Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts

Friday, January 20, 2012

Arrivals

I finally was able to pick up my books the other day. I'm so happy to be making my library larger. What do I need now? A proper bookshelf.

There are a few things I want to make in the schools woodshop these coming months and I'm trying to prioritize them. There is a stand for my computer monitors so I can free up some desk space. Actually need to make 3 of those. One for home, one for studio, and one for a friend. Next is a coat rack. My little studio is cramped on space and not having a proper coat rack usually just results in my hanging my coats and hats on the door, but then I cant close the door, so a coat rack is needed. Next is the bookshelf, I keep telling myself that if my books are out where I can see them more often I will somehow absorb the information contained in them just by staring... Last but not least, I want to make a shoe rack for hanging my shoes on when I come in the door. I usually take my shoes off but then they just pile up around the door, and since my fridge is by the door I can't get into my fridge....and thus cannot eat....see the issues here? Anyways.

I mostly want to treat these projects not just as building projects but also as finished work projects, and I want to build them all in autocad and Rhino 3D before I build them. I think it will give me some necessary practice in both of those programs. So over the next few weeks hopefully I'll be posting some of those. Right now I'm in the process of taking inventory of all the materials I have (and got for free) so I can minimize spending money on materials. That factor will be one of the primary design influences.

So this week has been an interesting one at school. So far this week we have had only one day of actual class, Tuesday. Its been snowing all week! Me and my buddy here attempted to make a giant snowball but it ended up taking about 2 hours for not that big. Snow wouldn't stick. But, as you can see, I haven't really been getting that much work done this week. Snow is great, but it is definitely a productiveness killer. What I'm supposed to be working on is a precedence study on Urban Agriculture. I've been doing a lot of reading into the subject and now I'm just trying to think of a way to put it in the context of Ballard. One of the first things I watched was The Future of Food It is a pretty interesting film seems a little biased but I highly recommend it. I has certainly changed the way I think about "traditional" agriculture. Anyways this very much fits in with the ideas of Urban Agriculture, the organic movement, farmer's markets, and the like. I am very excited about this whole idea. So the posters I am working on I want them to convey the reason's for Urban Agriculture, the challenges, etc etc and I very much want to look at both sides equally.

Hmm..what else did I want to talk about today...
I think thats it!
Until next time~

Sunday, January 8, 2012

10,000 Views! A New Day.

Hi everyone! Today my blog hit the 10,000 view mark. It's pretty funny, more people come the more you post...and spam your facebook status. Anyways today I'm just going to give a quick update about the NEW quarter so far, some NEW books i'm getting in, and a NEW view on high organization!

So far this quarter I've had a few lectures, just introductions into hydrology and site engineering, site restoration, and two quick studio sessions on neighborhood design. For the site restoration class we are going through a series of different natural ecosystem types and looking at the best ways to go about restoring them from man made disturbances. Unfortunately this has yet to yield any good pictures...Anyways, what I'm finding really interesting about the class is towards the middle of the quarter we are going to start a real life restoration project as a class at Ballard in Seattle. I have no idea how we are breaking up the assignment class-wise yet but it is going to be a new experience for sure. I will keep you guys updated as we go.

Books

So to compliment all these new classes I've purchased some books that are recommended and one that I've been wanting for a while. That book is Mastering Autocad 2012. I feel pretty confident in my basic autocad skills but in terms of advanced use, I am nowhere near where I want to be.

The other books I am still waiting for in the mail are Site Engineering for Landscape Architects,by Steven Strom, Kurt Nathan and Jake Wolandand and also Soil Design Protocols by Timothy A. Craul and Phillip J. Craul. At first I bought these bad boys at the local University bookstore and they seemed rather interesting at first glance. But of course they were a good 50 dollars cheaper on Amazon so I returned them. I'll let you know how they turn out!

Other News

In other news the Fluffy-Muffin website is coming along nicely. We have fixed a few bugs like getting the images not to flicker when you hover over them. We have also been able to get the links to the Facebook Page and the Tumblr and the Twitter all set up so that's good. The biggest thing we are having issues with now is getting enough content up for google to be able to accept our site as legit so we can get advertising up.... hopefully that will happen sooner than later.

Well Until Next time when I have more pictures to show!