Re: Gary Storrick\'s site is alive again!
Gerry,
I'd love to come out and climb one of the big ones someday when time permits. I regret not being able to do that a few years ago when you offered.
I'm a bit busy right now. I moved from Pennsylvania to the Illinois corn desert two weeks ago, I don't have a house yet, I'm living in a hotel, and all my stuff - including the entire collection - is in storage. Last week I started a new job that takes 10-12 hours out of my day, and next month is a plant outage and I will be working six 10-12 hour days a week. It is disgustingly flat here and I don't even have a tree to climb in right now. I have 44 new items to test and describe in my database, about half that many more that are not yet entered, and I have two beside me that I haven't even taken out of the box! Of course, there are also potential updates on everything that is already there. I'm swamped.
I took the site down in May in part because I did not have time to do a proper job. I put it back up this soon because people in the tree, climbing, and caving communities convinced me that it is still useful, even if it is not current. The tree community has been wonderfully supportive, and y'all are one of the main easons that I put it back up when I have so much left to do.
I should find time to do this right, and I hope that everyone will be a bit patient. It will be a LONG time before I'm satisfied with the site. I'd rather not have it up right now the way it is, but it is the best I can do for now.
I think my readers deserve an explanation of why I'm doing such a lousy job - and by my standards, it is a lousy job.
The other reason I took the site down was that I ran out of space and buying more would cost too much. I'm on a different hosting plan now, I have all the space I need (20 times what I had before), and the cost is negligible (less than one tenth of what it cost me before). I'm paid up for the next year, so the site isn't going anywhere soon. At least I solved the easy problem.
Gary
