What The Bleep Do We Know?!

September 17th, 2006 • Buddhism, Life, movie, temple

We had movie night at Hsi Lai tonight with our group. Such a good time. We watched ‘What the Bleep Do We Know’ - and I must say so appropriate after this week’s teachings with His Holiness. Then on do dinner at a great vegetarian Chinese place in 99 Ranch. (Yes, it was a little too good, I stuffed myself.. haha)

Start work again tomorrow…. betting my inbox is going to be insane…

birthdays and magazine update

August 24th, 2006 • Life, temple

So a lot of stuff has been happening.

We’ve been working on Little Man’s birthday invitations. This year he’s having a Thomas the Tank Engine party; so there’s a hint on what the invites will look like. Overall, I’m very happy with how they turned out.

Monday would have been my Grandma’s birthday. And yes, I still smile everytime I think about her, which has been a lot lately. The other day I was listening to Johnny Cash and in my mind, I got to dance with Grandma.

Also, had an update on the temple magazine; it’s a definite go! Quite exciting news to me. Venerable is happy with the direction I’ve taken the design, the colors are correct, and she likes how the layout is so far. I plan to improve a few things on the face of it, but need to determine the name we’ll be using still. Though this is a Buddha’s Light project, I believe we can grow it to a certain degree. The focus will be on the Western Dharma section of Hsi Lai, and the name should reflect that. We’ll see what is decided.

New Magazine

August 6th, 2006 • Life, tech, temple

My temple used to run a daily newspaper. This was a lot of work and a huge undertaking for them. Plus, since it was daily, you can imagine that it was good locally, but a huge portion of copies got exported to Taiwan. Not sure that part of it worked out so well. Then about a year ago, they decided to stop the daily newspaper. It just became too much.

Later, the intention was to create a bi-weekly magazine. This seemed to peek interest greatly. We met to plot out who would become editors, writers, publishers, etc. Tricia was even planning to assist with the web design. Then things became very busy at the temple again and the idea had to be set aside.

As of late, I thought we should consider this again, maybe as a monthly, or even bi-monthly undertaking. I thought out some ideas and ran them by Venerable Miao Hsi. She agreed, and was quite interested.

So, here we are and it does appear this will come to be. I’ve recently moved to a good hosting company that gives quite a good amount of space for a great price; 3 domains included. So 1) moving the family site over here - 2) started this blog - 3) I will use the third domain (name yet to be decided) as the magazine site. Very excited about this.

I’ve been trying to learn Joomla! lately when I actually have time to look into it. Seems like it will be the correct software to do this. I do have a few concerns thought. One, learning the software; luckily Jerid has gone through it and became quite the whizz at it. (Show your support, buy a knife from him, just please [personal request] don’t kill anything. hehehe) He’s helped me quite a bit, which is cool. Two, database size; I get 100 megs per DB with the hosting company, but I assume a magazine could outgrow that quickly. I’ve considered just using iWeb to design it as well, but don’t think I will. I love the look of iWeb, just doesn’t seem to be the program for something of this size. We’ll have to see how Joomla! goes and I’ll keep you posted.