For the record,

Today, June 10 2010, someone using the name “Me” has been doing the rounds and posting the following comment on various Toronto area websites:

Me // June 10, 2010 at 12:25 pm | Reply

I find the inclusion of the very fringe mayoral candidate Himy Syed laughable.

This http://himysyed.tyo.ca/about/islamic-banker/ is the link to this self-professed Islamic banker, but not a banker under Canadian Law.

Or how about his advice http://groups.google.ca/group/can.general/browse_thread/thread/29f25bda5a40e928/c03c054074e4eb4?q=immigration+canada+%22how+to+get%22+OR+%22getting+into%22+abuse on how to Get Into Canada a guide to abusing Canada’s immigration system?

Nobody in their right minds would believe this clearly corrupt candidate!

The comments attributed in my name in the middle of the 1990s on usenet and now archived on google groups (which is referenced & linked to above by an anonymous commenter) are not my comments, nor are their contents even remotely similar to anything I would state.

They were posted by a someone from my high school days who during their time at Ryerson decided to use my name instead of their own to place such comments.

ALL comments on usenet groups in the 1990s in my name were placed by someone else.

That person has since apologized to myself for his 90s version of identity theft and google being google, neither of us are able to remove those archived comments.

Thank You.

HiMY SYeD

Who will have the best social media strategy for the November 2010 Toronto municipal election? Mayoral candidate George Smitherman is laying low until spring; Rocco Rossi can’t decide whether to tweet under his partisan @liberalrocco handle or go for @roccothevoteTO; Giorgio Mammoliti promises a “no-nonsense campaign” that probably has no role for a Twitter consultant.

Back when nobody was heeding much attention to these details, though, compulsively chronicling the 2006 vote via Web 2.0 was Himy Syed — who planted himself on the ballot of central-west downtown Ward 19 to watch the process from the inside.

This morning, he tried being first to file candidate papers at City Hall for another run to replace Councillor Joe Pantalone as deputy mayor, but was beaten to the punch by Councillor John Parker, just ahead of Councillor Howard Moscoe.

First candidate for 2010 Toronto municipal election: @HiMYSYeD, Ward 19

Making a bigger show of his registration is school trustee Josh Matlow, seeking to fill a vacant council chair in midtown — and inviting reporters to a scrum after submitting his paperwork.

Syed plans to explain his ecological vision at the foot the Windshare Windmill at Exhibition Place on Wednesday at 10 a.m., expecting restless reporters assigned to the election beat to turn out.

Otherwise, he’ll just cover it himself.

Himy Syed waits to light a candle for Jane Creba during a vigil he organized for victims of gun violence in Toronto, Monday January 2, 2006. Hundreds of people turned out for the vigil for Jane Creba, the 15-year-old girl gunned down in a brazen Boxing Day shootout on Toronto's Yonge Street.

By Anthony Reinhart
The Globe and Mail

Before he headed out to the Boxing Day sales on Yonge Street in 2005, Jeremiah Valentine ignored previous court orders and slipped a familiar item into his pocket: a fully loaded, snub-nosed .357 magnum revolver.

Because of that one decision, a 15-year-old girl named Jane Creba was killed, six more people were wounded and Canada’s largest city was plunged into a long bout of grief and rage over gun violence run amok.

On Monday, the 27-year-old Mr. Valentine stood in a downtown courtroom a scant six blocks from the scene of his crime and took responsibility for it. He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in Jane’s death and received an automatic sentence of life imprisonment. He can apply for parole in 12 years.

Asked by Mr. Justice John McMahon if he had anything else to say, Mr. Valentine replied, “No, your honour.”

Judge McMahon, however, had much to say about the “indiscriminate firing” that followed what court heard was a robbery attempt on Mr. Valentine as he shopped for shoes in a Foot Locker store. Two males approached him in the store, revealed handguns under their shirts and demanded the chain around his neck, defence lawyer Edward Sapiano said.

Mr. Valentine rebuffed them and the two went outside, where they waited and stared through the store window at him and his friend, Milan Mijatovic. Rather than wait them out in the safety of the store, the armed Mr. Valentine and his friend chose to go outside.

“As he left the store, Mr. Valentine held his gun in his hand, up his sleeve, so that only a part of the barrel could be seen,” Crown prosecutor Maurice Gillezeau read from a statement of facts agreed upon with Mr. Sapiano. Outside, a large group of men waited to the north of Foot Locker. Mr. Valentine recognized one and called him over to ask what was the problem.

“Are these your boys?” Mr. Valentine asked, “ ’cause these are my boys. And I have a .357.”

He waved his gun in the air, and when members of the other group drew their guns, Mr. Valentine fired on them. They returned fire, and within less than a minute, Jane, caught in the crossfire, lay dying from a single shot to the back. It had pierced her aorta.

As the young men all fled, Jane was rushed to a trauma room at St. Michael’s Hospital, where a blood-stained bullet fell to the floor from her gurney. Forensic tests were inconclusive, but suggested the slug “very likely” came from Mr. Valentine’s weapon, which was never recovered.

Judge McMahon said that while Mr. Valentine did not intend to kill Jane, his “callous disregard” in carrying a gun into a crowd of holiday shoppers snuffed out the life of a girl whose “only mistake was to believe she could go on a family shopping trip on Boxing Day” in safety. Her death, the judge said, “has irreparably damaged Ms. Creba’s family.”

. . . Click Here to read the complete article .

They haven’t been able to sell the Metro Theatre , after a decade or so of trying, so why not spruce up the sign?

Torontopedia curator HiMY SYeD — who used the boutique area at the front of the 677 Bloor West building as his campaign office during a 2006 run for city council — snapped a TwitPic of restoration efforts atop the bijou once known for its “hot-hot -HOTline” where a sultry-sounding woman could hardly catch her breath whilst listing the titles of the latest XXX triple-bill.

These days — well, a charmingly naive female-written review of the premises on BlogTO this summer was followed in short order by an online NOW piece explaining that the old men shuffling around in their seats probably weren’t interested in her .

New York had a vacant Art Deco cinema called the Metro that is now an Urban Outfitters .

Locally, gentrification has a few blocks left to go before it reaches Koreatown .

Even before the city has announced locations of temporary dump sites, residents are threatening to boycott and set up pickets at the dump sites.

Christie Pits residents told the Sun that if the park is made into a temporary dump site, as is expected to be announced this afternoon, they’ll do whatever they can legally to keep the Pits from filling up with garbage.

"I think it’s a reasonable thing to voice our opposition in every possible legal way," resident Boris Steipe said. "If CUPE can picket transfer stations, I think we can picket here."

Temporary blue fencing has already been set up around the park’s outdoor hockey rink, a tell-tale sign of one of the coming garbage drop off locations that have sprung up across the city overnight.

Friends of Christie Pits say the decision stinks, especially after watching the 2002 strike ruin the park with piles of garbage from the 16-day city strike .

Group member Himy Syed started [promoting] a petition earlier this week to urge city council that parks should not be used as dumps . That petition garnered hundreds of signatures and received support from residents living around other parks in the city. The initial protest prompted a city cleanup of garbage left in the park from the weekend and illegal dumping on Day 1 of the strike .

Now the group is livid that, despite assurances to the contrary from local Councillor Joe Pantalone ’s staff, they’ll have to contend with piles of the stinky stuff.

Earlier this week in an e-mail to the group, Pantalone ’s staff assured them the park was not a dump.

"Christie Pits, nor any park, will not be used as a garbage dump," the e-mail stated. "Thank you for taking the time to write and for all the work you, and the friends do, with Christie Pits."

Christie Pits isn’t the only park site that has residents fuming.

Green 13 , a community green group, expressed their outrage the city plans to dump trash on the waterfront in Sunnyside Park .

“At a time of great economic uncertainty, with many city services currently unavailable, we need our great public parks more than ever”, Green 13 chairman Christopher Holcroft stated in a release today. “Particularly at Sunnyside, enjoyed by so many Torontonians every day coming to cool off by the lake, marvel at the tremendous view or take a stroll or bike ride along the boardwalk, the presence of a garbage dump is unimaginable.”

The group urged the city to encourage residents to create less waste and use home composters and have smaller dumping stations in city owned parking lots.

TORONTO, ONTARIO, CANADA — On the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, we can remind ourselves of the saying from an era before that event which was a "New Beginning" between Mao’s China, the United States, and the rest of the world: "Only Nixon could go to China".

Twenty years from today in 2029, on the 40th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, we will look back and say, "Only Obama could go to Cairo "; "Only Obama could go to Egypt ".

- He was channelling the oratory of another African American, Malcolm X / Malik El-Shabazz, even following his footsteps by first going to Saudi Arabia then to Egypt.

- As a Canadian, no mention nor nuance hint about Guantanamo and Canadian Citizen Omar Khadr being held there nor the Uighur being held there.

- On anniversary of Tiananmen Massacre, I was still expecting some Obama-esque charming indictment of that, especially when he talks of democracy in the Arab World, well, Mainland China is still waiting. But then again, China holds so much US debt that perhaps no American President will ever again be able to speak on this issue.

- As a pioneer and practioner in the Islamic Banking Industry, I have spoken with officials in NYC with the Treasury Department, literally a few days after Lehman Brothers collapsed, they admitted as much that had the US home financing market been based on Islamic Mortgages, and Islamic Financing ethics and contracts, the current U.S. economic crisis would be much less of a catastrophe than it is now.

- Dubai has collapsed and all the money and dealmaking has quietly returned to Saudi Arabia, Obama could have caused a great infusion of cash into the US economy by mentioning Islamic Finance and Islamic Banking, or a long term JFK-like Man on the Moon like vision, by aiming for a "dual-banking system", conventional and Islamic, or as the British call it, conventional and ‘alternative’ which is their euphemism for all things "Islamic" without using the word shariah.

The Cairo Speech could have reached into history to remind us all that the english word "Cheque" comes from the arabic word "Sakk" and it was the Ottomans who most recently impacted the U.S. in forming their republic as the U.S. founding fathers looked not to Ancient Rome, but rather to Istanbul (née Islambul nee Constantinople) as a blueprint for government and administration.

Had Obama even said "Islamic Finance" once, he could have caused in my words a net in-flow of "Shariah Compliant Capital Flight" into U.S. Money centre banks and markets.

He did not.

HiMY SYeD
June 4, 2009

ctvtoronto.ca

Toronto Fire crews battled a fire near Bloor Street West and Ossington Avenue. A spokesperson says the blaze isn’t officially under control, but has been beaten down.

"I imagine they’re still going through some smaller locations in the building and knocking down any further fires," Capt. Adrian Ratushniak told ctvtoronto.ca on Friday around suppertime.

He said that the fire’s address is being reported as 804 Bloor St. W .

View larger image

Firefighters ascend to the roof of the Bloor Street blaze on Friday, April 10, 2009. (Himy Syed /Special to ctvtoronto.ca)

However, eyewitness Himy Syed told ctvtoronto.ca that the blaze also affected 806 Bloor St. W.

He described the location as being just west of Crawford Street on the north side of Bloor, a location just west of Christie Pits Park.

Syed had been returning to his Shaw Street home from taking photos at the annual Good Friday Way of the Cross procession in Little Italy , "when boom — three-alarm blaze."

Ladder trucks were dousing 804 and 806, which house an Ethiopian restaurant and a small radio repair store, along with residential units on the second and third floors, he said.

Syed said he saw firefighters toss a microwave oven out of the restaurant.

He described the second and third floors as "all gone."

About 20 to 30 people were gathered on the street. A few were crying and some held a few bagfuls of belongings, he said.

"It looked to me like they just grabbed whatever the hell they could" and then gathered on the south side of Bloor to watch the blaze, Syed said.

The 804 building appeared to suffer the worst damage, he said, adding, "it’s a real big mess."

Ratushniak said there are no reports of any injuries.

"We arrived to find flames visible and thick black smoke," he said, adding it got bumped up to a third-alarm fire .

Web Links

• Twitter – HiMY SYeD
  
• Flickr – HiMY SYeD’s photos of fire at 804 Bloor St. W.
• Torontopia – HiMY SYeD video of fire at 804 Bloor St. W.

Special to Globe and Mail

December 20, 2008

When Torontoist announced it was going dark , a catfight broke out over the domain name Torontoest. One group , started by Torontoist contributing editor Jonathan Goldsbie on Facebook , called for a new site capturing the old site’s zeitgeist.

The other party was web designer Himy Syed, who registered the domain name for $13.50 and slapped up a splash page saying Torontoest.com would launch this past Thursday.

Mr. Syed wanted to include stories in Mandarin and Hindi and segments dubbed the Scarboroughest and North Yorker. But yesterday, Torontoest featured little beyond a legal warning from Torontoist’s parent company. So, what’s really happening? Two new blogs will launch in the New Year: Mr. Goldsbie’s resurrection project and Mr. Syed’s new city blog, T. , "The website for the ‘est of us," he said.

Nadja Sayej interviewed me some time ago about TheStoreFront Community and today her article appears in The Globe and Mail.

…Unlike most businesses, the StoreFront is a social enterprise – a community-driven business model that would rather see its neighbourhood shine than rake in the big bucks. The window reflects that: The mask and flowers are from the recent Night of Dread parade; the photos are winter shots of Dufferin Park in the 1920s."It’s a blog," says Himy Syed, a self-proclaimed "Torontopreneur" who uses the space, "showing what’s going on in the neighbourhood right now."

The StoreFront’s director, Ghazaleh Etezal, 22, explains. "It’s not a non-profit and it’s not an organization," she says. "It’s an open rental space and network hub dedicated to building community in whatever form. I want to get people together."

The StoreFront has been a hit at hosting creative events. The garrulous Ms. Etezal led a graffiti walk through colourful alleyways on Sept. 20; just this Monday hosted an Alchemy Art Jam, during which garbage, broken telephones and iPods were tweaked into art….

You can read the rest of Nadja’s complete article here: Social enterprise, with a twist .

Photos from the event: