Welcome to my personal website! I am a 30-something retro tech enthusiast living in middle America.
I reside in a small town of less than 1000 population near the college town that I grew up in. I share a living space with my longtime partner and our two pets.
Outside of my day job, I work various odd jobs including computer maintenance/upkeep. I value my free time and aspire to live frugally, learning to forgo consumerism.
I recommend viewing this website on a lower resolution monitor or mobile device, otherwise you may want to turn up the zoom on your browser! You can look at this place as a hub for all the different things I've put out into the world that are worth sharing. I also wanted to use this as an opportunity to learn a bit about HTML/CSS, but in this particular case I opted to use more amateur coding techniques and rely partly on Microsoft FrontPage to get a feel for what making a website was like when I was a kid around the turn of the millenium.
My only real exposure to web development was summer school computer class in the early 2000s. We learned how to use Microsoft Publisher to design a simple webpage, and while I enjoyed the experience (I still have the CD-rom that we saved everything on!), I didn't really get to take the next step. I did make some Freewebs sites and Invisionfree forums as a teenager, but very little coding knowledge was involved and I sadly never took the time to ensure that they were preserved.
Since I was too young and apparently busy, my experience with the wild west internet was limited in scope. It probably didn't help that I had very few tech influences in my life growing up; my parents had dial up internet at the house well into the 2000s and didn't hold on to the old computer when the new operating system would come out.
It might've taken 20 years, but I'm finally getting around to learning what the joys of unconstrained, unpolished self expression on the internet can be like. The unified design aesthetic of the modern web feels drab and boring after so long. I love the colorful whimsy of the old web, all the low resolution animated gifs, tiled backgrounds and ugly fonts. So, I hope you'll excuse me if this doesn't end up being the most professional or visually appealing website on the internet, or if my writing leaves something to be desired. I can live with it, I'm learning a skill, expanding my creativity and living out an experience that I should have had long ago.
For a run-down of my interests, check out the interests page. If you're curious about the various things I've put out into the world wide web, head over to see my stuff. If you want to gain an insight on my rambling thoughts, feel free to visit the personal page.
I settled on rootCompute as my internet alias because, well, I like how it sounds. I also feel like it does a decent job concisely expressing what I'm all about.
Tinkering with vintage computers has become a pasttime for me. I still enjoy using CRT displays and old Windows machines, trying out old programs and games that I used to love or never got to experience. I have a keen interest in computers from the Windows 9x era, but I wouldn't mind trying out any retro machine regardless of how old it is.
I also enjoy learning to use Linux more effectively and have always been a big fan of open source and lesser known software. I can never forget my roots.
The following styles are acceptable: rootCompute rootCompute:\ rootCompute:/ rC:\ rC:/ rootcompute
The backslash "\" is used in the Windows file structure while forward slash "/" is used in Linux. I preferred using the backslash in my pictures because I thought it looked slightly better, but it might be confusing with a Linux-inspired name so either one works.