Doggerel Woof:
I'm autistic and literal but I write doggerel. You can read some of the doggerel at this link.
It started in 2012 during a previous set of legal cases. At the time, Bonsai Kitten, who some Linux people know as a Gentoo figure, said that my mental circuits had been shaken up and were getting a good workout.
About me:
I'm in my mid-60s. I'm autistic to the point where I wouldn't have been mainstream-able if things had been slightly different.
Normal speech under speech is difficult for me. At the same time, if I'm in the groove, I'm polished. Two strangers have come up to me in the past decade to tell me that I should be on the radio. It's an odd thought.
I was High Honors in Math and Honors in C.S. at U.C. Berkeley. I've been a software developer and architect since 1978, three years before graduation.
Notable projects:
* Sole software developer for 50% of the U.S. Vote (1981)
* Sole software developer for DTIC microfiche project (1982) — see below
* I designed one of Adobe's printer protocols (1990)
* 'C' compiler developer for Rockwell rocket launches (1990s)
* Anti-terrorism for U.K. NCIS after 9/11 (2001)
* Fighter-jet database for Northrop-Grumman (2004 to 2009)
* Restructured development side of a corporation named WHI (2014)
* Anti-fraud for two national chains (2010s)
* I've spent 29 years on creating my own Linux distro (1995 to 2023)
* No Child Left Behind (2014)
The DTIC project is my favorite professional project in 45 years. Note: DTIC stands for Defense Technical Information Center.
The government had a pile of classified microfilm that it needed to convert to microfiche. An Air Force colonel named Robert G. Pomeroy built a giant camera to handle the job. I was the sole developer for the software. 450 pages of dense 8085 assembly code.
Robert G. Pomeroy died of Parkinsons in the 2010s. A coworker of ours told me that she cried when she heard. It's strange being old. I feel that a mistake has been made somewhere.
My Skills:
Cloud: Azure Synapse, Databricks, data lake, containers, VPS
Software languages: 'C' for nearly 50 years, Perl 5, PHP 4 to 8,
Python 2 and 3, Go, bash, PowerShell, PySpark, Forth, FORTRAN, Java,
JavaScript, Lua, R, Ruby, Tcl
Data languages: MariaDB and MySQL, MS-SQL, SQLite3, PostgreSQL,
JSON, CSS 3, HTML 5, XML, XSLT, YAML
Operating systems: Linux, BSD UNIX, Windows 3 through 11, SunOS 4,
Solaris, MS-DOS, DEC VMS, Data General RDOS and AOS
Other experience: Anti-fraud, data forensics, multimedia
In some respects, as a song that I like goes, “I'm the best that's ever been”. The song is, of course, “Devil Went Down to Georgia”. I've lived a wasted life, though, because I put everything into work.
I advise young people not to do this.
My home town:
I was born on the East Coast. But I grew up in Walnut Creek, CA. When we moved there in the mid-1960s, Walnut Creek was a small town. It still had an Old West hitching post behind one building. But the town went from Old West to megapolis in one generation.
Love at First Sight:
In the 1960s and early 1970s, computers didn't really exist for ordinary people outside of TV shows and movies and mythology. But there was never much doubt that I was going to have something to do with them.
The book below is one that I had when I was about 12 years old. It's for real; the idea was to build a computer out of paperclips.
My biological family:
The only biological relatives I had who mattered are decades dead. Anatol, I loved you.
Such family as remains has come from online.
This said, I'm the oldest surviving brother of four brothers. My parents are believed to still be alive at age 90. But I know little about the present doings of these people.
My parents are Jim and Grace Kiraly, both born in 1933. They resided in Walnut Creek, CA for decades but are presently in the Solvang, CA old folks home.
Jim was violent and abusive due. One factor was that Jim's father Frank had punched Jim's mother Ann through a glass door when Jim was small and had then left. Jim internalized that type of behavior.
One of my earliest memories, age 3 or 4, is of wandering into the living room very late at night. Jim had torn up the plants. I wasn't quite able to understand what had happened to them.
Grace was a pseudo-intellectual, fluffy and pretentious in some respects but made of steel in others. Silly and unstoppable at the same time. It was an odd combination.
Grace was also a Fundie. Not a nice one. She looked down on Blacks and
considered gays to be criminals.
If you've heard of the Duggar Family or seen the docuseries Shiny Happy People, Jim and Grace were involved with that group; i.e., Institute in Basic Life Principles.
In my teens, Jim and Grace sent me to classes that that group ran. There was a big red binder and the lessons talked like this: “Q. What if my parents tell me to do something wrong? A. Such a question should perish on the lips of a Christian child.”
The headmaster of that group, Bill Gothard, used to expose his penis to girl students. But I don't think that I ever met him.
I never stood up to my parents. However, one day in my 20s, I had some fun
with Grace. She was ranting about gays and I told her,
“You know, the son of one of your closest friends is gay.
You know him.” The fun part is that I wouldn't tell Grace who it
was. I just left her to wonder.
The gay young man was Roger Ceragioli. He was an early gay activist. Now, a young man of the same age that I know, Edgy McEdge, has changed his name to Stella, is taking the female injections, and a young lover of the same nature has moved in with him and it's no big deal.
Of course, I'm expected to say “young woman” and ”her” now.
Times change. When I was in middle school, one boy took me behind the P.E. room and shouted at me, “why are you such a fem?!” He was annoyed because I didn't like to hurt people. That was the definition of masculinity and proper conduct at the time.
My father Jim Kiraly used to smash things. He broke Grace's nose once. But Grace shrugged it all off because she saw the abuse as God's Will.
In 2012, Jim filed a lawsuit against me to get a gag order related to violence against Grace. I was in a wheelchair at the time, focused on other things, and had no intention of talking about the issue. But of course that didn't matter.
Opposing Counsel in the current gag-order cases, Christine Long of Berliner-Cohen, has filed an allegation that says I violated a court order in that case. Note: That isn't even a permitted allegation. However, Christine is prone to violations of all types.
In fact, the Court threw out that case. There wasn't even a settlement in the Court's jurisdiction. We'll come back to the question of Christine's veracity in the State Bar complaint. Presently, there are more pressing issues.
The lawsuit didn't go well for Jim. He had cause to regret it. Of course, it wiped out my life savings, cost me my home of 25 years, and rendered me a transient, so there's that.
My three younger brothers are:
Tom Kiraly, born 1960, former VP of Humana and Concentra and current CFO of Hanger, Inc. Tom lived 3,000 miles from me and we had very limited interactions. However, in 2012, Tom was angling to get a new job and thought publicity would hurt his chances. So, he joined our father Jim in the attempt to get a gag order.
Tom always was a sweetheart. Well, not really.
Tom resides in Austin, Texas so as to be near Hanger, Inc. A few years ago, I had a courier deliver a bottle of wine to Tom in Austin as a birthday gift. Tom didn't seem to want the bottle, so I told the courier to keep it for himself.
Ken Kiraly, born 1963, lead designer for the Amazon Kindle and past or present lead at Amazon's “secret” development center Lab126.
Ken didn't file against me in 2012 but he supported Jim and Tom. That's O.K. Ken and I hadn't been close since the years when I used to take him out of the house to prevent Jim from punching his face in.
I think that Lab126 is in Cupertino, CA, but Ken himself has spent most of the time in recent decades in Menlo Park, CA. Menlo Park is notable for a bookstore named “Kepler's” that was famous in the past.
Scott Kiraly, born 1965. Scott was mentally and physically disabled. I was the only brother to treat Scott as human. This didn't make a difference.
Jim and Grace once sent Scott to a Christian facility in Grass Valley stop him from harming Ken. I was the only brother to visit Scott there.
Jake, a minister-type friend, says that the Christian facility might have been Christian Encounter Ranch in Grass Valley, CA.
Scott eventually had a life of sorts. But his weight apparently hit 300 to 400 pounds and that is negative for people in their 50s. I don't know if he's still alive.
One fun story:
My father Jim Kiraly was a toad. A waste of skin as two of my brothers were. But I have about 3 fun memories related to Jim. It's not much for a lifetime, but it's something.
Jim set out to teach me how to ride a bicycle. The idea was simple. We lived on a hill. So, all that I needed to do was ride the bicycle downhill. Gravity would take me.
The problem with this was... Jim forgot to tell me how to do the brakes. And there were rosebushes with thorns at the bottom. I had to make a decision: ride right into the thorns or jump onto gravel. I chose the latter and probably still have a few scars.