Hi Jim, I hope you and your Fractal Lady get well soon. You wrote:

My Mindspring address is having technical difficulties -- it delivers e-mail but will not accept e-mail -- so I'm sending the FOTD's through AOL until Earthlink gets the problem fixed (if ever). The philofractal postings are missing because the philofractal list apparently does not accept messages in AOL format.

I'm not a user of Mindspring, but mabe their servers do require the authentication to be switched ON in your e-mail client. Unless you have a very good reason to avoid anything related to Google, there is a free and very convenient solution to your problem: you can switch to Gmail for free and for good. They offer a few GIGAbytes of storage for your mail, your mail transfer to and from POP3 client is securely encrypted, their anti-spam filter is a blessing [... and so on]. Even if you have a hard disk crash, you can log to your mailbox with your web browser and all your mail is still safely there (should you accept the default of not deleting the mail from the server and keeping it as a convenient archive and/or mirror available even if you are out of town). And YES, I'm a very satisfied user of Gmail myself for over 2 years now. The more I use it the more I like it. I do sincerely believe that Gmail would serve you (and all of us) much better at delivering your daily fractal treats. Back to fractals...

Since I found the image with so little effort, I could not give it an honest rating.

It is a sad thing to see your fractals left unrated. Many of them are very interesting, beautiful and inspiring. With all due respect, I have a strange feeling that the method of linking their rating with the amount of effort required for finding them may have some major flaws. Would you rate a book just by the amount of effort needed to find this book in a library? Would you call such a rating just and honest? I am sorry for being a silent lurker for so long. I would like to thank you for all the beatuful fractals you share with us (regardless of their rating) and all the witty and colourful bits of news from the Fractal Central. Keep up the good work! To make my message more on-topic: I like to play with fractals, especially colour-tweaking them. I have some series of colour-tweaks of some selected fractals from you. I can (with your permission) either put them in an online album (Webshots, Flickr, ipernity, other) or set up a temporary webpage display (if this might be of interest or cheer you up a little). Wishing the best of health to you and the Fractal Lady (oh, and the fractal cats too!). Ted the Lurker P.S. A few of my fractals may be found at my ipernity album: http://www.ipernity.com/doc/haiku_ted/album/41085