Roadtrippin' Colorado Style

the man, the myth, the legend

Welcome to my newest way to relieve my boredom! This page gives you a little information about me and my hobby of roadgeeking.

The man

Born in July 1976 as Ryan W, I still go by that name today. It's also where I came up with the r-dub name for the site. I have always had an interest in roads my entire life. At a young age, I often begged my parents to drive me through construction sites. I'd then explain what the crews were doing and how the project would end up. Most of the time, even at 3, I was correct. Now that I have a car and a digital camera, I thought I'd continue what I had started oh so many years ago.

The car

Any good roadgeek needs a car. Kinda hard to take picts of roads from your couch. Originally, my choice of wheels was a fuel-saving (35 MPG) gold/tan (WTF is that color, anyway?) 1997 Saturn LS. Now that I managed to completely screw up the engine in that one, I'm on to a '97 burgundy Mitsubishi Mirage. Hey, don't laugh. I picked it up for a song, it only has 83,000 miles on it (as of 2/22/09), and it gets better gas mileage than the Saturn.

The camera

My current view to the world of roadgeeking lies in the Fuji FinePix E550 camera. Not too shabby at all. It has some issues shooting into the sun and when it's extremely overcast, but what digital point and shoot camera doesn't? Originally I used a Canon A320 for my pics. It had issues keeping up with the fast movements inherent in roadgeek photography, as seen in the original pictures on the site. Once I get the pics home, I use Paint.NET to get the pics into a viewable state. It's a freeware Photoshop-esque program available for the Windows environment.

As for the video side of things, I have a Canon camcorder that I mount to the windshield using one of those suction cup mounts. From there, I plug the camcorder into a Dazzle card hooked to my laptop. From there, I record lotsa movies. I'm still using Windoze Movie Mucker to get the vids online only because I don't have the patience to learn a new video editing proggie. I have lots more videos than what I have online, but it just takes too long to format, caption, and music the videos for the time I have available to do it. Oh, well. One of these days I'll hit the lottery and then all bets are off with the site.

The site

This site has become just as much of a hobby as the roadgeeking side of my life has. I'm always fiddling with something here. Currently I am trying to figure out how to manage the sheer volume of pics on my COSMIX section. If you want some more information on the background junk needed to keep this page on the bleeding edge of web design with CSS (the only <table> tag on this site is to get around IE's shortcomings!) and stuff, wander over to my web information page.

Enjoy your stay on r-dub.us. I'm always looking for ideas to better the site. I'm hanging around in MTR. Or you can just email me at the addy below. Thanks for visiting! Me love you long time!