Updated template and upload

Friday, January 9, 2009

As you can see I updated the design of the blog. Its been a while since I've touched any of my blogs. However I'm slowly but steadily trying to get back on track. You could say I'm trying to rekindle my interest in blogging. To do this I decided to start by working on the template of my two blogs. It was particularly interesting experience because it has been well over a year since I've worked on HTML and I've never touched CSS. But this is one of those things I've been meaning to learn more about. And there are few things like the sense of accomplishment you get when you figure something out. For example while fixing the search box to the right here I spent the better part of an afternoon just to learn that I simply needed to change a single letter of code (an "s" for a "q"). Nothing quite like learning, eh?

Another thing that I wanted to find when working with the template was find a way to integrate it with the flickr and blip site. So it was great to find one with the link at the top. Lets see... what else... . I found that one of the videos about the project wasn't uploaded yet so that will go up next week and if all goes as planned I'll be cross-posting it here as well.

I'm Back! Finally I'm back!

Saturday, May 10, 2008

Lets forget that I haven't uploaded anything here for several months and enjoy the fact that I'm back at work with my blog. There are many reasons why I haven't worked here, depression, work, procrastination, graduation, family, friends, relationships and what have you. Some fun and some not so much, and it seems like a hassle and of no particular interest to explain them all. So lets get on with business!

So, what I have been up to? The most important thing right now has been working with my graduation. I'm currently taking two video classes and polishing up (at least trying to polish) my Path to Enlightenment video. Also I'm debating on the purpose of having two blogs. Right now I don't know what I should make each one about. As its stands right now my video-place blog is rather empty and I would prefer to use it for videos, and personal stuff. However my stupas in video already has content and is more polished (here I go... using the same word twice). So until I decide what I want to do with my video-place blog I'll just use it only0 to cross post videos from blip , and this one will serve as a "base of operations" for my blogging needs. Also I've uploaded a few videos to blip recently so I'll start cross posting them to my blogs as soon as possible.

Oh! And to all who may be reading: The Master of Fine Arts exhibition reception is tonight at 6pm in the OSU Urban Arts Space. And the opening of the Bachelors of Fine Arts Exhibition (in which I'll be a part of) will be June 7th between 3pm and 9pm at the OSU Urban Arts Space and several other campus sites (I'll give more information about it as we go along).

Issues with research and blogging

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Before I start with the post itself, a question, if I may: Ever had the problem that you start a post and leave it for a day or two and when you come back to it you find that the energy you thought was present in the post... just... suddenly disappeared? And then, when you try to keep working on it, you start deleting all the phrases you though were good, and the post goes from good to bad to "Oh my God! where's my post, I lost it in all these words!!" Well it happened with this post so I had to restart it from scratch.

Now back to the topic at hand: Research.

Well, I don't know about you but this material I'm using to create my video installation isn't coming from nowhere. Actually I didn't know anything about stupas before I took my Asian history of art class, so I was pretty much had no knowledge on the subject. So I asked a professor in the history of art
department if he knew any good material to learn more about Buddhist
stupas and he recommended this book from Lama Anagarika Govinda called:
Psycho-cosmic Symbolism of the Buddhist Stūpa. And here is when the issues start. If you don't feel the even slightly overwhelmed by the title or the author's name there's something wrong with you. Of course this isn't a problem, it's just more of a sign of issues to come. One of the problem that I had was that I had to catch up on a lot of material that the book takes for granted the reader knows. Which in my case is pretty much the core concepts of Buddhism and its history. But I think that the main problem was translating the ideas he put forth and finding what sort of material I could use to represent visually in the installation. But either way it was a book of great help for me and if anyone out there wants to learn more about these structures this is a great book to read. Actually quite a bit of the stuff you see posted on the internet about Stupas comes from this book.

I think I'll leave this post here as I can feel it draining my powers from me and leaving me with less time time to work on this project. Right now, I think I'll start with the models of the three stupas I'll be using in the video.