Ian Harding

Inventory

58 posts across 2005–2009 (18 magazine + 40 blog). Ian was one of R4NT's busiest blog hands — the recovered 2008 dump roughly tripled his visible output and clarified him as the resident gear-and-gadget reporter. Magazine pieces cluster in his first two years; the blog feed carries him through to a quieter 2009 sign-off.

Voice

Ian writes with infectious casualness — colloquial, profane, self-aware. The voice reads as a friend narrating over beer: frank opinions tempered with self-deprecating humor. Vivid metaphors (the Z06 will "make you its bitch"; the Prius is slower than a toddler's reading schedule), direct address ("So brace yourself ladies and gents"), and running commentary that reveals his thinking in real time. Footnotes and asides break up earnest passages, creating a conversational rhythm. Sentences sprawl with clauses but rarely feel tangled — practiced informal writing. There's generosity in his detail work: he explains why gear matters before what to buy. On the blog he tightens up to a paragraph or two — link, blockquote, a wry tag at the end — but the same voice carries through.

Topic mix

Ian owned three lanes once you fold the blog in. Gear and vehicles (cars, snowboards, ski bindings, shoes) remained his anchor — the long-form magazine reviews became the canonical reference, and the blog filled in between with auto-show photo dumps, novelty cars, and gondola spec sheets. Tech and Apple emerged almost entirely on the blog: iTunes releases, Photoshop CS2's currency-detection lockdown, Adium, Xbox Live Video Marketplace, and three days of Flickr-driven MacWorld coverage in 2007. Sports, travel, and cultural ephemera filled the rest — NHL/NHLPA dispatches, Vancouver 2010 ticket prices, the Whistler Peak-to-Peak gondola, a Christopher Walken Christmas link, the millionth English word ("Web 2.0," to his outrage). His magazine voice stretched out; his blog voice acted as a notebook.

Evolution

• 2005 (magazine ambition): the flagship year — top-five cars taxonomy, the Kingston-to-Calgary road-trip diary, the Jarhead essay, plus the first wave of blog quick-hits on Adium, iTunes, and the Royal Tyrrell Museum.
• 2006 (split widens): still producing magazine cornerstones (the two Gear Up For Winter pieces, the Auto Show 2006 walk-around) while the blog turns into a near-weekly feed of tech links and auto-industry chatter.
• 2007 (blog dominance): only one magazine piece (AutoShow 2007); the blog carries the year, headlined by his MacWorld 2007 trip — three sequential Flickr-photo posts that read like a live travelogue.
• 2008 (late peak): Spore disappointment, two Star Wars: Clone Wars takes, an Indiana Jones return, and the technical Alpine Touring binding comparison — gear-nerd Ian's last great spec-sheet.
• 2009 (sign-off): four blog posts, mostly hockey-jersey reveals and Olympic-era housekeeping, then quiet.

Standout pieces

1. Top Five — Audacious car manifesto; argues taste through specific machines. The worst-cars section is merciless.
2. Kingston to Calgary — Epic road-trip diary. Narrative momentum and granular observation balance perfectly.
3. Jarhead — War-film essay that interrogates realism in cinema; personal and analytical at once.
4. Gear Up For Winter — Practical guide that becomes cultural document; captures early-2000s snowsports aesthetics.
5. Gear Up For Winter: Snowboarding — Companion piece with depth and humor; explains binding types for novices without condescension.
6. Alpine Touring: Binding Comparison — Technical research masquerading as blog post; fills a gap he identified (no multi-brand comparison existed).
7. Nike Shox Shoes — Product review that earns trust through personal running data (10K race time, placement).
8. Spore — A phase-by-phase autopsy of his first purchased video game in seven years. Disappointment delivered with anatomical patience — the Cell Phase paragraph is a small classic.
9. MacWorld 2007 — Three-post Flickr travelogue from San Francisco that doubles as a snapshot of late-2000s Apple fandom in its native habitat.

Throughlines

Ian is a documenter — someone who tests gear, travels, experiences, and reports back with specifics. His pieces work because they honor the reader's time: comparative specs, price points, wear-testing results. He's quietly philosophical too — the Jarhead review probes what film teaches us; the road-trip diary meditates on leaving home. The full blog feed adds a second throughline: he's a Canadian fan in love with infrastructure projects (the Peak-to-Peak gondola, Vancouver 2010 jerseys and ticket prices, the AB campground reservation system) and equally suspicious of corporate weasel-words (the "Web 2.0" millionth-word post is a small rant, the Photoshop CS2 currency block reads as a polite alarm bell).

Fun details

• The "SoCo" in his login is short for Southern Comfort, and the byline never lets you forget it.
• His Flickr handle, ski_bumm, surfaces in every photo-essay link — a one-word self-portrait.
• The 2006 "Cocaine" energy-drink post lives one click from the Xbox Live Video Marketplace post; his beat was wider than his beat.
• He flags Christopher Walken's Twelve Days of Christmas as the year's best holiday gift to readers — and then steps out of the way and lets Walken's prose do the work.
• For someone so voluble, he rarely editorializes beyond the material — the Prius's slowness gets dismissed via performance numbers, not rants.

The arc

Five years leave a clear portrait of a specific kind of taste: activity-driven, detail-obsessed, allergic to hype. Ian was the magazine's most reliable gear evangelist and, on the blog, its most cheerful aggregator — equally happy testing AT bindings in the Selkirks and forwarding a Cracked.com link with a one-line tag. The voice never wavered between forms; only the word count changed.