Paul's Apsara Palace
Apsaras were the celestial dancers for the God-Kings of the Khmer civilization who ruled the kingdom of Angkor in present day Cambodia a thousand years ago.
The rulers of Angkor were prolific palace and temple builders, and the walls of their buildings were covered with sculptures and bas-reliefs. Some represented stories from the life of the Buddha, or, on earlier temples, tales from the Ramayana. Some, however were dedicated to the Apsara, the embodiment on Earth of divine beauty.
Despite the depradations of wars and the passing of a thousand seasons, many fine examples of these Apsara sculptures still remain. The images on these pages are from a recent trip of mine to see the ancient splendors of the Kingdom of Angkor.
Take a look...
MDP
MDP stands for Major Design Project. If you happen to be a Year 12 Student doing Design and Technology you'll know just what that means. For the uninitiated it's an open-ended design brief undertaken by senior D&T students as part of their HSC course.
It's got two parts, the project itself, and the folio which describes the journey you undertook to create your design.
I'm doing an MDP because I'm retraining, and learning to teach D&T to the fine and upstanding students in our NSW High Schools. The MDP I'm designing is an e-learning website called “WebSchool”. It's about learning web-design, and it's meant to be a resource for NSW high school teachers.
If you click on the ‘WebSchool' link you can see the actual website. The ‘MDP' link takes you to an online version of the folio describing the process I went through to create the WebSchool site.
I daresay this site might be of academic interest to most people, but to those interested parties—namely my lecturers and fellow retreads (you know who you are)—feel free to drop in and browse.
Take a look...
Web school
Web School is a project about web design. It is aimed primarily at High School children (I’m a high school teacher, you see.) In particular it is geared towards the NSW ( Australia) syllabus for yrs 7-12. Anyone interested in learning web design, however, might well find something to their advantage.
There are three sections
- Getting started—hand coding basic HTML in a text editor
- Looking good—Using CSS for presentation and layout
- Code Warrior—A look at scripting with PHP and MySQL
Take a look...
Third Island
Third Island is a musical duo I have been involved in for some time now, with fellow musician and artist and friend Robert Laurie.
Low tech, no budget, backyard, gritty, grainy, hissy, dirty sounds.
Everything you shouldn't do to a piece of musical equipment to make it squeal, crackle, distort and glitch.
Frenetic explosions of orchestral energy.
Loops and samples of everything from Ligeti to La Boheme.
Etherial landscapes of finely drawn ambient sounds.
Polytonal -- Polyrhythmic
Avant Garde -- Ambient.
What more could you ask for?
Take a look...
SHHS
SHHS stands for Smith's Hill High School . This site is a mirror of the one I created while working at Smith's Hill a few weeks ago. If you're a student from that august temple of higher knowledge, you can find all the resources you were using in here. In particular I suggest you revisit the ‘Learning Dreamweaver' site to reinforce the skills you learnt last term. (Note to teachers—the registration forms have been removed. If you need access to them contact me using the form-mail box at the top of the page).
Take a look...
The Buddhas of Sukhothai
Sukhothai (literally Dawn of Happiness), founded in 1238, was the capital of a Thai kingdom in the middle of the 13th century.
In 1238 Sukhothai became the first Thai kingdom. Before, smaller Thai principalities had existed, mostly under Khmer rule.
Thais today view Sukhothai as the cradle of the Thai nation, and see Sukhothai as a kingdom of happiness.
Today the palaces of Sukhothai are in ruins, but giant, serene buddhas still meditate amongst the fallen masonry.
I cheated and made this gallery from a Dreamweaver template. I'll do a proper version with larger images at some stage.
Take a look...
Miscellaneous
This site was created using Dreamweaver MX software. The layout and text styles are formatted using Cascading Style Sheets CSS.
Earlier versions of Internet Explorer (5 and 5.5) and Netscape (pre version 7) may not preview these pages correctly. If you are using one of these browsers you should consider upgrading for a better browsing experience.
I recommend Firefox—a free, open-source browser, which not only has excellent security, but is much better than IE at rendering pages created and laid out using CSS.
If you are thinking of developing pages using CSS you should consider using this browser, or the Opera browser to preview your work, as you can be sure it is rendering correctly.
The Hit List
The websites listed on the links page of this site are my picks for use in teaching the IST course in years seven to ten. This course has a number of option topics for teachers to chose from as a vehicle for teaching the core content.
The option topic, Internet and website development is a huge one, and overlaps the digital media, authoring and multimedia and networking systems options.
Some of these sites have lessons on HTML programming, which can produce functional webpages with only a simple text editor, such as notepad, and an internet browser.
Others are specific to particular programs, such as photoshop, dreamweaver or fireworks. Some contain articles about the nature of the web and issues and emerging trends in internet design and usage.
This site is perhaps a bit redundant now, as most of the links in this site are available in the link list on the left. I have included it for the sake of completeness, and also because the resources listed are some of the best online web development resources around. The site was put together as a study assignment, and so is a tad basic. It was done with the help of a Pegaweb tutorial (See link list, Web Design section).
Take a look...
