As you have probably noticed, most of the sparse postings this year have been photography. That's because about the time we bought the new place, the dual PIII motherboard in the render machine (I named it "Aggememnon") gave up the ghost. Since my cash flow has been going into repair and replace on a house that has not been maintained for the last 20 years, the "Aggie" has sat while I started pulling together the parts (mostly off of eBay) that make up the heart and brains of the system. Now that I finished David's "Dragon" PC, I am start to put things back together on the new render machine. Note: I've done about all I can do outside for the winter months, plus my contract ends at the end of the year, so I can't spend anymore money anyway--besides, I have to get my Christmas cards made for this year (LOL). I scored a matched pair of AMD dual core Operton CPUs on eBay. Then I found a motherboard with a corner that got chipped when it was dropped (they had to dump it as 'damaged' although there was no component or circuit board damage). So when I finish lengthening the wiring from the case to the new motherboard (which is smaller than the PIII motherboard), I'll have a render machine with four CPUs running at almost twice the clock speed as before with a gigabyte of memory for each CPU (4GB of memory was the pricey part of the deal). Now I can load that copy of Lightwave I picked up on eBay at the end of last year as well... I can almost TASTE rendering again (finally!) just in time for the new version of Terragen to release. T4V&C!