i q r a

Greg Allan: March 6, 1973 - June 16, 2002 | Adam_Baum: PostNuke .50 - .714

This morning I upgraded the wordpress software powering this blog to the latest version, and while browsing and bringing myself up to date on wordpress happenings, I came across this ‘books’ plug in module.

Having installed it, I am now seeing how it will fit into Photopia / IQRA.

This being the first Book entry, I am including my own book which I wrote three and a half years ago.

Next, what is expected of me for a review my own book???

;-O

Wednesday night, a couple dozen Torontonians (and an ex-pat Canuck from Ft. Myers, Florida who was avoiding Hurricane Wilma and visiting family), gathered across from the U.S. Consulate in downtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

We held a silent candlelight vigil to mark the 2,000th U.S. Service Personnel death and the 100,000 Iraqi civilians who have died since the war of convenience and occupation of desperation began.

I arrived at a quarter past 5 pm and met Stan, who had learned of the vigil through the afsc website, and thereafter another vigilkeeper who learned of it through the United For Peace and Justice Website.

Stan planned to recite the Hebrew Prayer for The Dead during the vigil.

We began at 5:30 pm and spread our ‘End The Occupation’ banners as well our ‘Toronto Coalition to Stop The War’ banner.

Several passers-by smiled and automobiles honked their horns in support as they drove by.

We then created a giant ‘2000 TOO MANY’ sign on the sidewalk by taping simple cash register lengths of paper into the outlines of the letters .

Alex of TVAC (Toronto Video Activist Collective) filmed much of the vigil for a future feature.

As in the Viet-Nam era, many U.S. War Resisters are finding their way north of the U.S. border and seeking asylum here in Canada. A number of them are in Toronto. We have an active ongoing War Resisters Support Campaign for them, providing legal, housing, and financial/employment assistance.

Canada is complicit in the Occupation of the Iraq by proxy. Canada has ground troops in Afghanistan and police forces in Haiti. Our troops there mean U.S. troops and supply lines are freed up for use in Iraq.

With the passage of time, Afghanistan may grow to become Canada’s own Iraq-like quagmire.

Our Candlelight vigil here in Toronto being outside of the United States, is our way of letting the American People know that your friends to the North have not forgotten about you nor your just fight to end this unjust war and illegal occupation.

Our vigil ended at 6:30 pm, which was was 10 minutes past sunset time, and time for me to open my fast up the street at Masjid Toronto.

I’m glad this vigil came together on such short notice, and am sad that it had to be held at all.

Oddly, I hadn’t realized that today, September 18th is the one year anniversary of this here my very own photoblog. :-O

Though I had posted photos with earlier dates showing, I was backdating them to the day the photo was taken rather than listing the date as when they were posted onto p h o t o p i a.

So, it’s kinda a weird thing that today also ended up being the day of the Toronto Area Photobloggers at Apple Store presentation event I helped organize for tonight at 7 pm.

I am pensive and worrying not too many people will show up and the evening will not run smoothly, Matto hadda pull out at the last minute as something unavoidable popped up.

And I hafta go do the Terry Fox Run right after I blog this.

Very well then, Happy First Birthday to p h o t o p i a , my photoblog.

:-)

9/18/05 T.O. Apple Store Yorkdale Event

I’ve organized a Toronto Area Photobloggers event at the Apple Store in Yorkdale Mall, Sunday September 18th, 7pm. Rannie and I will be presenting along with Matt o’Sullivan, Natalie Brahan, Gayla, Matthew Blackett, and Joey Cuppa.

This event is sponsored by Torontoist and Spacing Magazine and Toronto Area Photobloggers.
With special presentations by photoTO and spacing photos.

Past events in NYC and SF have been smashing successes, help make our local Apple Store event a success by linking to and/or listing the event info on your blog/photoblog then coming out on Sunday evening, Sept. 18th, 7 pm :

Apple Store Toronto - Yorkdale
3401 Dufferin Street, Toronto, ON M6A 3A1
map | directions

www.Photopia.TYO.ca/applestore

(Please RSVP in the comments below)

I leaving, not on a jet plane, and I hope to be back, back again…again.

I’ll try to post pics on during my trip back, though I doubt I’ll be able to update until I reach Toronto and rest a bit, so, the Weekend then.

In the meantime, meet a girl named Leroy, a going away gift from Zach of http://www.ThingsISaw.com during my San Francisco going away party yesterday.

:-)

Failure.

This panoramic stitching of three photographs shows the original intended width of the Giant Peace Symbol I began, yet failed to complete, upon the Marin Headlands, just north and west of the Golden Gate Bridge.

All the conditions finally were in place, a full day’s worth of fog would keep the GGNRA Rangers from stopping me in mid-Outstallation, it was not raining though it had been, hence the earth was soft enough for the pegs which would hold the pieces of paper in place to stay in position, I found the exact right spot to place the giant peace symbol, which would be visible from San Francisco right beside vistas of the Golden Gate Bridge. Everything was in place except one thing.

Me.

I was exhausted, numb, fed up with the overachieving Pacific winds, moist almost to the bone from the dampness of the fog. For the first time in my life as an Artist, I walked away. I couldn’t finish what I started.

This is what failure looks like.

THIS is what success looks like.

…and is what ‘failure‘ was supposed to look like…except instead of on the hill side beside Toronto’s second busiest highway, ‘failure’ had it not been, would [sic] be right beside hwy 101, beside the Golden Gate Bridge…

failure.

:-/

EBPB - East Bay PhotoBloggers Photostroll
Bay Area Psychogeography Walk

Thursday July 7, 2005
6:30 pm
Meet at North East corner of 4th and University
Berkeley, California
Take # 51 Bus from Downtown Berkeley BART Station

http://www.Photopia.TYO.ca/ebpb

He Beat It. He Beat It. He Beat It. He Beat It. He Beat It. He Beat It. He Beat It. He Beat It. He Beat It. He Beat It.

Andre White, drove down to Santa Maria, unhinged the licence plate from his car, looped it around his neck and garnered the first 4 seconds of his fifteen minutes of fame courtesy of CourtTV (tv image capture courtesy of Philly based Dave’s life like weeds blog).

I met Andre at an ARCO station in Fremont, California as we both were filling up back in January. He was happy to allow me to snap photos of his car and ‘MICL JXN‘ front plate upclose. He smiled the entire time.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, aka my ‘puter, I was without internet access, again, [begin Homer Simpson voice] lousy comcast [/end Homer Simpson voice], hence I wasn’t able to post these photos at the very instant the verdict was read aloud as I had intended to since snapping these shots back in January [/end run-on-sentence a la Homer Simpson].

Here’s another view posted on flickr:

I found Dave’s lifelikeweeds blog in Philly after googling ‘MICL JXN’ et voila, blog ping pong at its finest: my very own four seconds of fame.

Strange how this photoblog has seamlessly weaved its way beyond anything I thought, anything I expected. Now it has become a recepticle for this, my thing, I am doing, in need of doing.

Wednesday I dreamed I was home in Toronto, I saw people waiting in a line, at a bank waiting to donate money. But I was then I wasn’t in the line. A close friend of mine and I walked away and figured out a different need existed. Then the dream gets fuzzy, then her and I part ways having figure out our own way of donating to the catastrophe in South Asia.

A few moments ago, I updated Photopia with an art outstallation I created earlier this year in Toronto. . I ain’t sure how to word the caption. I’ll improve it later, hopefully.

I am leaning towards wordpress over postnuke to run the Global Vigil site…perhaps I will leave it as is and have people keep emailing globalvigil@gmail.com which I just set up to let me know of their local vigils…

It is just 11 pm Pacific here in California. I miss Toronto. I miss my activist friends in person. Oh God-Alone willing I hope this works out, for the honest sincere reasons and not some self-serving crap.

I now have much less time than I did this morning, and I have yet to do the heavy lifting of indymedia-ing, Press Releases, figuring out how to blogroll this…Gonna be an intense 96 hours.

I need a quick break, stay away from the ‘puter, recollect myself.
then it’s all Let’s go…

UPDATE: The GlobalVigil site has been live now since the early morning. I’m emailing, but not enough, getting a trickle of emails back… I gotta work smarter with the remaining time, Sunday afternoon will arrive faster that I can imagine…I feel a satisfaction that maybe just maybe, this ‘Global Vigil’ will take on a life of its own and well…back to work.

I’ve had sitting on my hard drive three recordings of Gabriel performing in quicktime format. They were taken the same time the accompanying photo was taken.

I debated how exactly to include his music onto photopia, and finally decided on embedding a looping 7 second record within the photo’s caption. I feel satisfied now. Something was missing as I first uploaded Gabriel’s photo. Having stretched myself to stretch my photoblog with audio and video, I feel satisfied nothing more is missing from photopia’s last entry for 2004.

Click Gabriel plays 8 days a week and treat your ears.

How To Speed Up Firefox on Broadband

Posted on 12/12/2004 12:45:50 PM PST by KoRn

Here’s something for broadband people that will really speed Firefox up:

1. Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return.

Scroll down and look for the following entries:

network.http.pipelining
network.http.proxy.pipelining
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.

2. By doubleclicking on each, alter the entries as follows:

Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”

Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”

Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to 8.

This means it will make 8 requests at once.

3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer.

Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0″.

This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.

If you’re using a broadband connection you’ll load pages MUCH faster now!

Finally stayed on my ass, sat in front of the ‘puter, and ‘upgraded’ to Folderblog v 2.02.

Why so long? I dunno. fear of…success?

I thought almost everything was running fine with the fb 2.0 preview version, except for those tiny annoyances that fb v 2.02 resolved with respect to its preview version, which has powered p h o t o p i a til a few minutes ago, when I finally uploaded the version 2.02 files.

I needed to upload something to see if the minor aches and pains had gone away, hence the two rather unremarkable water fountain pictures played guinea pig today.

For me, no more minor annoyances.

For visitors, ‘cept for the teeny tiny itsy bitsy weblink in the bottom right corner to this here new Iqra ‘photo’blog, p h o t o p i a looks the same as before.

Bismillah…

Originally an inkling for a spot to discuss phototaking, that inkling has grown into a necessity to accumulate everything photo-related into one spot for easy self-referencing later. Somehow, photo(b)logging doesn’t fit into the rest of my life’s work. Hence this ‘photo’blog… I trust the Heisenberg Principle was waiting for me to say that, so it can make its appearance. Lessee where this goes, shall we?

Delay of game penalty on me for not creating a place to enhance my photo(b)log, P h o t o p i a, in the first place.

“Iqra” is Arabic for “read,” by the way. I coulda come up with something better. Nyahhhh. HiMY lazy. P h o t o p i a now has its own blog. Outtasight!