lol. MS Paint.
Cant you tell? To make the transparency I colored the entire background pink (since pink is used nowhere else in the icon) and when I converted it to a gif, I set pink as the transparency color. Everything pink was made transparent and there you have it.
I have a habit of once finishing a project and leaving it alone for a while, coming back and redoing it. It becomes a neverending cycle of redoing work Ive already done. I think this icon looks like crap now but at the time I was somewhat proud of it. You should check out my thread on OPU User Icons. Unfortunately I lost all my files in my recent system nose dive and will be starting over.
Cheers