For me the symptoms were consistant with a classic attack on my partition boot sector and the main boot record (the part on the disk that tells the computer how to start up). It's possible that the disk 'crashed' because of a power surge or something, but it seems very much like a virus attack. Your symptoms don't seem so clear. I'm not sure what you mean by "restricted Windows mode." You should run an anti-virus program every day, one that gets updates daily from the net. You may be suffering from some other degradation. Windows and other operating system are said to degrade over time due to registry problems and other stuff. This can be solved by saving all your data onto some other medium, like DVDs, or even another hard drive installed in your computer. Then reformat your drive and reload Windows and everything else. I know it's a big job but it's recommended by some to do this every few years to keep your system snappy. Whatever you do, definitely back up your data as soon as possible. Your data is much more valuable than the computer. Tim

Thanks for the info.

I'm certainly not one to promote the H20. I don't bother looking at it anymore. But what people vote on is their business alone. Sometimes it feels like 'Fractal Wars' here, with Apo forces as the rebels and the UF army as the Empire. May the force be with us all. All I want to know is, where can I get a picture of the ladies wearing the transparent shirts?

Not a clue. I had done nothing unusual.

Thanks for your hard work and steady hand. Tim

And after he sold his shares the rest of the investors got stuffed. Sounds like tar and feathers would be good for that chairman.

I totally agree with Simon. What does it hurt to allow people who have not divulged something of themselves - valid or not - access to viewing the galleries? The benefit in doing so is getting digital art in front of more people. That seems to me a good thing. I know I have held back many times from going further at some site or another because they want me to 'sign up' or 'register.' Sure, here at Rendo they don't spam you but that's not true for other sites. What do the major stockholders or the board of directors gain from a lot of registrations, many of them bogus? Can't the number of people viewing the site be kept tract of without registration? Maybe there is a good reason behind it. It would be interesting to hear from Rendo management the logic behind this particular change.

Good on ya Rick.

Let us know your web site name. And I'd be interested to know how your fractals do commercially. See ya. Tim

It probably is getting tiresome, me drawing parallels with the music biz, but the commercial aspect of the art world has some similarities. We all know that some pop music acts are simply marketing driven. Some producer decides another girl-band (for example) can sell. So he brings a group of good looking, semi (at least) talented singer/dancers together, decides on a marketing strategy (sex seems always to be a good gamble) and either composes a song himself (if he can) or finds some studio musician to put together something that has a decent 'hook'. And there you go -- the next big seller may have hit the scene. On the other hand there are some pop music artists (and I have no qualms about using this term) who truly make wonderful music, and do so for many years. Examples: Becker and Fagan (Steely Dan), Peter Gabriel (Genesis, etc), Sting (The Police, etc), Paul McCartney (The Beatles, etc), and so on. Commercial? Well, yeah to a certain extent. A marketing ploy? Maybe at first. But they all produce well executed, thoughtful, and I will say beautiful pieces of music that the broad public can appreciate. And, most importantly for this discussion, they are extremely successful at it. This parallels what we're talking about here. The commerciality of an artist can be looked at on a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being the little puppy with the big sad eyes and 10 being purely artisticly driven -- Van Gogh perhaps?. It's a very subjective thing, and I put Kinkaid at around 3. That is not to say he isn't good at it, he's obviously technically very good. But his work is not going to challenge anyone or make a bold statement about anything. He is singularly trying to sell stuff. And I don't have a problem with that. The point of this post is to try to put this issue into perspective. I think we can learn something from him, even if we don't particularly want to emulate his fixation on making a big business out of it. To get into the public eye many of the pop artists got their start at least partially by clever marketing. The image of Hendrix picking with his teeth and burning is guitar on stage at Monterey comes to mind. A publicity stunt for sure, but that's what people talked about when they went home. Very clever I'd say. What we need is a fractal artist who can pick with his teeth. ;) And I nominate Keith. Start practicing man!

I must be missing something. "It has been brought to my attention..." - TYeboah. "Now that you have brought it over here..." - Deagol. I am enjoying this thread for the most part, but it would be nice to know what's going on. Can somebody fill me in please.

Many people think that if a computer does it then the person on the computer has little to do with it. My wife is a perfect example of this attitude. She thinks a real artist should have a brush in his/her hand. (nuff said) It is a knee-jerk reaction that is very common, and is likely to be one of the impediments to fractal art becoming mainstream. Exacerbating the problem is that so much of what many fractal artists do are images that look like a computer did them. I'm not critical of that. Heck, I do some of those myself. It's just making it easier for that attitude to linger. I've been busy lately preparing a group of images for printing and framing for hanging in an exhibition coming up in March. I'll be putting up a broad(ish) spectrum of images with the hopes of getting some indication what the public likes and dislikes. It would be nice to sell a few too but I'm not anticipating much. I'll post anything useful that comes out of it. One thing I can say at this point is that the border/frame of an image can have a huge impact on its overall appearance. Some images can be mounted with little or no border and look perfectly fine. But for others, when a carefully chosen border and/or frame is added the result is remarkable. In particular the color of the border can compliment and give the image more impact. Tim

Dirk, that was a thoughful and well written post, and I thank you for contributing so elequently to this discussion. I whole heartedly agree with your call for artists to advance their skill levels and technical understanding of the fractal medium. I've heard some musicians that blow "any note without any structure" and it's not a pretty sound. Here at Rendo, and anywhere for that matter, there are serious artist (and serious emerging artists) and there are hobbyists, which includes many who 'do fractals' for the therapeutic relaxation as well as those here mainly for the social interaction. Your message must be targeted mainly at those of us who are serious about fractal art. And good on ya for that mate. In other words, we can first exclude those who are primarily hobbyists from any moral obligation to improve themselves (they certainly can if they want) and share this site with them because it is their's as much as it is anyone's. But there is a danger that in trying to become more skillful and technically competent the artist can become too high minded and even snobbish, and turn away from inspiration at a more basic, human level. I believe that with fractals, because physical skill it not really an issue, this danger is even greater than with other media. So my first point here is a warning really. Inspiration is what makes good art. Couple that with skills and knowledge and the magic begins. But without inspiration one has very little. My second point is just a musing, I suppose in response to your "fractaltrain" analogy. For me the number of formulas and their parameters in UF alone are bewildering. And the number is growing all the time. From my limited capacity anything over twenty is an infinite amount, no, a chaotic amount. I think I can safely say that I will never understand them all completely, not even half of them. And furthermore, do I want to? Should I want to? I don't think so. It's not a religious thing. At this point in time I don't believe that fractals can be 'controlled' in the same way that, for instance, paint can be controlled. It's a whole new medium, not just a minor change to a conventional one. In this sense conventional art-skills and rules don't always apply. And I can live with that. Tim

Seems like a whole load of guilt at play here. Look, fractal art is different from conventional painting-type art, and the methods a fractal artist uses to create an image are different too. In fact abstract painting is different from conventional painting in much the same way. Abstract painters don't always plan out their works. They follow their noses too. Same for photographers. I don't know how many times I've heard that an award winning photograph "just happened." If an improvisational musician were to plan out in detail what he was going to play it wouldn't be improvisation would it? The best jam sessions are when the band just takes off and lets it all happen. Some times it's pure magic. We have a different art medium here and it's not gonna fall into the same artistic formula as any other. Just because we stumble onto our best work doesn't in any way detract from it. It's just the same for a jazz musician, he gets his best stuff when he lets it go. I take exception to what is implied in urchin1996's post, that is, if you haven't gone through the aforementioned process you can't be making art. To me that sounds like a classical musician telling a jazz musician that he doesn't make music. And that's a great load of hooey. I've heard classical musicians who couldn't move anyone emotionally. Sure they can play or sing scales like a meadowlark and sight read like a computer but that's not the point of art. It's the passion, the emotion that defines art. And the 'wonder of beauty' (there's a word for that I think) is the emotion that abstract art evokes mostly. Sure, it's not compassion over social injustice or any complex emotion, but someone who want to express these should be writing poetry or something, not creating abstract fractals. The fractal software is my paint, my instrument, my camera, and I'll brush it, play it and point it at anything I want. If I try to plan out an image it usually doesn't work as well as when I 'go looking' for inspiration, in the same manner that Rick describes. I firmly disagree with the notion that the software is the artist unless you go about creating art from the top down. Has anyone tried to create a fractal image without looking at it? I mean, just let the software do it all? It won't work. You'd get the same results through random generation. OK the random stuff Apo generates can be interesting at times, but the software doesn't know that it is. The selection process alone is an artistic action, in the same way as when a painter selects a color. And once a randomly generated flame is selected a "flame artist" will surely manipulate it over and over again. All this manipulation is artistic input. It may not require the same level of physical skill that an oil painter employs but it is artistic input none the less. The skill in this case is in the seeing not the physical aspect. So what makes a good fractal artist? The same things that makes a good jazz musician. A superior artistic sense, bravery, technical skill and expressiveness, to name a few. And Rick, you have a lot of all these. Hang in there man. Tim

And by the way, getting the word out about fractal art is something that helps us all and we all should try to do (thanks to MrP; I would like to go to a concert some day with Apo animations), even though the commercial aspect of the artist thing is not to everybodies taste. I'll be thinking about some of Stephanie's ideas for sure.