About

Hi. I'm Ziggy the Hamster, or you might prefer to call me by my real name, Keith Gable. I use he/him/they/them pronouns, am a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, and live in Richmond, California.

I've been programming nearly my entire life. My elementary school had Apple ][e and Apple IIGS computers that I learned BASIC on. Around 1995, we got our first home computer - an IBM PCjr - and I learned that version of BASIC as well. For a few years, I used this system to connect to Oklahoma City area BBSes and do the kind of things that kids these days would probably do with Minecraft, until I eventually got a more modern machine around 1998 and could run Windows 3.1. I learned QuickBASIC and had sporadic access to the Internet, where I discovered the O.H.R.RPG.C.E. and made some silly games. I didn't end up having the ability to connect to the Internet permanently until around 2000, where I became more active in the O.H.R.RPG.C.E. community.

MSN Chat Era

Around 2001, I got a copy of Visual Basic 6 and started writing l33t h4ck3r tools for the MSN Chat network. Eventually, I developed an interest in reverse engineering and forked an open source Visual Basic 6 IRCd called Pure-IRCd to create FakeMSN Chat Server, which eventually became ignitionServer (current source lives on GitHub). At the time, and probably still today, it was the only open source IRCX server. Its name comes from The Offspring's 1992 album Ignition, and was suggested by someone in the MSN Chat "troupe" I was in at the time. ignitionServer eventually implemented support for migrating configuration from IRCXpro (a commercial IRCX server), which I reverse engineered. The original "FakeMSN Chat Server" permitted the MSN Chat ActiveX control to connect to a non-Microsoft server, and which worked with the majority of third-party clients. I pivoted to more generally supporting IRCX and not reverse engineering the MSN Chat ActiveX control because one of the MSN Chat sysops I had contact with (Koach, if I remember correctly) told me that the MSN Chat team were considering raising concerns to Legal about it.

After MSN Chat

I worked on ignitionServer for several years, and eventually abandoned working on it in college. While being active with the MSN Chat community, I also learned web development and went from FrontPage to Server-Side Includes to Perl to PHP, and finally to Ruby on Rails in 2004. I and the rest of my vo-tech team won a state competition for creating a Rails-based e-commerce site in 2005, and would probably have won the national competition if not for the fact that we did not pack a DVI to VGA adapter and could not locate one before we had to submit our entry. Being that it was 2005, the entry submission had to be an entirely local server, complete with keyboard/mouse/monitor.

In 2004, I started using FreeBSD as my daily driver operating system - my first non-Microsoft OS - and eventually moved to Gentoo Linux in 2005, which I used for a long time: I have done an in-place upgrade from 32-bit to 64-bit, and took my original 2005 install on an AMD Athlon XP all the way until I stopped using Gentoo on an Intel Core i7 around 2014. I ended up needing to dual boot Windows because I also participated in a lot of LAN parties and even the commercial forks of Wine didn't play every game. I was also frequently the guy who needed to reinstall Windows at the LAN party. FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8 (I still remember almost all of this key today).

At this point, I was basically only active in the web development community. You'll find me in the Firefox 1.0 New York Times Ad (but not the original run, because they made a mistake, and the fixed version I am actually in seems to be lost to time), and if you search hard enough, you'll probably find whatever cringey teenager thing I suggested to Spread Firefox that resulted in a bunch of adults doxxing me on SomethingAwful (thank you for that). Being active on Spread Firefox also got me a Firefox challenge coin, but I can't find the thread about this to link.

Windows Vista Era

Toward the end of high school and into college, I got deep down the RDF/RSS rabbit hole and the W3C standards that came out in this weird time between when Internet Explorer stopped being the dominant browser, Firefox was no longer in need of spreading, and Google had yet to show exactly how little they cared about their "don't be evil" motto. I spent a ton of time on Freenode, met a ton of awesome people, and spitballed ideas with other similarly minded people, particularly around the Semantic Web. Some of them went on to co-develop standards like ActivityPub and JSON-LD. I was around on Freenode when news of lilo's unfortunate passing due to a hit-and-run driver was shared, and I was on Freenode during its demise.

Present Day

As school and eventually work got in the way, I stopped updating my blog frequently except via posts automatically shared from Instagram, and basically only got involved in communities I needed to be in to do my job. That has primarily been the Ruby community, but I have spent enough time on the AWS forums to have a thread (dead link due to AWS re:Post killing the old forum and the Wayback Machine not saving it) turn into an internal meme in the same way that Low-flying-hawk did. Maybe one day I will tell that story in a blog post.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I started to get more involved in the communities I love, and am still working toward that goal. I actually am starting this blog back up with the intent on sharing more long-form content than is reasonable on the Fediverse, to hopefully be a more active part of the communities I consider myself a part of.

My Career

There's a lot to talk about. I started doing freelance sysadmin and web development work in high school and ended up being the second engineer at a startup that eventually got acquired by Amazon. This page is long already, so if you want to read more, there is a separate page. You'll also find my resume there.

Meta

I've had a blog of some description since I was like 11 or 12. I've brought over some of the posts from then, but I am leaving quite a few of them behind. The posts I'm leaving out are not representative of who I am today, don't really have anything meaningful to say, and are from a part of my life when I was deeply rooted in an evangelical church. These days, I'm a bi atheist, and when I read some of the things I wrote, I am deeply ashamed of them. If you were around back then and found anything I wrote hurtful, I'm sorry.

Probably related to the aforementioned religious trauma, I also did not realize that I'm a furry until the end of 2023 despite spending nearly my entire life online with a fursona: the ignitionServer icon is my fursona, my avatar on all of my iterations of blogs except the most recent one on Tumblr has been my fursona, my Steam avatar has always been my fursona, friends both online and IRL refer to me as my character and have for literal decades, and I have had art of my fursona before I even had a consistent connection to the Internet. I guess that I never quite drew the connection that the character I've spent most of my life anthropomorphizing as my online persona was a "fursona", and also had some misconceptions about what it meant to be "furry".

Acknowledgements

The original character design for Ziggy the Hamster was done by me and my sister, Krystal Pinson, around the year 2000. The original was on paper and scanned in using a cheap parallel port scanner on Windows 95. I colored it in using 16-bit Paint Shop Pro because it was free. Several other character versions were done in 2000 and 2001.

In 2023, I commissioned Kalanit Saidon to reimagine Ziggy as a Sonic OC, and have since commissioned METEORLIMIT to do a few pieces (which you see around this site today).

This site's theme is a heavily modified version of Cactus by Pieter Robberechts and borrows some ideas from Soatok's blog, Dhole Moments.

Compliance

I have a privacy policy, but TL;DR, this is a static site and I do not have the capability of collecting personal information.