Wired Cola

I probably shouldn't be proud of this. A summary of activities for which I was paid little or no money.

Name: Ryan Cousineau

Aging: Fairly well, except for that bald spot

Hobbies and Activities:

Photography

Avid photographer since age 10. Member of darkroom club in high school. Got bored with film for a long time, then fell for digital photography hard. It still feels like being a hobo at Big Rock Candy Mountain. It will take something amazing for me to return to film. Currently looking to buy a dSLR, a purchase I can just barely justify this year. It should be a hoot. My interests tend towards close-ups, low-light hand-held portraits and candids, and amusing dog photos.

Videography

Using a wide variety of borrowed gear, I shot this:

And using my own gear, I shot this:

And this:

The Dog Spends most of its Day on the Couch from Ryan Cousineau on Vimeo.

The dog is a great foil, as are cyclocrossers. Both tend to fall down amusingly.

Games and Amusements

I used to tell people I was pretty good at trivia. Then I went on Test the Nation, and proved that I was so-so. In the realm of video games, I am broadly terrible, but I have a modest collection of obsolete consoles and old console games. I own two copies of Warlords, a brilliant bit of multi-player silliness for the Atari 2600, and for some reason have continued to specialize in 4-player games and accessories, despite hardly ever convincing anyone to play with me. There's always something better to do.

Sports

"Road racing imitates life, the way it would be without the corruptive influence of civilization. When you seen an enemy lying on the ground, what's your first reaction? To help him to his feet. In road racing you kick him to death." - Tim Krabbe, The Rider

1970s-2000: I rode bikes a little

Fall 2001: motorcycle broke down. I pull my old mountain bike out of storage and ride it to work.

By 2003 I was racing. By 2004 I had joined Escape Velocity, the biggest, most service-oriented racing club in British Columbia. They are an amazing group of weirdos fully dedicated to the delusion that training and bike racing are fun. Aside from frequently doing badly in bike races, I spend a lot of time fussing with the website or giving bad mechanical advice to riders who should know better. I am a small cog in a big machine, but it's an excellent machine: the prime mover of road racing in this province.

Last year I attempted, with a friend, my most ambitious ride ever. It was not a race. We failed. It was great.

Reconfiguring

I know how to do a lot of things just well enough to impress people who don't know how to do those things. I can solder (badly), do auto mechanics (incompetently), fiddle with computers (sort of okay), and generally come up with bad ideas at torrid paces. I put this all under the rubric of "reconfiguring" because I am most interested in putting things together in novel ways.

It's not fabricating: I hardly ever make my own parts, because I have no facilities to do so. It's not mere assembly: Ikea furniture doesn't hold my interest for long. But if I can combine components to do something that was not previously tried, or saves money, or just makes a few people think about wider possibilities, I get happy.

Food

Aside from being a functional cook (with occasional obscenities like peanut butter and chocolate chip microwave sandwiches) and an enthusiastic eater and drinker, I make crab apple jelly just about annually. I even took a shot at crab apple wine a few years back. We'll see...

Recycling

I'm not much of an environmentalist. But I love repurposing trash. Clean-Up Week is my favorite holiday.

Nerding

Right, as if my hobbies weren't nerdy enough. Somehow I always seem to be the guy who is selling 30 sets of bicycle fenders, or buying $500 worth of flashlights on behalf of friends, or reformatting someone's hard drive, or giving some sort of nerdy advice (buy this computer, buy that camera). I'm proud of teaching myself what Drupal is and then putting that knowledge to work in several different projects. Some of them were even work-related.

I like fussing and fiddling. I hope to spend a little more time Making in the future, as space and time permit. I like to read nerdy things, and write very nerdy things. It's fun, and I hope it makes the world a little less mysterious and a little larger.