Teagan, my 9 year old son, and I took advantage of today being a stat holiday in Canada to go on a three hours spots finding “mission” in the Old Montreal, the Old Port and downtown.
Here are a few of the ones we remembered to take pictures of.
Blog
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Montreal's Newest Skatepark: Le Taz – Panoramic Views
Here are some quick and dirty panoramic views (QTVR + frames) of the Taz, Montreal’s newest skatepark. Embed VR scenes from the pictures can be found below the gallery.
Construction happened during the Winter, so the even larger outdoors park (94,000 sq/ft) is not built yet. With 83,000 sq/ft indoors, I think we can wait another couple of month. 😉
Sorry for the abysmal quality, but I had more important things on the mind: riding, riding aaaaand, riding! 🙂 Don’t worry, tons of pictures will surface online this week for sure.
Feel free to download the movie files if you want full screen. -
J. Grant Brittain Limited Edition Pro Board #17 of 99
When I told my wife that I bought my first ever collectible last week, she started having cold sweats, thinking I had just grabbed a chunk of the family savings for a way-too-early mid-life crisis. Needless to say, she was relieved when she found out that the object of my desire was just a $75 skateboard.
But what a board! And especially dear to me is what it represents, since the fact that I am fanatic about extreme sports, and have been since I was a child, is far from a state secret.
In 2009, Mumble will be presenting three people who have had an outstanding influence on the skateboarding industry over the last decades with pro skateboarder diplomas and honorary pro model decks.
The first person to be induced in this hall of fame of sort, in association with Powell Peralta and The Skateboard Mag, is none other than legendary photographer J. Grant Brittain, the founding photo editor of The Skateboard Mag.
And today, I received my own copy of this limited edition deck, number 17 of the 99 that have been produced. And to top it all off, I also got myself a classic Ripper shirt to go with it. Can you feel the joy? It’s positively palpable, isn’t it? 🙂
Now, I can’t wait to see who the next two legends will be. I’ll definitely try to get these boards too, as well as a[nother] personal treat: a re-issue of Steve Caballero‘s original Cab Street, my first real skateboard, in Martinique back in the 80s.
Hey, it could be worse, I could have been tempted by one of the Rip the Ripper tribute art pieces! Not that I’m not, but there’s no way I can afford one of those… :p
Update 1: I so feel like mounting trucks and era-specific wheels on this bad boy and ride the […] out of it! But I’ll be strong…
Update 2: I forgot to mention that the proceeds of the sale of these limited edition boards will be going to the Grind for Life foundation, helping people with cancer.
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The Fifteen Minutes Snowskate
I got really inspired to try something out yesterday, after discovering Snowsk8r, Pedal BMX‘s sister site: I wanted to rig myself up something in the general spirit of a snowskate from miscellaneous recycled parts.
If you are not familiar with snowskating, just check out the following embedded video to get the gist of things.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npJjZzMwJCI]
YouTube – Chairlift Skeptics… A Snowskate Flick
An appropriate short description would likely be: the newest surefire way to injure yourself while laughing your head off. :p
Looking at the various kinds of snowskates out there, there seems to be three general types:
- simple boards with an oversized tail and nose, referred to as single deck
- what looks like a standard skateboard made out of marine plywood, with a mini snowboard underneath, aka bideck
- and the same, but with multiple mini-skis (2 to 4), with or without suspension
The easy way out for me would have of course been to just grab an old skateboard and gone for it as is, but my kids and I have done that many times in the past and although it’s fun, there is just not enough kick to it. What became obvious was that the elevation from the ground that trucks and wheels provide was what I was looking for in the rig.
After finding a photo of the now out-of-production Danny Kass Snowskate model, it became apparent that simply joining 2 old skateboards might just do the trick nicely, at least to mess around with and see if there’s any sense in spending more time or money on getting setup.
So that’s what I just did. You can see the basic steps I took by browsing to the photo set of the build process I uploaded on Flickr, or you can use the following embedded slideshow (full screen mode will let you see the attached instructions).
Voilà! Nothing too fancy, but it promises to be a blast to at least try out. 🙂
The kids and I will go do just that shortly.
Updated 2009-01-18: I’ve added some picts of our test run to the slideshow. Fun stuff! As expected, it works best with heavily packed snow. Not a problem in Montreal. 😉
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Seven Things
Well, it had to happen sometime. Eli White (@EliW) was kind enough [aka: I’ll get ya back! ;)] to tag me in his own version of the Seven Things meme going ’round these days.
Meh, why not? So, I now have to detail seven things about me – some random, some weird – then find seven soul to harass with my new found mischievous streak.
Here we go:
- First thing first, I’m the proud dad of three beautiful boys between the ages of almost-3 to 9-and-a-half.
- I didn’t actually write my first PHP app. I wrote a script to convert it from Perl to PHP for me, around 1998-99.
- My favourite place to be is on a half pipe, with my son(s) and bmx/skateboard/snowboard, no matter the location.
- Although I live in Montreal, Canada, I’ll never EVER get used to its weather, yet still like it here.
- I dug part of our previously 4-feet-high clay basement by hand so I could have a wood workshop in our downtown duplex.
- I spent my childhood in France (0-12), teenage in Martinique (12-17) and adulthood in Canada (17-…).
- And finally, I hate how English spellcheckers highlight properly spelled words, such as favour, colour, and behaviour. :p
Now, for my preys, aiming for fresh ones:
- Pierre-Hugues Pellerin (@pierhugues), who will probably mention Ruby, despite his initials.
- François Lafortune (@quickredfox), who could write and illustrate a comic book published only in pure Javascript.
- Xopher Murtagh, who can play the trombone and probably find a way to get GNU/Linux running on it, somehow.
- Janina Szkut (@nanananini), who could probably mention something about knitting and PAX in the same sentence.
- Konstantin Ryabitsev (@mricon), who is probably already teaching four or five languages to his newborn son, who’ll probably read them fluently by age three.
- Sylvain Carle (@afrognthevalley), Praized Media‘s CTO extraordinaire.
- Evan Prodromou (@evan), who will (and should!) probably mention Laconica.
And to conclude, the complete rules:
- Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
- Share seven facts about yourself in the post – some random, some weird.
- Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
- Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.
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Making Ubuntu Server Work in Sun's VirtualBox
Here’s a quick fix if you’re interested in installing a VM running Ubuntu Server in Sun‘s OSS virtualization tool, VirtualBox.
After installing the 32bit version of Ubuntu Server 8.10 in VirtualBox 2.0.4 on my MacBook Pro (OSX), I was faced with the following error message when starting the VM, which I found also happens on other platforms:
From Wikipedia:
Physical Address Extension (PAE) refers to a feature of x86 and x86-64 processors that allows more than 4 gigabytes (GB) of physical memory to be used in 32-bit systems, given appropriate operating system support.
Fortunately, the fix was as easy as pie:
- Once VirtualBox is up and running, select your Ubuntu Server VM.
- Go to the “General” configuration screen and select the “Advanced” tab.
- Check the “Enable PAE/NX” option.
Here’s a screenshot:
Try starting your VM again, and all should go as planned. It did for me.
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WordCamp Toronto 2008
Better late than never, this is to announce that some of the Praized crew and I will be attending WordCamp Toronto 2008 this weekend. The event takes place at the Progress Campus Student Centre of the Centennial College, in Scarborough.
Looking forward to it!
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Praized is Now Live!
Yes! Praized Media, our Hub, Facebook application and other current integration options (API, plugins, etc) are now all live to the public and in full production gears. 🙂
Now Web publishers can easily write about local places while growing traffic and ad revenue. Praized is the first free local search platform designed specifically for social media sites like blogs, social networks and other online communities.
I said, back in January, how happy I was about joining the Praized team, and how much potential I was seeing in the company. Suffice to say, I’m just as ecstatic as I was back then, kicked up a notch or two.
Hey, maybe now I can reach inbox zero and start blogging again. 😉
Edit: we’re getting some pretty good reviews so far. Crossing our fingers. Still work to do.
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SSH Setup for EC2 UI on Mac OS X
If you are using Amazon’s EC2 as a cloud hosting solution, you owe it to yourself to install the most excellent EC2 UI Firefox extension (source) to manage your server instances (note: not yet compatible with Firefox 3).
Now, if you also happen to be on Mac OS X, one annoying thing is that EC2 UI is configured by default to be used on Linux (and GNOME). Looking online, all I could find were questions on how to set EC2 UI on OS X to use the proper terminal and ssh, but no answer.
Fear not! Yours truly spent a few minutes on the case, and ended up finding a solution that is at least viable for myself, and will hopefully be for you as well. The trick is that I have X11 installed on my OS X box anyway, so I just use the binaries intended for this package.
There you have it. Now, I can right click on any instance listed in EC2 UI and select “SSH to Public DNS Name”. X11 and xterm are both seamlessly launched and proceed to log me into the desired instance.
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WordPress 2.5 is officially out!
From the WordPress Blog:
WordPress 2.5, the culmination of six months of work by the WordPress community, people just like you. The improvements in 2.5 are numerous, and almost entirely a result of your feedback: multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and search that covers posts and pages.
Not taking the time to post much these days (too busy), but I couldn’t miss this one, being in the middle of developing stuff for the platform (among other things). 🙂