One of the most visited areas on this site is House of Neil’s eBay Watch. You might say it’s beloved, actually. There are two main types of people who read his column; Those who just like seeing all the old and obscure boards, and those that use it as a tool for finding out how much something is worth. A few months back some people in “the collector’s community” got upset with Neil because he reported how much a board sold for at an auction, but the buyer never actually paid for it. Some people felt Neil was practicing irresponsible journalism that would somehow influence the outcome of future auctions. You can probably guess which forum that discussion took place on. As part of an ongoing campaign to keep people from getting their panties in a bunch, Neil does not comment on the value of skateboards that are currently in auction or otherwise for sale, or thinking about being sold. That means you should not ask us how much you think a particular board is worth. We won’t tell you. Not because we are elitist snobs or dicks, (well…) we just can’t do it without pissing someone off. And besides,…

Yes indeed, the Grover family had a baby girl on Friday, tentatively named “squeak.” Ok, that’s not true. The name is what they are calling her until they decide on the final name. Congratulations Steve, Alisa and big brother Jack. But seriously, I hope the next GVK doesn’t have any delivery room footage. Another picture of “Squeak” after the jump.

Our web host is moving their data center this weekend. Starting at midnight on Friday we may be down for 24-48 hours. With the track record of our host company, I’m predicting it will be more towards the latter, if not more. Of course I haven’t gotten moved over to a new company yet, but at least I’ve picked the winner.

My web host (IXWebhosting) sucks the big one. I’ve had repeated problems and headaches using them over the past couple of years. Yesterday we were down for about 16 hours before we got back online, and I had to spend almost four hours on the phone getting it fixed. Now that we are back online everything is glacially slow. IXWebhosting is preparing for a move at the end of the month and they are experiencing some major technical difficulties that they won’t come clean about. Expect the site to be spotty and unresponsive until I get switched over to a new host, hopefully by the end of the week. I apologize for the suckitude.

We got hacked this weekend. I’m still trying to sort it out. Expect sporadic outages and a craptacular look and feel for the next couple of days. Also, I’m deleting all the registered users that I can’t identify, or haven’t commented. If you get deleted, don’t take it personally – either I didn’t recognize you or deleted it by accident. If you want to become a registered user to keep others from commenting under your screen name, send me an email and I’ll set it up for you. We’re back: But don’t hold your breath cause I don’t know how long it will last, still lots of things to fix to prevent it from happening again.

I forgot to post a couple of comics. Here’s Tuesday and here’s Wednesday. I back-dated them.

It has come to our attention that some users are not experiencing the full glory of Skate and Annoy as it was intended. You should be seeing (left) three columns side by side, but it may be showing up (right) as one column stacked on top of two columns. Problem is, I can’t replicate the error, and I’ve tried it with multiple machines, even on Windoze…. Take a minute and leave us a comment if you are seeing it the bogus way on the right. Please include the web browser you are using (version if possible) and what operating system version. Also helpful.. how long has it been that way?

In addition to the other hassles of running a semi popular web site, some lowlife is taking content wholesale from Skate and Annoy and reposting it without credit in order to populate a web site with skateboard related Google ads and dupe people into helping him/her make money. It’s a blog template that hasn’t been updated and still has “Company Name” and “Company slogan” as placeholders. It’s kind of flattering to find out some dirtbag thinks your content will help him make money. They are using our RSS feed and randomly sticking in the words “skate”, “video” or “DVD” to get search engine hits from people looking for skate videos. Now there are other scumbags that pull RSS content and pretend it’s theirs as well, but most of them pull bits and pieces from a multitude of sites instead of just copying everything from one site. So I apologize to our RSS feed readers (apparently, there are some legit ones) for the general funkiness of our feed in the last few days. I’ve been trying to combat the content thieves. If you are so inclined, you can find out how after the jump.

UPDATE: We’re back!!!!! Don’t pay any attention to the words below. We are experiencing technical difficulties with our web server/hosting company. Bear with us please. You won’t be able to read posts that have a “There’s more” link, you won’t be able to comment or look at earlier posts that aren’t on the front page, which makes this site 80% useless, just like a tech support line in India. This is a photo of Mark Conahan bailing over Kuna Idaho last year.

In case you were wondering what’s been going on here, In the past few days we’ve had some server issues at our crappy web host (Ixwebhosting.com – I can’t recommend them) as well as two separate plumbing leaks at my house that have conspired to leave Skate and Annoy in a sorry state. Everything is back to normal now, so move along, there’s nothing to see here. I mean, wait, there is something to see now. Bail photo by Rich at EPM.