We’ve met so many interesting people from all walks of life and everyone has a common thread, skateboarding. I’m actually not sure why and how I got so interested in the sport. Early on, I got on my son’s skateboard and nearly broke my arm just rolling down the driveway. Occasionally, I’ll walk over to him at the skatepark and take his board and act like I’m going to show him something. It usually draws a lot of eyeballs since all the other kids know me and have never seen me skate. Casually, my son will take the board from me and go do an elaborate trick so I don’t get embarrassed. Then, I typically walk back to the sidelines and say something like “You know I showed him how to do that”.

One endearing quality I’ve observed in all the skate parks we’ve visited is the admiration the parents have for their kids. Some sit stoically and proud, others twitch and hold their breadth on every trick and once in a while you’ll see a parent jump up, pump their fists and scream “yeah” as if their favorite team had just scored a touchdown in the super bowl. It’s usually followed with “You know I showed him how to do that”. It’s funny how things work out in life, of all the things I could teach my kids, skateboarding was NOT one of them.

Sure, it’s not easy driving to the parks each day, taking care of the occasional bumps and bruises or just generally finding the time. It’s really weird though, you see I feel as if I’m the one that wants to go to skatepark now and I’m always disappointed when one of my sons says “no, not today dad”. Then, I have to get creative, I’ll make a comment like “seems like there might be a lot of people to show-off for today” and if that doesn’t work I’ll escalate with a possible trip to Chipotle or Tokyo Joes afterwards. Finally, if that doesn’t work, I pull out all the stops with some new bearings, wheels or even a brand new deck, but clearly that can get pricey and only happens once on a blue moon.

It’s really hard for me when I’m away from my kids on a trip or something, but it’s comforting to know that even when we are apart we are still together in spirit. I know when I return, I can always count on them and I know that they know, they will always be able to count on me. It’s that unconditional love thing. I’ve really enjoyed watching my kids grow up and can’t wait to see what they do with their lifes in the future. So in part that’s why being a “zombie skateboard dad” is the greatest job on earth.

For this year’s annual 2009 video we decided to mix it up a bit and have some skateboard video footage from Greenwood Village, Redstone in Highlands Ranch and Castle Rock, Colorado. Enjoy and please let us know what you think. Happy New Year!

The final chapters of the book are about bringing semantics to otherwise disparate content. Over the years, the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative has made progress with formalizing interoperable standards, but we still have a long way to go before we realize the vision of the Semantic Web.

However, it’s interesting how we are now starting to adapt these principles in are our daily lives. An example might be our use of YouTube to broadcast our skate videos through RSS. Now our SK8NE1 subscribers can be notified and review our latest materials in their RSS readers without even coming to our web site. Here’s an example of a video you would see in an RSS reader:

Another interesting trend has been an increasing number of blogs. It seems like it was only a few years ago that Google bought Blogger and applications like MovableType and WordPress were just starting to get momentum. Today, blogging is part of the mainstream and an intregal part of the way we get our information.

In many ways, blogging and RSS are synonymous since most people syndicate their blog’s content using RSS. Embedding the display of your YouTube videos in your feeds is a powerful way to add rich media to an otherwise text only post. We now live in an on-demand world. Social networking and personalized web spaces allow people to receive information based on their preferences and most people subscribing to our blog seem to be primarily interested in our videos.

To that end, we plan to add more and more videos to our blog posts and are now embedding the entire posts in our feeds. This means that if you subscribe to our blog we’ll automatically send our latest posts directly to your designated location and you don’t even have to come to our site.

We got to the park early to get some skating in before the city’s official presentation. We thought there might be a skate competition and wanted to get a feel for the park beforehand. The street course is particularly interesting and has a little of something for everyone.

This is a well-designed park and worth the trip from the Denver area. The skaters take skating seriously so you’ll need to bring your A game if you intend to play SKATE. The address for the park Brighton Skate Park is 1101 Judicial Center Drive, Brighton 80601.

SK8NE1 web site "look and feel" as implemented on 10/01/08

Here’s what we did: We created three specific content areas. 1.) Our skateboard blog is used to chronologically document our activies and give our friends the opportunity to participate in the discussions. 2.) From now on we’ll be using our new YouTube channel to deliver videos. 3.) We decided to periodically archive all the old image and video files to a media repository to keep things fresh and up-to-date. Finally, we added a feedback link to give you the ability to eMail us your thoughts.

Interestingly, we removed the in-home “fair use” soundtrack from the original video for the potential copyright infringement implications of placing the video on YouTube. Now here’s what is really cool. Google and YouTube have authorized the distribution of music tracks from a variety of bands looking for visibility, so you can now replace your existing audio track with something that can be legally used with your video on the web.

We arrived at the downtown Denver skatepark somewhere between 8:30AM and 9:00AM. BTW: This is the best time to skate this park since it can get really crowded later in the day on weekends. One popular part of this park is the wave at the southeast corner. There are 4 or 5 humps of increasing size that allows you to build momentum for jumping obstacles. I landed 3 cones several times before we decided to go to Castle Rock for some street activity.

It’s a long drive from downtown Denver to Castle Rock, but it goes quickly because we talk about tricks and technique in the car. The Castle Rock skatepark has some good terrain to practice street tricks, like rails and stairs, without a lot of risk. I landed a back-side 180 and a pop-shove-it over the stairs and to finish the day off I finally did a boardslide on the inclined rail.

We came, we skated, we left…It was a good day!

Note: We changed our WordPress settings to full text to see if the YouTube video above would show up in Google Reader after the ping indices were updated.

I think it looks pretty good so I may start using YouTube to do the “heavy lifting” of my skate videos. Over the next year or so I’d like to put up some short training videos on skate tricks I’ve learned over the years. Digital video files can be enormous and if I get a lot of people looking at my videos it could cost me (my dad) some bucks! Enjoy the short clip, I’ll plan to put more up soon. Please let me know what you think!

Last Christmas, I got more skateboard ramps and a grind rail. I believe that this time the cost was $89.00 and he (Santa Claus) purchased it at Sam’s Club. The new ramps have helped a lot since I can set them up in different configurations. My street tricks have never been that good because most of the time my dad takes us to the concrete skate parks around town and I just like skating vert, but these low cost ramps have gone a long way in helping me develop some street skills when he is traveling or playing tennis.

The first skate park we went to was in Marietta, Ohio since it was the closest park to our grandparents home. There really wasn’t much there: 5 foot half pipe, 1 foot spine, small ledge and a quarter bowl. There’s a pretty strong group of skaters in Marietta, but my guess is the adults and city governments in southeast Ohio just don’t get the idea that skateboarding is a lot more than a past time for kids with nothing else to do.

On the weekend, we headed up to Athens Ohio where we found a nice concrete park. We wondered how old the park was because the surface was pretty beat up, then some sk8rs told us it was built only a few years ago. I’m not sure if it’s the humidity or what, but the surface at this park seems to have aged a lot in just 2 years. When we arrived in Athens it was 10:00AM and the sk8rs were already leaving because of the heat, so I guess you either skate really early in the morning or later at night since it looked like there was some nice lighting. In any event, there was a lot of good terrain and we skated it for nearly an hour.

Finally, in Athens some sk8rs told us about a park about 30 miles away called Skatopia. It sounded really interesting so we packed up the car and headed to Rutland, Ohio. Now, this park is hard to find, but well worth the effort. There was a skateboard museum with 100s of skateboards from past decades. There was a barn retrofitted for skating with massive 16 foot dropins! At the top of the property was a concrete park with a real school bus built into one of the bowls. We’d never seen anything like it. The park quickly became one of our top skate adventures of all time. Thanks Brewce, you rock! I hope you stay young forever!