The Blog

I am sick and tired of spyware! Everyday there’s something new on my system. Google toolbar’s pop up blocker is coming in very handy these days. I’ve been using AdAware and SpyBot to get rid of these annoying things from my system almost daily. I need to rebuild my system.
I seriously need at least 2 other really powerful systems to be complete satisfied with the setup here at home. My current PC is just not sufficient. I am just itching to get a couple of servers and set up a sort of a lab…perhaps one machine with Windows 2000 server and another machine with a Linux server. And to top it all off, I’d love to get my hands on a powerful laptop to remotely connect to and administer my home systems. I guess I am just too greedy. I don’t like to build my own systems. I never have. Maybe I should start now to save money.

I found this to be a bit ironic:

i am from neither here nor there as someone, who shall remain nameless, put it

Normalizing Islam in America

an excerpt:”In general, Native-born American Muslims are more openly accepting of immigrant Muslims and their culture than the latter are of them. Roughly a quarter of the Islamic practices that we have adopted have been culturally based, imported from the Middle East and other Muslims lands, and not textually based. That trend needs to change.”

so true and pisses me off…my parents are from pakistan..but i dont know much about pakistan really…so why should i be chained to their customs, which are many times unislamic, and then be on guard to other pakistanis’ hostility towards my cultural preferences?!

i am busily working on my pieces for the show in february…its fast closing in on me! it seemed so far away before but now 2004 is just around the corner! having a baby around makes life fly by even faster…last year around this time i could barely move, being in my last month of pregnancy!

so my theme will be “COLOUR”…colour of the ordinary, of everyday life, thoughts, events…unnaturalistic colour applied to these ordinary events…the colour that underlies them but is not seen physically.
this is my very first solo show, alhamdulilah…inshaAllah ihope it goes well

i will be listing the paintings for my show on the sidebar as i get them finished, photographed and scanned…

also, i was reading this book called ‘ways of seeing’ which was going pretty good till i lost it in the big blackout last week…i dont know where the hell it went…it was recommended to me by an art prof, and now iguess the library wont see it again…i really need to find it

As good as Bloglines is, I think NewsGator seems to be better. I’m trying it out with my Outlook (as bad as Outlook is – because of its vulnarablity to virii and inability to fix the spam problem – its still my e-mail client of choice). I did have to download the .Net framework for it to work, but it seems to be worth the trouble. I’m still not sure if I want to spend the money to buy NewsGator though, even though its only 30 bucks. I read blogs/news feeds to stay informed. And information should be free. I mean, I’m bomarded by freakin’ ads everywhere I go on the Internet. I’m not cheap, I just think it should be free. Outlook should just come with a strong anti-spam, anti-virus, news/feed reader built into it.
Speaking of ads, I was trying Pop Up Stopperfor the past couple of weeks, but it just didn’t seem to cut it. I had no way to create an exceptions list for pop-ups I wanted to appear. To get that functionality I’d have to buy the professional version. Whatever, I thought. Then I stumbled upon the new Google tool bar for IE. I’m not entirely sure if its new or if its been around a while…but its way cool! It has a built in pop-up stopper. Only propblem: slim as it is, it still takes up quite a bit of space on my IE window. I suppose I could hide it, but I want to see how many pop up windows I killed because it has a counter! I am up to like 200+ popup windows killed since 2 days ago. Not bad, eh? And it doesn’t seem to be bothering me with closing legit pop-ups…even though, it too doesn’t let me specify an exception list. The Google bar also has a form filler (like gator) and a Blog This shortcut for Blogger.com (remember Blogger?). Another cool feature from Google (and this works with the google tool bar) is the calculator function…what a great idea…?! But then, Google does have a lot of other totally cool features.
Eliminate Spam is starting to prove to be pretty useful since I’m not seeing that much spam anymore. It couldn’t be because I don’t get that much spam anymore ’cause that’s just plain impossible. I couldn’t really use any server run apps for filtering spam because I don’t have access to my ISP’s mail server. And I don’t get enough spam on my domain’s e-mail @umairsalam.com to warrant installing anything on the server end myself. Its working fine for now.