Monthly Archives: January 2009

The Fifteen Minutes Snowskate

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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 – 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. ;)

Seven Things

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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:

  1. First thing first, I’m the proud dad of three beautiful boys between the ages of almost-3 to 9-and-a-half.
  2. 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.
  3. My favourite place to be is on a half pipe, with my son(s) and bmx/skateboard/snowboard, no matter the location.
  4. Although I live in Montreal, Canada, I’ll never EVER get used to its weather, yet still like it here.
  5. I dug part of our previously 4-feet-high clay basement by hand so I could have a wood workshop in our downtown duplex.
  6. I spent my childhood in France (0-12), teenage in Martinique (12-17) and adulthood in Canada (17-…).
  7. 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:

  1. Pierre-Hugues Pellerin (@pierhugues), who will probably mention Ruby, despite his initials.
  2. François Lafortune (@quickredfox), who could write and illustrate a comic book published only in pure Javascript.
  3. Xopher Murtagh, who can play the trombone and probably find a way to get GNU/Linux running on it, somehow.
  4. Janina Szkut (@nanananini), who could probably mention something about knitting and PAX in the same sentence.
  5. 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.
  6. Sylvain Carle (@afrognthevalley), Praized Media‘s CTO extraordinaire.
  7. 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.