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At the beginning of every month, I'm reminded about this place, and how I haven't written here in a while. I'm reminded because I remember that I have to do a new table for this month, so the old stuff page is "current", and I usually end up writing something in here, so I don't feel like I'm doing updates on a page that doesn't need it. It's true. Look at the archives page and see how many entries I've got dates on the first or second of a month.

Anyway, we threw a Hallowe'en party this weekend. If you weren't invited, it was an oversight, and I'm sure we'll remember next year. If you were invited and you missed it... well, it was pretty fun. I'd guess more than half the people came in costume (even if I took mine off after a couple hours 'cause the sweatshirt was hot), and there were some neat costumes. Liz and I are already thinking about next year (early rejected idea: a dish and a spoon). We made a lot of food that wasn't eaten because people were having too much fun in the living room to wander into the dining room for munchies. Too bad, and more leftovers for me!

I cleaned up the living room before the party so there'd be places for people to collapse, and after I got done, I realized I was staring at the empty area under the windows, morbidly fascinated with the expanse of blank wall. Our apartment barely had any blank wallspace at all along the floor, there was something against the wall in just about every possible place, with gaps of about 18 inches permissible in only the most extreme of circumstances. Here, there was about 8-10 feet or so of blank wall space. It unnerved me. I lay on the couch, staring at the wall, thinking "There's got to be something that has to go there... something that belongs there... it can't just be empty like that, can it?" Help me. I've lived an apartment for so long that free space scares me.

You know, I had about eighteen things I wanted to say before I started writing this. All gone now. Dammit.

Oh, well. On to techie crap.

PNG stands for Portable Network Graphic. It's a replacement format for GIFs. Why replace GIFs? Good question.

The following has an example of a stupid company. Continue at your own risk.

The data in a GIF is compressed using an algorithm called LZW. The patent on the algorithm is owned by Unisys. Unisys is charging webmasters $5,000 if they have GIFs on their website that were made using a graphics package that didn't license the LZW algorithm from Unisys. This is nailing people who use freeware graphics packages whose authors don't have the revenue to purchase a license for the algorithm.

The goofy thing is that the algorithm is publically available. You can buy a book that tells you how to use it.

The GIF format first got really pushed when CompuServe was looking for a graphics format. Then they said they'd charge the license fee to commercial programs, but not freeware. Now, they're charging across the board.

So, I decided Unisys was stupid, and I was going to try to stop using GIFs. Notice I said "try". Because PNG support in Netscape and IE kinda sucks right now. I can (hopefully) do regular standard images, but no transparent images. Animated images doesn't work with PNG either, but I don't think I use any animated GIFs on my pages... oh, well.

So, I've converted most of my GIFs to the PNG format, which is free, and even makes smaller files than GIFs 85%-90% of the time. If you can see the blue bar over to the left, than the PNG thing is a partial success. If you can't... well, I'm still trying to figure out what to do about that.