Random thought

(From subbes)

Fun fact: on an alphanumeric phone keypad, you press exactly the same buttons for 'obtuse' as you would for 'mature.'

I'll leave the symbolism for you to work out.

Whodathunkit?

Six years ago today, I proposed to Stella.

Well—six years ago this evening. I think it's fair to say that six years ago this morning, neither of us would have thought it likely that today, we'd be married and parents of a lovely child. (Thereby hangs a tale.)

Random thought

Microsoft CDs, in Germany, typically say "Sie sind nicht berechtigt, unrechtmäßige Kopien dieses Datenträgers herzustellen" (roughly, "You are not permitted to make illegitimate copies of this medium").

Well, duh. No-one is permitted to make illegitimate copies, right? That's kind of what "illegitimate" means. Or put another way, if someone were permitted to make a copy, then that particulary copy would not, by definition, be an illegitimate one.

Smallest user pictures

I wonder what the smallest (in terms of file size) 100x100 pixel LiveJournal-legal standards-compliant (e.g. no leaving off IEND chunks from a PNG image) user picture is?

The one on this entry is 77 bytes; can anyone beat that? (Interestingly, I used netpbm to create both an all-white and an all-black image; the all-white one ended up as 82 bytes when converted to PNG with pnmtopng, 5 bytes more than the all-black one.)

And what's the smallest LiveJournal-legal user picture? I'll guess that it'll be a single-pixel picture; this user picture of mine, for example, of one black pixel, packs a whopping 67 bytes (of which 10 bytes are actual image data, i.e. the contents of the IDAT PNG chunk; the rest is checksums and headers, for an overhead of 570%!). Strangely enough, a white single pixel also takes up 67 bytes (the image data differs from that of the black pixel in three bits: it's 78 DA 63 68 00 00 00 82 00 81 in the white image and 78 DA 63 60 00 00 00 02 00 01 in the black one).