Audrey

My First True Love

It's true that I've had relationships, of many kinds, with various people.

However, only till recently did I realize that, in order to love someone, one need to care, to support, and above all to understand that person's feelings as-is.

I'm glad that I've found my first true love in Isis Kang. This realization is complete -- I'm certain there will be no others.

Porcelain painting is fun!

I'm getting ready for the conference trip in June (to Oslo/NPW, Redmond/Microsoft, Chicago/YAPC::NA, Boston, etc.), and I'd like to prepare some gifts for the kind people who host me and/or joined me at the hackathons.

The last time around I designed some T-shirts, printed via myif.net, with surprisingly good (almost silk-like) fabric. This time around, I've prepared something even more personal: Porcelain dishes!

It turns out that Yingge (a local town known for its porcelain crafts) has outlets letting people paint whatever they like, then pick up the dishes a week later.  So I went there this afternoon, and painted five pieces.

As an utter novice, I chose the easy way -- abstract designs, such as the pattern in Higher-Order Perl (as a gift to MJD), the Haskell logo, SVK's hot-spring icon, and (of course) a lambdamøøse. I'll probably post some photos here next week... :-)

鳳たんです!

Last month when I visited Tokyo, I was very flattered (and pleasantly surprised) when fellow Japanese hackers -- Miyagawa and Takesako in particular -- referred to me as "otori-tan", literally the "phoenix girl", where phoenix is my Chinese chosen name.

The fascinating thing is that this sounds almost exactly the same as the Japanese romanization of "Audrey Tang", my English chosen name. Miyagawa wondered if I knew about this strange coincidence -- I really did not. :-)

Wikipedia has some more information about the -tan suffix, as seen in e.g. the OS-tan phenomenon. After some ego-googling, it seems that this usage started from lolipop's blog, then subsequently propagated to Rocco's and other places.  Lovely!

Active projects.

There are currently three active projects going on in my life, aside from the usual torrent of interactions for my 100ish CPAN modules (and now some Haskell modules).

The first and foremost is, of course, Pugs, to which I allocate 3 full days per week.  I also try to stay on #perl6 as much as I could in other days.

The second one is $job, which takes 2 full days per week, primarily involves hacking Jifty, a very advanced web application toolkit. Just today I've checked in a shiny new Jifty::Dispatcher, based on joint design with Jesse Vincent.

The third one, taking about an hour a day, is working on translating Luna into Chinese. It's an early-adult novel that tackles transgender issues. Although quite easy to read, it covered a wide range of aspects from childhood to adulthood, in a fair and empathic manner.

Similar to Gifted Grownups (my previous non-technical translation), it's good both as a self-help book and as an introduction to the world of certain interesting brain structures. Albeit perhaps not as magical as the first two projects, I do enjoy it nonetheless. :-)

Some random photo.

Today I played with iSight a bit and took a few photo of myself. If you ever wondered how I look like now... :-)

The other Audrey Tang.

I just discovered another Audrey Tang, then I remembered gaal mentioning her in #perl6 the other day.  Apparently she worked at amazon.com and now microsoft.com, and is also a geeky girl who likes shiny gadgets. Cool!

FWIW, Ingy thinks my new name is a good refactoring of the old one; I'm sure people who tried to pronounce my old name would agree. :-)

Why did the journal move?

This is becoming a FAQ on #perl6, so I'll list the reason here briefly.

The short answer is: This makes me more motivated to write.

Part of it feels like the (very early) decision to move #perl6 from irc.perl.org to irc.freenode.net, to encourage more diverse discussion from people focused on non-perl languages, as well as on areas other than  programming language technologies.

Part of it is that I need a backstage journal to write about myself and off-topic metajournaling (such as this entry), and creating two use.perl journals for this would be very confusing.

Part of it is I'd like to put in more multimedia contents -- visiolization pictues, movies, tutorials, podcasts -- and TypePad offers much better support for these things.

Part of it is per-entry categoriestags really helps me ditching the "group everything in Day ###" format, and give separate subprojects the attention they deserve. Archiving and searching is also much easier this way.

Part of it is I have a soft spot for Atom-based publishing, having participated a little bit during its move to IETF standardization.  I look forward to synchronize journals in a SVK-like manner in the future, instead of relying on <textarea> and screen scraping.

Part of it is I really like bright white background and paragraph width that is narrower than the full screen, with drops of purpleish and bluish colors.  It's kinda silly, but I'm a silly girl like that.

Oh and finally, I'm very grateful to Six Apart for their generous offer of hosting this journal.  Thanks folks!

Runtime Typecasting.

Several people asked me to write something linkable about my recent name and gender change, so here's an initial sketch.

All four names (original/new * Chinese/English) are listed on the Wikipedia page about me. The new names had replaced original ones in my passport and national ID card (yes, .tw does have such things), so legal documents -- including copyright notices -- need to carry the new name.

I'm okay with people addressing me with the handle autrijus, but "Audrey Tang" is much preferred over "Autrijus Tang".  I have also changed my IRC nickname from autrijus to audreyt in magnet, ircnet and freenode.

About the gender change: I've been shutting Reality off and lived almost exclusively on the net for many years, because my brain knows for sure that I'm a woman, but the social expectation demanded otherwise -- a classic transgender situation that caused high background anxiety, making it difficult for me to meet and relate to other people.

With love and support from many people (my lover/partner, several camelfolks and lambdafolks, my family, a few real-world friends), I decided to reconcile my outward appearance with my self image (which, among the myriad of gender identity labels, is perhaps closest to a winkte).

Now things had improved a lot after a few minor operations, adjustments in appearance, as well as counseling; more surgeries are expected in the future.

As such, for people writing or speaking in languages that have gender-specific pronouns, I would very much prefer female pronouns for all of past, present and future tenses. Thanks for your understanding. :-)

Backstage...

All the [OT] bits in the old use.perl journal will now go here; namely, my life in general that are not related to programming projects.