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Radio Shack: “Is this stuff any good?”

July 20, 2010

My last two posts (skip­ping over the one regard­ing comics) men­tioned Radio Shack in one form or another, so I thought I would com­plete the tril­ogy with this one.  As you may recall read­ing, I worked at Radio Shack in the early 90s.  It was min­i­mum wage plus poor com­mis­sion, so basi­cally ended up being […]

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The business card companion cube

July 10, 2010

A few years ago, I ran across Ned Batchelder’s instruc­tions for mak­ing a busi­ness card cube.  Since then, I have made dozens of them, includ­ing a few con­joined cubes that form Tetris pieces.  It occurred to me the other day (about a year or two too late to hit the Por­tal craze and at least […]

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Flashback: thump, scraaaape… thump, scraaaape…

December 19, 2009

I started blog­ging in 2001.  Prior to that I had a cou­ple of web­site on which I wrote things in a fairly unor­ga­nized fash­ion.  I had netninja.com, my main site since 1997, and used to have diedrichs.org, a site cel­e­brat­ing a gang of cof­fee shop bud­dies, from a few years after that until I finally […]

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Ex Libris

April 3, 2009

As a kid, I was for­tu­nate enough to grow up in a house­hold that pro­moted read­ing.  From a fairly early age, my ele­men­tary school had occa­sional book fairs and a sort of monthly book club.  In fact each month, all of the stu­dents of a par­tic­u­lar set of grade lev­els would get a cheaply-printed color […]

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The floor is made of lava

April 30, 2008

Did you ever play the lava game as a kid?  The sub­ject came up again last night as we were steam clean­ing the car­pet for a house­guest this week­end.  It seems like every­one I talk to has played it, or at least some minor vari­ant.  Tech­ni­cally, I think the label “game” is less accu­rate than […]

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Staple Gun

February 2, 2008

I just tried to treat a sta­ple gun like a real gun.  “Okay, I’ve removed the clip but how do I tell if there’s still a round in the cham­ber?”  Wait, no, they don’t work like that. Sent from an iPhone

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Minor Update

January 8, 2008

No recent blog posts… it’s been a busy week. It would appear that 6 inches of sil­i­cone rub­ber weath­er­strip­ping is the best cat toy ever.  Ebenezer loves it.  Char­lotte, who does not typ­i­cally play with cat toys, was seen to be play­ing with it a few times.  The non-toys always make the best toys. Port­landers, keep your […]

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It’s a tarp!

January 2, 2008
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Profound statements from around Portland

August 5, 2007
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Rwar!

January 15, 2006
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Funded in part by the surreal. An angel, complete with reservoirs.

December 2, 2005

Today, I am home sick with a cold.  Ick. I can’t imag­ine the fol­low­ing thing ever becom­ing a meme because the act of down­load­ing the XML and compiling/running all the command-line appli­ca­tions is a bit too time-consuming and arcane for the aver­age Joe.  Any­way, I tried a lit­tle exper­i­ment today that con­sisted of the following: […]

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“Anything plus radish equals radish”">“Anything plus radish equals radish”

September 11, 2005

In the math world, you have things like iden­tity func­tions and zero func­tions.  Iden­tity func­tions basi­cally do noth­ing to your number–you put some­thing in, you get the same thing out.  Zero func­tions dis­card what you put in and give you a known con­stant out­put. In the juice world, you have much the same.  You have […]

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