About
Who
I’m Austin Ziegler. I’m a mid-thirties software designer and developer living in Toronto, Ontario and working in Oakville, about 30 km west of where I live. I work at EVault, which was acquired by Seagate in early 2007. In November 2006, I married Anne-Marie. I’m newly-wed, but we’ve been together for eleven years now, both refugees of alt.society.generation-x, where we met.
I work with C++ and C# all day, and have been heavily active in the Ruby community for five years. Greg Brown and Michael Milner have recently picked up maintenance on PDF::Writer (my most-well-known library) for which I’m grateful; I simply haven’t had time to work on it for almost two years. I may not be developing much open source Ruby right now, but I’m still active in the Toronto Ruby community and try to use Ruby whenever I can at work. I’m also in the process of learning Erlang and Objective C (and am interested in Nu when it’s released). I work with several Unix variants and Windows daily, but bought a MacBook Pro last year and have basically not looked back. It ain’t perfect, but it’s the best computer I’ve used so far.
Where
I can be found in a number of places:
Many of the above are aggregated at my Tumblr “lifestream“.
What
My blog started out as a Ruby-oriented blog, but I have been commenting on a lot more than Ruby since late 2007. A recent post attracted an anonymous comment that has caused me to change certain policies with respect to my blog. I’m also going to make a few things perfectly clear about who I am.
I emigrated to Canada nine years ago from the United States. I earned my Canadian citizenship five years ago. I expect that I will die a citizen of both the United States and Canada unless something goes drastically wrong with the governments of one of the countries.
If you’re an American, you’ll find my politics left-wing liberal; that’s okay, most Canadians are liberal compared to Americans, even the conservatives. If you’re a Canadian, you’ll find my politics a bit more subtle and across the spectrum. I’ve voted NDP for the last couple of elections (both Provincial and Federal), but that’s mostly because I thought the candidates were good for my riding. If a high-quality Progressive Conservative candidate came through the riding, I could see possibly voting for them, because I don’t think that Red Tories are a bad thing at all. Too bad Red Tories don’t really exist in modern Canada, effectively killed off in turn by Mike Harris, Ralph Klein, and Stephen Harper. (Okay, it probably started with Brian Mulroney, but he’s before my time as a Canadian.) For Americans that’s sort of like wishing for Goldwater conservative in the days of Bush neocons, but that doesn’t even capture how absolutely progressive Red Tories were.
So, be warned that you might not like what I have to say. That’s fine. Both Canada and the U.S. have free expression, and I support that. If you don’t like what I have to say (or even if you do!), feel free to express it on a comment to the post in question. But be prepared to own your words. I no longer accept anonymous comments. I do promise that I will not edit what you say in your comments if they are published, and that I will publish comments that I disagree with as long as the words are owned.
One word of warning: just because I’ve mostly posted about Ruby in the past doesn’t mean that this is a Ruby blog. It also doesn’t mean that I’m done posting about Ruby. It just means that I’m not doing enough Ruby to talk about right now.
What (Part II)
My web site name, Halostatue, is based on a joke my father told me years ago. It’s a stereotype joke, but it works very well using Newfoundlanders (a Newfie I know knew the joke!), Arkansians, Alabamans, or just generic Southerners. It’s becoming a little less relevant since the joke was first formulated, probably sometime in the 1930s, but it’s a great name and it was available in all the forms that I wanted it.
This old Southerner wins the lottery. He’s wealthy now, so he wants to have a mansion built. Of course, he’s a backwoods man, so he’s not exactly up to speed on the times. He does know, however, that New York architects are the best in the world, so he hires himself a New York architect. He tells the architect what sort of mansion that he wants. As the architect is leaving, the old man says “I want you to make sure that there’s a halostatue in the mansion.” The New York architect doesn’t want to jinx this lucrative contract, so he just nods and leaves, promising to come back in a couple of weeks with a model of the mansion.
Two weeks later, the architect visits the old man with the model. “I’ve made sure that there’s a halostatue in the mansion.” He points to the model of the front hall, which has a statue of an angel in full resplendance with a halo around it. The architect’s pride is punctured, however, when the old man says “That’s not a halostatue. It’s pretty, but it’s not a halostatue.” The architect shrugs his shoulders and promises to be back the next week with another model.
The architect returns with a new model the next week. The statue, this time, is just the angel, without a halo. Once again, the old man says that it’s not correct. “I told ya, I want a halostatue.” Again, a promise to return the next week.
The final week, the architect returns with yet another model. This model is far simpler, consisting of a pole and a halo. Unsurprisingly, the old man is not happy. “I thought you New York architects were hotshots and you knew what you were talking about. I’ll have to hire someone who knows what they are doing.”
The architect, however, is just a little torqued. “Sir, I have brought you three models for your mansion. None of them have satisfied you, and it is only over this one item — the halostatue. In all of my years as an architect, I’ve never heard of a halostatue. So, I have to ask you. What the hell is a halostatue?”
The old man looks at the architect as if the architect were from Mars. “You don’t know what a halostatue is? It’s one of them things that goes ring, ring and then you pick it up and say Halo, ’s’tat-chu?“
