Eco Skateboards has an project placed on iFreelance.com titled Hip looking website for an environmentally friendly skateboarding company:

I need a cool looking flash website design done for an environmentally friendly skateboard company. To give you a little background on our company, we are a skateboard producer located in Canada called Eco Skateboards. The philosophy behind the company is really organic and natural, we love bright colours and happy looking designs! We are looking for something with our logo integrated into it.

What is their budget for a hip website developed in Flash no less? Between $250 and $499 with two weeks to deliver. I don’t know if the skateboards are made in China, but at that price the web site will have to be made in India.

Joesf Heffner (AKA nweyesk8 in our comments) sent in these pics of a mobile skate shop he’s seen traveling around to skateparks in the central part of western Oregon. It’s less than ample stock is being hauled around in the back of large RV style trailer. That’s an awful lot of hardgoods they need to sell just to cover gas. The skateshop-out-of-the-back-of-my-car is not a new phenomenon, but at this level it’s a big slap in the face to the local skate shops. There’s always the chance that Grinders is servicing a bigger geographic area that doesn’t have local shops, but it’s a pretty safe bet that’s not the case. If it is, then good luck with that operating model. Your first order of business ought to be selling the huge trailer for a small used panel van that runs on home brew biodiesel. You might have a fighting chance then.

Insert joke about shitty bowls here. Oops! Shoulda made this photo of the Kent Washington skatepark a Shot of the Week.
[Photo: Tony Davies via Sleestak]

Ready for another online zine? Tweaker appears to be a UK based skate zine and not a Midwest USA zine for meth heads. Tweaker is one big Flash application that mimics a real magazine, but with a few multimedia tweaks, if you will. The traditional folded over letter-sized paper aspect ratio is preserved, and corners peel up when you mouse over them. Some of the photos can bring up an overlaying sequence, some pages have video embedded and some pages can scroll. I’m not a fan of Flash-based simualtions of printed magazines, but in this case I think it might work. It’s more immersive because it not only looks like a printed zine, but it has the ability to do things print can’t do, or at least not until they get digital paper perfected and available cheaply. One example is embedded video out takes from Winstan Whitter’s “Rollin’ Through The Decades” documentary in an article about a famous street spot. Tweaker is in beta right now so it’s a little buggy and slow. For instance, you can flip a page with the video playing and it will continue to play even after the page turning effect is over. It looks cool, but the sound can interfere with next page. There’s a mixture of street and park skating, old and new, plus a little bit of the now mandatory artsy-fartsy content. The fact that they bothered to make the beta version live confirms my opinion that this thing is going to be very labor intensive to publish. I hope they figure out a way to make it work. Check out Tweaker.

[Source: The Goat]

OMG! UR SO HOT! The blogosphere is on fire with hottest skateboards on the web this week – the Dead Rappers series from Jeremy Fish and a soon to be released Wii controller-looking board from Black Market, a company that seems to be doing a second rate impersonation of World Industries circa 91. Actually, this Wii deck is BM’s best work to date. A bunch of gaming sites are tittering all over it. Speaking of tittering, I just said BM!

[Source: Wii – Kotaku Dead Rappers – everyone]

Check out the fancy video camera that guy is holding at the edge of the pipe. Who needs expensive prosumer electronics gear when a point and shoot still camera can give you glorious 160 x 120 pixel imagery at 15 fps? Not our friend Troy Sliter. Check out his moving picture footage of Rune Glifberg going over the mouse hole at Portland’s Pier Park during the 2007 Oregon Trifecta after the jump.

[Update: More reader video added in comments]

Jacob Marcinek of Tranny Whiskers is one of those guys with too much free time on his hands. Sounds like a college student to me. Fortunately for the hard core skateboarding gamer, he has created the BEST SKATEBOARDING VIDEO GAME, EVER. Forget everything you’ve heard about Tony Hawk’s Proving Grounds and EA’s Skate, because Radical Mathematical blows them all out of the water. What could be more fun than using your grade school knowledge of math to navigate through three totally awesome levels of skateboarding? Nothing, obviously. As you can see, even the graphics have eclipsed the cutting edge. I would go so far as to say that Radical Mathematical is so advanced that it is more of an extremely accurate high tech simulation than simply a video game. What are you doing still reading this? Check out Radical Mathematical.

A couple of months ago we posted about blind skateboarder Jennifer Tissot, and now we have another. The Chicago Sun Times has an article with a title straight from Cliché Headlines 101 about another blind skateboarder. What else, but “Skater’s blind ambition.” Duh! The article is pretty straight forward and short. 14 year old Tommy Carroll who lives in the suburbs of Chicago, went blind in both eyes at the age of two. He enjoys other sports like cross country running, and is on a local skate team, Agent Skateboards. Check out the team. If that is the Jerret Barry (Jarret Berry?) then Agent has the lock on Extreme™! minority team members. One of the more interesting notes (besides Tommy, the blind skateboarder) is that his parents are the ones who “helped steer him into skateboarding, figuring it was something he could master.” That’s a pretty progressive attitude, considering a lot of parents of seeing children don’t want their kids skating. The best part of the article is the video link that actually shows Tommy carving around, doing a nose pivot on the coping and even catching air.

Thanks to Mike Timble for the tip. [Photos and video capture: Chicago Sun Times]

I was on the fence about a short post on this reality show on TLC called L.A. Ink where a hot gal runs her own tattoo parlor. She’s got a (nonfunctional) skateboard ramp in her shop and a boyfriend that skates, or something like that. Now that Mike Vallely has shown up on an episode the skateboarding link is less tenuous. There’s a split second of skate footage and band footage. Mike looks like a crazy old biker. Highlights include Mive V’s quote:

There’s all these people who talk about ‘keeping it real.’ Keeping it real is joke! Keeping it real is keeping it real mediocre.

Also interesting to nobody but me is the the fact that I went to high school with one of the tattoo artists on the show, Hannah Aitchison, who, if she remembers me at all, will likely think of me as the annoying kid who thought he was punk rock. She dropped out a year early to go be an adult, something I’ve only just gotten around to doing.

There are other tattoo parlors with skateboard ramps. Portland’s own Urban Soul had a ramp and a skateshop, but soon found that all the annoying groms that just wanted to hang out and ask to see boards and not buy anything put a serious damper on their real livelihood, tattoos. – Thanks to Eric Cherry for the video.

The saga of Caz’s ramp continues. When assembled, The ramp is 75 feet long and ten and a half feet deep in the deep end. It’s half shallow, half deep with a connecting hip section. You can see pictures and video of the ramp in it’s various states on Antigravity Press, and supposedly on the Plywood Benders site. I never skated this thing but heard about it every now and again. It was a private operation in a barn somewhere, then it was supposed to be some sort of a skate camp type operation that never got off the ground, and lastly it was being assembled in an indoor skatepark in Troutdale Oregon that never opened due to permitting problems. Now it can be yours if you have an extra $10,000 and a really, really large garage. The pictures form the Craig’s List post makes it look like a Noah’s Ark episode of In Search Of. In fact, isn’t that Bigfoot in the upper right hand shot? Let’s hope that thing get’s sold before the rain hits. Thanks to Joe Martin for the tip.