avatar offer to GX1_MAN

[Zylstra]

that a scary looking dog you have they lol

I'm so glad its dead!  
That thing is going to cause nightmares.

how do u know its dead have u checked your backyard lately??

GROSS! (BUT INCREDIBLY HILARIOUS)  
I wonder how old that dog was before it was freeze dried. (or at least it looks freeze dried)

[unlovedwarrior]

lol it might be in your freezer right now waiting on you to come let it out...

dont be scared itll be to weak to kill u but it might hurt and/or scare the heck out of you

[GX1_Man]

Who said it was dead?  

[Zylstra]

Who said it was dead?  

Its eyes....

[GX1_Man]

It could be cataracts.  

http://www.stlukeseye.com/Conditions/Cataracts.asp

[homer]

im pretty sure its cataracts. how else do u explain the way its leaning over?

[Dilbert]

No need to touch my avvy. It's only 8.44 KB, not too bad a stress on PC's.

That's true.  And, you downsized the file to the actual dimensions of your avatar before inserting it in the forum.  That's the best technique.

Anyway, I grabbed your avatar and ran it through my sofware to see whether resulting file size would be significantly different.  It is significantly smaller, at only 2,556 bytes.  Here it is if you want it:

Well, the reason I downsized it was for two reasons. One, like you said, it's good to shrink it to actual size. The other was the fact that when I first used my colored avatar, it was just a tad over the limit, and Dilbert's glasses got "squished" in the process of the YaBB code making it look a uniform size. (It's still just a tiny bit squished, but it looks fine in my profile. Go figure.)

I've downloaded the avatar and re-uploaded it to Imageshack. You can remove the Photobucket one if you want.

Funny thing happened. I tried to save it as a PNG (because, after all, my PNGs tend to be much smaller than JPGs -- exponentially, in fact) to reduce the file size further, but that made it go back to almost 9 KB. Weird. So I'll keep the JPG as my avatar.

[Dead_reckon]

speaking of frozen dogs; when our dog died in 96 i think it was, it was the middle of winter, we couldnt bury him, so, my dad got a couple large clear trash bags, and stuck him in the freezer, that spring, we buried him... we have quite a pet cemetary forming at my house... a dog (blacky), 3 gold fish, a parikeet (ozzy), a lizard, a cat (dutchess), one of dutchess's kittens... i think thats all, not sure though...

[unlovedwarrior]

did u bury them in an old haunted indain burial ground?? :-? i hope not cuz ull be sorry..... boo

[soybean]

Well, the reason I downsized it was for two reasons. One, like you said, it's good to shrink it to actual size. The other was the fact that when I first used my colored avatar, it was just a tad over the limit, and Dilbert's glasses got "squished" in the process of the YaBB code making it look a uniform size. (It's still just a tiny bit squished, but it looks fine in my profile. Go figure.)

I've downloaded the avatar and re-uploaded it to Imageshack. You can remove the Photobucket one if you want.

Funny thing happened. I tried to save it as a PNG (because, after all, my PNGs tend to be much smaller than JPGs -- exponentially, in fact) to reduce the file size further, but that made it go back to almost 9 KB. Weird. So I'll keep the JPG as my avatar.

Based on some experimenting, I find PNG files to be much larger than JPG.  Perhaps it depends on the file you start with.  My NetGraphics Optimizer software only saves files in either GIF or JPG format.  If I copy a JPG file into Paint and start to save it as GIF, Paint usually shows a warning that "Saving in this format may cause loss of color informatiion" and, indeed, it usually does.  So, JPG seems to be the best format in most cases.

[Rob Pomeroy]

(because, after all, my PNGs tend to be much smaller than JPGs -- exponentially, in fact)

There might be a slight misconception here.  The PNG format uses a lossless compression method called "DEFLATE".  JPEGs use a lossy compression method which, particularly with large complex images such as photos, can produce much better compression ratios (but with a loss of data that is not always detectable by the human eye).  JPEG compression is variable - that is you have a trade-off between quality of results and file size.  If you are finding that your JPEGs tend to come out larger than your PNGs, then there are two possibilities - either you're working on an image that doesn't really lend itself to JPEG compression (such as simple cartoons...) or your JPEG compression settings are turned up too high.  Aim for a setting of around 15, using standard rather than progressive encoding.