000 people. it's not likely to get any better anytime soon, since they're still not finished counting the bodies and diseases like typhoid tend to flourish in disasters like this one.

...and so i'm asking you to donate to the red cross, red crescent or some other humanitarian group that's out there on the front lines. if you can't help out yourself, the least you can do is contribute your lunch money. how much? well that's up to you, but i suggest that you should donate just enough, so that it hurts a little. and when you're thinking about that number, remember that noreen just donated $25 and she doesn't have 2cents to rub together. for my part, i'm putting in 50€.

link to The Canadian Red Cross.
link to The International Red Cross and Red Crescent.

but please remember that you don't donate to make yourself feel better. you donate because you know it's what you'd hope others would do if the positions were reversed.

i feel terrible.

i've felt this way for about 3 months now, though i'm not sure on the accuracy of that figure. the cool thing about blogging is that you can go back into your own history and check over stuff. the bad thing is that you can lie about how you feel or just choose not to write about whatever is really getting at you -- sometimes though, you don't even know what it is.

but no, i don't feel good at all. and i'm pretty sure it's not a physical health thing. sure, i generally have low energy, but i'm thinking that has more to do with diet and lack of sleep than anything else. i'm not sick, i'm just sad, or feeling pointless... whatever the propper terminology is, i don't feel obligated to look it up just now.

i have a theory about it though. it might be related to tv. i stopped watching it. and when you stop watching tv, your life sorta falls apart -- fragmenting into little pieces of confused lack of direction. normally, whenever you feel like that, the instinct is to turn on the tv, or (gods forbid) look in the fridge to see what you can do with yourself. some days, when i have some real energy to play with, i'll clean up around the house or get started on a web project or two, but mostly, i'm lacking any energy and all i want to do is... nothing.

now i'm not about to go out and start paying for that crap they call entertainment again. hell they gave it to me for two months free and i still don't watch it. but i do feel like there's something seriously lacking for me out here. and i find that i'm constantly fighting off urges to fill that lacking with purchased goodies... like that'll somehow make me feel better. 'course it never does, but for some reason, i seem to forget that an awful lot.

i think i miss something very important to me. but i'm not sure if it's direction, clean air, friends, family or all of the above, but i know it's been missing for a very, very long time. possibly from as far back as before i left vancouver. and if that's the case, i hope i find it soon... before i run out of cash or find myself drowning in even more shit i don't need.

well let's hope it's not "gone" -- since it's likely that it's somehow rematerialised now that you're reading it, but at this moment, all domainsite.com domains seem to be dead. see, i use domainsite's dns servers for the resolution of my domain (*.danielquinn.org) and it would appear that they've ALL gone down. not sure why. but this is bad. very bad. so bad in fact it's not supposed to happen -- ever. wtf? looks like i need to have a dns server somewhere else to act as a backup if the guys @domainsite go down again... have i mentioned that this isn't supposed to happen... ever? wtf?

it occurred to me this weekend that this blog is already more than a year old. my first post went out on the 18th of december, 2003. what's more, i just recently passed the 300posts mark. both of these were missed mainly due to the craziness surrounding the holidays, so i thought i'd do a special statistical thingy now. so, without further ado...

total blog posts so far	304
comments so far	631
days active	376
total hits since [16/Jul/2004:09:54:56 -0400]	23051
total referers	1123
some google searches that ended up here	- martin luther king arc of moral universe mp3 - "She's a liar, and no good will come of her" - liberti fatali - "Tommy Douglas" paid vacation - redalert 2 wine can't install - Grandville island brewing logo - animation fairyfly - nchertok - Councillor Rob Ford yelling and Lindsay luby ward work - mac editor "mac kills my inner child" - shayne koyczan Zed - "randy white" blogs - "emily-jane" tao home - "MURRAYVILLE PUB" - pictures of shiz su puppies - "a village in texas is missing" t-shirt - angela's hopeless romantic website - "mother, can i trust the government" - "Okay, everybody else not talking about sex, in here. Everyone else, out there" firefly - Clair Love & the Sweethearts toronto - "Mayor David Miller" December 2004 blogs
lines of code required for the blogger	11996
files required for the blogger	687

you'll notice that the "total hits since" counter only starts in july. i did some mangling of the logs back then [geek] mofed from stanadard to combined. to capture the referrer so i could see who's linking to me and how well i'm getting ranked on google.

happy christmas everyone. hope you're enjoying your day and spending it with family & friends when you can. i have a bunch of calls home i have to make today, but since it's 9am over there, i figure i'll do some blogging first.

i had a pretty cool christmas eve. turns out that two of my neighbours know each other quite well and since we've chatted each other up separately on a few occasions, they invited me to a quiet party they were throwing in christine's apartment. it wasn't the usual christmas eve for me, there was no family, no mass dinner, but it still was really nice. we talked a whole lot about everything from work to politics, to relationships and then pavel showed up and we talked some more... 'till 2am. my neighbours are cool people -- and interesting to talk to. it all just made the holiday that much more pleasant.

today, pavel & emily have invited me out to his place for a feast of some sort. knowing pavel, there's likely to be lots of meat and wine involved. have i mentioned how great it is to have russian friends? like my grandparents, they love to host parties and foodings, and this guy can really cook. i just hope he likes the gift i got him.

so to the lot of you who happen to be burning time on the internet today instead of spending it with friends and family, to you i say: happy christmas, now get the hell off the computer and call your mother. ;-) and to my friends and family who i can't be with because of the 4349.9 kilometres between us: "i miss you".

so yeah, as the title says, i'm late for work, but i just had to post this picture i just took:

i also have this nifty link from my buddy colin @work. it's a very special book on sale @wallmart possibly written by a distant cousin of mine. and let me just say that it's nice to know that there's other quinn's out there fighting the good fight.

well i don't know about you, but i've been coding for the past few hours, trying to get this new layout out and finish the massive rewrite behind the scenes. so for the non-geek: behold! new shiny blog layout! and with the new backend, i'll be able to give the site a face lift far more often!

for the geekery-inclined though, here's what happened. i dropped fusebox in favour of a system i wrote myself that works a lot like it, but better. why better you ask? 'cause i've integrated smarty into the mix. it's a templating engine that lets me separate design from code, so facelifts become less of a chore, and it's also a caching engine! so the site might even move faster now.

unfortunately, there's something weird in this very page that's causing my cpu to max out while i type in the box. might just be a quirk, but you never know... i'll find out sooner or later. speaking of which, problems/questions about why something looks broken etc are greatly appreciated. i sorta pushed these last updates out faster than i would have liked, so there's bound to be bumps.

but now is not the time for such things. now is the time for sleep. and so i'm off.

it's only wednesday and i'm already overworked. not so much @work, as everywhere else though, and i STILL haven't gotten anything for pavel yet (tomorrow... has to be tomorrow...) i've also been hard at work re-fitting my blog with some new code, but i'll leave the details of that for a geekier entry when it's all done. it is however the thing that's holding up the new winter theme. but given that i get 4 days off over christmas, i'm sure i'll have time to do it and possibly lara's thing as well. hope you all are enjoying (or is it enduring?) your holidays, i'll blog more soon... like in a day or two.

o dear gods it's cold. -22C outside right now. it's the kind of cold that makes your nose stick to itself when you breathe in. with the windchill, the temperature drops to -33C -- so bad that a quick trip to the corner has me shivering and frozen. at the moment, only ottawa and thunder bay have us beat with -23 and -24 respectively... what happened? i thought toronto had that nifty smog layer protecting us from the evils of ontarian winter. noreen says i should blame it on the treehuggers... damn them! o wait. that's me ;-)

i blew a couple hours tonight trying to make my new layout for lara's blog work and i've officially gone back to tables. with issues ranging from sporadic browser support (even now, 2years after xhtml's invention) to ridiculous gaps in the initial design spec like not bothering with the ability to position an element relative to the right side of another element, i found myself hacking at it just to make it work... sort of. if i wanted this, i'd stick with tables. i guess i will.