hello. i'm neilfred picciotto. isn't the web fun? even though nobody really cares, i can put all this information about me right here for the world to read.

for example, the above photo was a little blurry to begin with, so i blurred it a little more with the gimp. now it's only barely recognizable as me. ok, maybe a little more than barely. but anyway, i bet you really didn't care to know that irrelevant little fact, did you? and yet there it is, for anyone who stops by to find out. isn't the web fun?

i should really find or create a more recent picture. my hair has been purple for years, and here my website still shows me with brown hair. lame.

you're looking at the homepage of the derf himself (that's me).

i've set up a phone photo blog which i can post to from anywhere my treo 600 has service.

i've written a good deal of the derf FAQ. so far it mostly -- though no longer exclusively -- contains questions about purple.

oddly enough (or perhaps it's not so odd?) there are other derfs out there on the internet.

i've created a "what's new?" page, so you can keep up with the ever-changing landscape of the derf.net site.

i have a big list of riddles (a.k.a. "minute-mysteries") -- mostly the kind where you ask lots of yes-or-no questions to figure out what's going on.

i no longer maintain it, but i have a huge list of palindromes.

my fictional software company is called derfware, and is the originator of that infamous marketing slogan, "if you use derfware, you may be derf". (or maybe that should say "unfamous"...)

you can read my (horribly out-of-date) descriptions of all the machines on the derfnet local network and all the components in the derfnet audio/video system.

in the fall of 1999, i created a puzzle called Inventions of the Millennium.

in college, i wrote a paper on NP-Completeness, Cryptology, and Knapsacks.

i wrote up some thoughts on eclipses.

i made some silly warning signs.

some time ago i decided to learn to draw. to begin with i practiced tracing some photos with a tablet. they came out quite well, i think.

i've made a few comics. i can't really draw very well, but i figure i'll probably get better with practice, and in the meantime, well, it doesn't really matter.

and then of course i have the obligatory links page.