TET.Life (The Extraordinary Tourist Life)

I have been thinking about my board slider and how I might feature it more in my video skating sessions. I don't use it very often because all I can do on it is really short nose slides and fairly short board slides.
In order to use it more I need to get used to doing grind tricks on top of it but because it has fairly large coping I don't find it easy to lock my wheels into it - even for a basic grind trick like a 50-50. As such, ollieing onto it (which I would do without a second thought if it was a concrete curb), seems like quite a dangerous proposition.
However, after some consideration, I decided lifting my front truck onto the slider and then trying to leverage my back truck on in a kind of backside 50-50 slappy motion, seemed doable. So that's what you can see my try in my latest driveway skateboard session in the video below.
Naturally I did spend some time trying kickflips first as I'm still trying to land these. Unfortunately my mind was more focussed on trying…

On the off chance Kevin Smith or anyone from his organisation happens to read this review, I want to applaud Kevin for personally taking this movie on the road to theatres. I think that's amazing and more directors should release their films that way but...
For the love of God, can you please find a way to release your films so that people in countries you won't be touring in can get to see them sooner... and I don't mean that BS where one streaming service gets the film exclusively for 3-5 months before the DVD/Blu-ray release and wider distribution to other streaming services.
Jay and Silent Bob Reboot Roadshow kicked off mid October of 2019. At the time of writing this it became available on DVD just a week or so ago. I bought a copy as soon as it became available here in Australia. So, about eight months after it released I can finally see it. I can also finally listen to the Smodcast Commentary track Kevin recorded, which has sat on my playlist for at least two months a…

Unlike Chris Guillebeau's other books, such as The $100 Startup, The Happiness of Pursuit is less of a how to guide and more about finding inspiration.
The book is set out in a logical order of sections and chapters starting with why people go on quests, what to expect while on a quest, and then debriefing once a quest is achieved (or not). However there is no ten point plan or step by step guide to achievement.
Instead the book looks at many different case studies of people who have pursued seemingly insurmountable quests, what it took to get started, how they broke everything down into manageable tasks, the problems they faced, and their conclusions after having completed their goal.
Along the way Chris offers practical advice from both his research and as someone who also pursued a quest of visiting every country in the world.
Some of the real case studies include (and many probably wouldn't even spring to mind as a 'quest' in the traditional sense of the word): Master K…

Our first full day at sea on our Queen Elizabeth Cruise was anxiety inducing. For the first time since, I can't even remember we would have no internet access on our mobile phones for at least 24 hours.

If you're new to TET Life, or this is your first post, I'm blogging about a cruise ship holiday my partner, Enigma, and I went on at the end of January 2020 for eight days.

You may like to continue reading from this point or you might like to start from the beginning, Automobiles, Planes, Buses, Trams, and Boats and then click  Queen Elizabeth Cruise 2020 to get the all the posts, in descending order, of how we got here.
Day 2: Sea DayA 'sea day' is exactly what it sounds like, a day spent entirely on board the ship at sea. All cabins have full room service included so we began our day by ordering breakfast in bed as the ship made its way to Adelaide.
Although the food you can order to your cabin is pretty much the same as what you can get from the various restaurants, …

When you think of drones (the little quadcopter with a camera type rather than the more dangerous airstrike type) you tend to think of big cinematic landscape video often used as B-Roll by many Youtube channels.
As great as that is I've been keeping my eye on the object tracking and autonomous flying capabilities of smaller consumer drones at the lower priced end of the market. 
As a solo video creator one of the things I can't do on my own is have a camera follow me as I move through an environment on my skateboard. Having a drone camera that can just lock onto me, and follow me as I ride my skateboard without me having to control the drone at all, opens up many possibilities for more dynamic video.
Initially I tried a couple of low cost selfie drones that were specifically marketed as ideal for filming yourself. The Elfie was my first selfie drone and did not meet up with the expectations of it's marketing. I could not get it to hover in place at all.
I was then gifted a Fli…

On May 10th 2020 I turned 50 years old. While younger me never imagined I'd still be skating at 50, I have always said, Tony Hawk (one of the world's best skaters from my generation) is only two years older than me. When he decides to quit that gives me two more years before maybe I'll consider it. He hasn't quit yet.
While I'm not nearly as good as him I still enjoy being on a skateboard, and working on getting back to a level of ability that I had back in my twenties. That said, kickflips were not my forte, even in my twenties.
I reckon I could count on one hand, and still have a finger or two left over, the number of flat ground kickflips I landed. I actually had a greater chance of landing a backside kickflip to tail on a curb than I had of landing a standard kickflip, but even then that wasn't in any way consistent.
So in early March, while the world was in lock down from the pandemic, I thought that would be a good time to attempt to learn kickflips, and lan…