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Happy GIF Liberation Day! One of the most popular graphical formats for the web, for anything with simple colors and cartoonish layout (or animated, in the case of small gif cinema) (photographs usually use the jpeg format) is about to have its patent expire. Geeks remember back to the mid-90s when Unisys acquired patent rights to the algorithm used in 'em. It didn't have a big effect on the web, despite efforts to promote alternatives, though digital art programs had to cough up. Anyway, now we're in the clear! ('Algorithms probably shouldn't have patents anyway' is a common geek idea.)

Now if we could all agree if it's pronounced with a soft "G" as in "Giraffe" (which is what the original creators argue) or a hard "G" as in "Graphical".

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Quote of the Moment

This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it.

And given how much I despise raisins...man, that IS terrible. (Maybe it's all because when I was young my dad tried--and failed, I think--to convince me that raisins were flies with the wings picked off.) In any case, one of life's biggest disappointments is to take a big bite of cookie and the expected chocolate chips turn out to be raisins...

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Article of the Moment
You might need to be a member to see it all (which you should be anyway) but in Salon, Stephanie Zacharek makes an argument that Sarah Jessica Parker is probably guiding her character to close to the center stage of "Sex in the City"...and her unwillingness to get naked, unlike her 3 co-stars, is part of that. To which I agree. But maybe I'm just that kind of voyeur.

Oh well, we don't get HBO anymore anyways...it turns out that if you want to actually have a good chance of a decent movie at any random hour, that Starz/Encore package is a much better bet than HBO et al, which seem more geared towards their original programming. (Or of course if you are just in it for the boobies, Skinemax--er, Cinemax, is your best bet, at least in the wee hours.)