It's been a while since the last gallery update over seven months! I've started scanning my slides again and will try to continue the bi-weekly updates that we enjoyed until I disappeared for a while.

There are a number of reasons for my absence. The first is that I upgraded my monitor to an LCD flat-panel. Changing the drivers confused Windows so horribly that the system actually wouldn't boot any more, so I had to do a reinstall. Then the scanner wouldn't work, and when I finally got things back to working condition the colors were all messed up! I'm pretty sure that I have it fixed now, but let me know if you think the colors aren't right in the new pictures. If only my scanner worked with my laptop running Linux.

But the biggest reason for my absence was a lack of time and money. hort.net has traditionally been financed by Mallorn Computing, but last years available funds were lean at best. I ended up having to finance significant parts of hort.net out of my own pocket and it wasn't fun any more.

Hopefully this year will be better, but we're also soliciting donations to keep hort.net running. If you've found hort.net to be useful at all, please consider donating by sending a check to

hort.net fund drive
c/o Mallorn Computing
702 W Vermont
Urbana IL 61801

There is more information about the fund-raising process and options at

    http://www.hort.net/funds/

Thanks, and have a great New Year!

Christopher Lindsey, gallery maintainer