Hello

Thank you Terry and Tim for putting the effort into this thing. And especially thank you for inviting me to participate. I need to come out of hibernation.


I feel a need to make my first post here profound. I have to impress all my fellow contributors and all the lurkers with with my insight and depth of thought. Well, maybe next time. I will take Terry's advice and just write. Maybe, like the infinite monkeys, if I type enough words something interesting will appear.


Here is my requisite introduction. I am 51, still married after 27 years, two children and almost 2 grandchildren (2nd is due this month). I have a degree in mathematics and have spent my career designing, building, programming computers and other things with micro processors.


I too am a fractal fraud. It has been five years since I seriously fired up the fractal generator. Back in the old days, it was easy. No one (well, not many people anyway, but allow me some hyperbole) had done it before, so everything was new and interesting. Two color fractals on a screen with resolution less than 1% of what we are used to now, and which took all day and all night to build. And we liked it.


With each new technology step in screen colors and resolution there was much more to explore. 16 colors, 256 colors, and wow 24 bit (essentially infinite) colors.


So what happened? I cannot claim fractal-block. The truth is more along the lines of laziness. Too much effort to maintain the web page. Too much effort to find something truly new. Everything I did seemed the same, and I was falling into a variation-on-a-theme rut. But on reflection, it was always took some effort and at some point I just quit making that effort. It was easy to let the web site go, and then to stop posting and eventually stop reading the newsgroups. And then, in isolation, even the art became repetitive and stopped.


Meanwhile everyone else kept finding new things to do with fractals and newer and faster hardware. And I am trying to figure out what I have done recently that gives me as much satisfaction as computer art used to. Well, it is not really that bleak, there are other interests and plenty of things to occupy my time. Still Terry made me realize how much I miss doing fractals. And, seeing the posts here and view your web pages makes it obvious how wrong headed is my "it-is-all-the-same" attitude.


Seeing several familiar names, and seeing your great new work is getting me motivated again. So, thank you all.