The current free ebook is located at this link:
http://haggishell.com/ridgeproject.pdf

For details about the ebook, click here.

121225.XM1. Today was Christmas Day. Phenek told me that I should purchase a Christmas decoration for fun. So I went out in the mid-afternoon and bought a few of them. The photo below shows the result.

Presenting the Coderland Christmas Friends :D

121225.XM2. Phenek has expressed an interest in Coderland photos so I've started to take some. There isn't much that's significant close by but I've enjoyed my attempts to do this again after decades.

The current gadget is limited to relatively low-quality photos. If circumstances permit I'd like to get a real camera again in 2013 and see what I can do with it.

It's been rainy in Coderland. But I don't mind the rain and these plants seemed happy about it.

121224.XM1. The photo below shows the birthplace of Silicon Valley or one of them. I live a couple of blocks from the scene.

The business is dead. It was one of several produce stores that tried to occupy the building. In the 1960s, this was the site of the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory.

121224.XM2. Kenneth Kiraly is said to be the inventor of the Amazon Kindle and a technical lead for Lab126. He lived in the apartment complex shown in the photo below for a while. It was located a few blocks from my own apartment complex.

Kenneth eventually grew tired of the complex and moved away. But it served his needs towards the end of the 1980s. Only the latter part of the decade. Most of the 1980s, he lived with me or his parents, James and Grace Kiraly.

Kenneth Kiraly was manipulative and he therefore had an easy life. To the best of my recollection, during his multi-year stay with me, he didn't pay for rent, food, electricity, or other expenses. I paid for pretty much everything.

Kenneth liked to curse me even while I was buying our dinner. So eventually I asked him to pay rent. He moved out immediately. Our parents provided his housing after that until he was roughly age 26.

Around that age, 26, Kenneth was ready to get his first apartment. He chose the one in the photo.

Grace Kiraly and I took Kenneth to a diner to celebrate his transition to adulthood.

There was an accident during the meal. My skull was cracked. It's my understanding that I ended up with a subdural hematoma. The incident happened over two decades ago but I never recovered.

Some years later I ate another meal with Kenneth and was injured again. I guess you could say that Kenneth was not a good luck charm for me.

Life is interesting. You do what you can but things happen. This is normal.

121224.XM3. I talk to strangers more readily these days. Usually it's to offer help.

Is this altruism? Difficult to say.

I'd like to get back to researching altruisum. I need to write about why some people are similar to Christ — seeking to help those in need or at risk — and why others are like James Kiraly, Grace Kiraly, Thomas Kiraly, and Kenneth Kiraly — self centered and full of loathing for the vulnerable.

I can't work on the project much presently. I'm dealing with legal attacks initiated by my abuser, James Kiraly.

The best I can do, most of the time, is to help people myself. To attempt to follow Christ in a manner that is different from that of the Kiralys. A manner that does not mock Him. To reject the piety of people like James and Grace, the self congratulatory blindness that defines those who see what they wish to see.

In 2012, I volunteered to work on software for a brain injury clinic. The Kiralys took the project away from me. And me away from the project. My family hurt people who didn't need to be hurt further. But this is not the sort of thing that troubles the Kiralys greatly.

I do what I can do online now. But I look for ways to interact with people face to face and to help when it's possible.

Little of this passed through my head on Christmas Eve as I chatted with strangers at a store. I just wanted to help.

I was waiting to use the machine shown in the photo below. It converts coins to dollars. A middle-age woman and her son, college age, used it ahead of me.

They were Russian. The woman did not speak English. The son had not dealt with this type of contraption before. I talked them through the buttons that needed to be pushed. The menus that urged them to provide personal information. Even appliances try to trick people these days.

In the end the machine did its job and changed more than a thousand coins into dollars for them.

A simple encounter. And I'll never see these people again. But they were real in a way the Kiralys were not. They thanked me for my assistance. Something the Kiralys have rarely done in half a century.

The Kiralys look at me and see an object. A thing to be used. A manifestation of the other; the shadow that haunts the dreams of the primitive. Others look at me and see somebody kind and useful.

If it comes to a dividing line between myself and the Kiralys, a way to tell us apart, I think the line is a simple question. Who honors God? And who reviles Him?

As a technical note, the object in the photo with little feet painted on it was some sort of piggy bank. The people involved saved pennies in it for seven years.

121223. The picture below shows Coderland on a rainy winter day. The buildings are typical Mountain View apartment complexes.

121222.XM1. Here are some Coderland photos.

First, I live in Silicon Valley. Mountain View, to be precise. My area, which is near Stanford University, is urban. There is nothing interesting close by other than restaurants and small businesses. I live next to a few small “malls” and that's about it.

Google and some other major firms are located in my city but they're on the other side of town.

Here's the mall that's closest to me. I live a short distance behind the stores in the direction that we're facing.

The mall is very small. The Sprouts store that you see here is new. That space was occupied for a decade or longer by a book and music store. Tower Records.

Tower Records stayed open until midnight most nights. I'd work until nearly midnight. Then I'd drive down to the store, buy a book before the place closed, and go to eat dinner at a bar and grill that also stayed open late.

121222.XM2. There are few signs of the Christmas season in my part of town outside the stores.

Here's somebody who strikes me as an anomaly. A Santa Claus who resembles the older St. Nicholas character, tucked away in the corner of a modern and busy convenience store.

121222.XM3. Most apartment dwellers in my area don't have trees like Phenek's. They sometimes get toy trees similar to this one. I haven't had a Christmas tree, real or toy, for decades.

121222.XM4. This is a neighborhood restaurant. A bar and grill, actually.

It's located only a few blocks from home and it's good. I prefer the buffet in Santa Clara, though; it has a wider selection and the local restaurant is expensive by my standards.

Regardless, I've eaten at the local place off and on for decades. And this is the restaurant where Nancy Meyer and I ate circa Christmas 2011. I've written about that meal before.

I believe the Kiralys and I shared a meal at this place 20 to 30 years ago. I don't remember the meal as being especially enjoyable.

121222.XM5. I'm not certain, but I believe the shopping cart shown below is a homeless person's home. I encountered it while walking home the other day. I've been concerned about the possibility that this may be my future domicile.

I'm grateful to James Kiraly and Thomas Kiraly for interrupting job searches and hitting me with legal plus medical expenses totalling in the five figures. Grace's and Kenneth's support of James's and Thomas's false and fraudulent actions is also appreciated. I don't mind the homeless possibility issue.

Oh, wait. Actually, I do mind it.

I've known homeless people in the area for 30 years. Some of them have been friends. I'll tell their stories sometime.

I'll say this much now. I felt closer to the homeless people than I did to the Kiralys. The homeless are real. They have sincere feelings. The Kiralys, I believe, do not.

121222.XM6. Around the year 2000, I was in an unusual auto accident. I'll write about what happened another time.

For now, I'll say that I haven't driven much since that day. So I go most places by bus or train. For bus travel, I often take the #22 or #522 line. They travel from Palo Alto, north of me, to San Jose, south of me, and back again.

The #522 is better because it's an express route; i.e., it's faster. Here is one of the faithful #522 buses arriving to take me to see my attorney.