Archive for the ‘random’ Category

It was a great Moustache May, though Molly is happy to be rid of the ‘stache. My full set of photos is here, but the surprise I managed to keep the entire month is a series of action shots I took while drawing each day, compiled for your enjoyment:

It’s Moustache May, and disparate group of moustache wearers have gathered again at MoustacheMay.com. The official rules are as follows:

You Moustache May:

1. Have / Grow a glorious moustache
2. Post one image per day
3. Participate in frequent shenanigans

You Moustache May NOT:

1. Go more than one week without posting.
2. Detract from your moustache with other overly prominent facial hair.
3. Be mean spirited, vulgar, or socially inappropriate.
4. Photoshop your images. Let’s keep it classy.

In addition to following these rules, I made Moustache May a personal project this year. My brother helped me build a stand that suspends a pane of glass between myself and the camera, and I’ve been creating a drawing each day and photographing the combination of myself and the drawing. My progress through May 16 is below (click to enlarge). Follow the madness and see full size images here.

I’m getting ready to go on the annual Kimball family week-long vacation. My parents rent a huge place for a week, and my three brothers and I (+families) come and stay for as much of the week as we can. My parents now have ten grandkids under the age of 10, so it gets pretty crazy when we all land at the same time.

I’m looking to repeat an activity I brought a couple years ago: readymechs. They’re an ongoing project by the design firm FWIS. They’re small, robot-like throw-away toys you make yourself. The beautiful little creatures come to life by printing out the 8.5×11 design sheet, cutting out the design, and following the assembly instructions.

Last time I printed and brought a bunch of them the whole family (adults included) had a blast constructing the various designs. By the end of the week they were pretty much destroyed by the kids playing with them, but that’s kind of the point. I even imported the PDFs into illustrator and deleted the color, so some of them were a coloring/constructing combo. I don’t have time for that this year, but they’ve added a whole new series of mechs since we did it last — I don’t think we’ll get bored.

I love the way iTunes handles podcasts. My church offers the ability to listen to sermons online (http://royaloakvineyard.com/sermons/), but they don’t offer an RSS feed I can submit to iTunes.

So, I wrote my first RSS feed*. It’s a testament to how well I like iTunes that I’m willing to manually update the RSS feed weekly in order to listen to the sermons in my favorite format. Of course, I love a project that requires research and problem solving — that played more than a small part.

I found a great guide on how to create your own rss feed, and I wrote and uploaded my own feed:

http://www.sethkimball.com/ROVCpodcast/feed.xml

It basically tells iTunes where to find the mp3 file of each sermon. Updating the feed manually is a little labor intensive, but it was a fun project.

Now don’t anyone go submitting this to the iTunes store. I don’t know if I’ll keep updating it. But if you want to podcast the Royal Oak Vineyard Sermons, open itunes and choose Advanced >> Subscribe to Podcast. Copy the above url (..feed.xml) and paste it into the box that pops up. I’ll try to keep it up to date!

*Check out this video if you’re thinking “What’s an RSS feed?”