Who am I?

I'm lroop. I live in Pittsburgh, PA with three cats and one really awesome human. I attended Carnegie Mellon University from 2007 to 2012 and earned a bachelor's and masters in electrical & computer engineering with a minor in photography. I was (and still often am) quite involved in the CMU Computer Club.

Stuff I Like:

• Computing History
• I've helped run Demosplash, a demoparty and retro gaming festival at CMU since 2011.
• I have a collection of vintage computers, game consoles, interesting handheld devices, and whatnot. Maybe when I have some more free time I'll inventory them.
• Computers and technology in general
• Cats
• Cooking, baking in particular
• Here are some recipes I've collected over the years.
• I spent some time trying to recreate Gullifty's peanut butter truffle pie that I had fond memories of as an undergrad in college.
• Music
• History and Vintage Stuff
• I'm a fan of mid-century architecture and industrial design. A few years ago I bought a house built in the late 1950s and spent a lot of time stripping out wallpaper and carpeting that was added later, refinishing floors, etc. to make the place look more like it would have when new.
• I have a small collection of mostly vintage cast iron cookware and enjoy cooking with it.
• Also on the cooking note, I find vintage kitchenware and appliances interesting. Sunbeam Radiant Control toasters are particularly interesting to me for the clever engineering and great industrial design behind them. Osterizer Cyclomatic blenders are cool too, nobody's made a webpage about those that I know of, maybe I will someday.

Other Internet things I will admit to being me:

For a variety of mostly privacy-related reasons I am not active on most mainstream social media sites. I had a Facebook account once upon a time but deleted it after the Cambridge Analytica scandal. I don't use Twitter, whoever has the handle "lroop" on there isn't me.

I've been an IRC user since the early 2000s. Currently I'm most active on OFTC and Libera as lroop, but you may also find me on DALnet as ClarusWorks. (It's a cheesy pun about the ClarisWorks office suite for classic Mac OS and Clarus the Dogcow if you're curious.)

I do use Mastodon. If you haven't heard of it, it's like Twitter, but federated and built on open-source software. Specifically, I have an account on the instance retro.social. You'll mostly find pictures of retro computers I'm working on or pictures of my cats being cute there. I think Mastodon encompasses some of the good things about the old Internet and today's Internet as well, it's distributed and not-for-profit, but can do things like alert your phone in realtime to let you know somebody has mentioned you as well.

I do have a Reddit account. Reddit is huge, there are some obnoxious subreddits but there are plenty of worthwhile ones too. /r/pittsburgh can be a good resource for local Pittsburgh happenings.

Why does this website look straight out of 1995?

First and foremost I'm not a web designer. I learned basic HTML years ago and haven't bothered to learn more. Also, as a vintage computer enthusiast there's something nice about having a page that will render just fine on a 25 year old machine.