I just spent another week in a town with a perpetually flat ocean and yet every third retail store serving the tourist trade has a few mint condition surfboards on the walls, ceiling, or in the window. Must be a city ordinance. I’ve been coming here for almost 10 years during different times of the year and I’d venture to guess that every day in Oregon would beat the surf conditions here on any day, water temperature excluded. In any case, I’m back from vacation. Regular transmissions from Skate and Annoy will resume shortly, although there will be no travel documentary as I’m approaching the half point in a recent tendon tear recovery via DOS Trusty Bowl. Didn’t even pack the (skate)board.

Somebody in Kansas / Missouri trying to hack into the site. What’s your problem buddy?

Whoo boy! So I’ve been busy in my free time since the winter holidays, working on the redesign of Skate And Annoy. It’s not quite done yet, but I’m getting sick of turning it on “maintenance mode” at night and weekends while I work on this. There are definitely a few bugs and some things that are not working too well, like the top navigation drop downs, which looks about as nice as a Nash Executioner. I’m embarrassed about them right now, actually. Also, for those of you on iPads and iPhones, I haven’t gotten to the responsive design layout yet, but it is definitely a priority. The biggest chunk of the work was in the back end, consolidating 4 themes, stylesheets and templates that were often redundant and were getting a little bit out of control. Speaking of css style sheets, don’t look at this one yet… At some point I got tired of managing it during development so I just started tacking things on at the end. It will be cleaned up and minified for faster downloads. What, doesn’t everyone who reads this site write their own php/html/css? So love it or not, it’s here to stay for…

I’ve been working on porting some of the old static HTML content into the Wordpress powered back end. The latest addition is the old Galleries section. Most of the work was in figuring out how to make the old format fit, and now that’s done. Well… mostly. There are a few things that need to be tightened down, but it’s good enough to start filling in the massive hole. It actually goes pretty fast. Last night I put up four issues in the 80’s Skate Zine collection, including Freezine #11, Chi-Town Shred #5, Harsh Vibes #2 and Concrete Crusaders #2. UPDATE: Added

A Simon Woodstock interview coming on Friday. He won’t be rehashing his whole career, rather focusing on some clowning around. To get you in the mood, here’s an old Fisher Price puzzle of a clown on a skateboard, circa 1992. Perfect!

I was cleaning my house the offices of Skate and Annoy over the weekend. I found a ton of SASE requests for stickers stuffed away in various mouse holes, some… very old. The stack you see does not include the 10 or so that I found after I took this photo. So, much to the annoyance of my mail carrier, your stickers are on the way. The selection is dwindling. I think it’s time to make some new ones.

The Pink Helmet Posse, courtesy of the Daily Mail. These kids rip! When you’re done watching this video, don’t forget to drop into Norms. – Thanks to Maureen Swan for the tip.

Sorry for the unannounced blackout this week, but I decided to do some major overhauling in the back end of the site so I could make some improvements down the road. If you’re pissed, just remember, it was in the Terms of Service agreement that everyone had to mail me with a dollar when you agreed to look at Skate and Annoy. Features (eBay Watch and GVK) as well as Reviews are still down, but it won’t be that long. And the good news is Neil is working on another Ebay Watch. In the mean time: Expect a few bugs and some broken links here and there. No need to let me know about it yet, I’m still working in the background. UPDATE: Features (eBay Watch and GVK) are back up. Reviews still down. The graphic for this post is from 2010 when we switched designs. Nostalgia. I think it’s time for a new look here again.

Our normally reliable web host had a few issues while switching us over to new hardware yesterday, and as a result, S&A was unvailable for about 12 hours today. As I’m writing this we’re still experiencing sporadic difficulties and outages. Kind of reminds me of the reason we switched web hosts in the first place, about 4 years ago. Check out some vintage GVK tech satire after the jump, and stick with us, they should have everything shorted out shortly.

Skate and Annoy was mentioned in last month’s issue of Sidewalk Mag via Jim Thompson’s Scene Zine column. Thanks for the love from the UK. Some older Scene Zine are archived online if you are looking for more ways to avoid work or school. If Mark and Neil ever find out they don’t need me, I’m sunk.