Who are you?
I’m Ryan Pierce. I live in Chicago with my partner, Elizabeth Koprucki, and a ball python.
I’m an IT professional by trade, currently studying Electrical Engineering at Arizona State University, but I have a wide variety of interests, including general aviation (I’m an instrument rated private pilot), electronics, physics, nuclear tourism, glassblowing, beer brewing, and just plain making cool stuff. Bonus points if it is Steampunk.
So why this blog?
Well, I joined Pumping Station: One, a hacker space in Chicago, and started picking up new hobbies and making stuff. And there’s a saying at PS:One that it’s not done until you’ve blogged about it.
I’d previously had a website, with hand-coded HTML that looked like it was written in 1994. A catastrophic Linux server crash took it down, and while I eventually recovered the data, I figured it wasn’t worth putting back up again. So I set up WordPress on the replacement server and started this blog.
I’ve got a backlog of fun stuff I’ve done or built, which I intend to post here eventually.
What’s with the name?
My blog title The Inventor’s Workshop? That’s all Elizabeth’s fault. She gave me a cologne she blended for Christmas, with a theme of an “alt-Victorian inventor cooking up something mysterious in his workshop” that had a label with vector drawn gears. (The gears will be used in an upcoming project!)
The domain name mackenziegems.com? I used to be very active in the Society for Creative Anachronism. In the SCA, I was known as The Honorable Lord Ryan Murdoch Mackenzie. And back then, one of my primary hobbies was faceting gemstones. So Mackenzie Gems was also my business site.