Clarification:  The original statement written in March is slighly outdated (see the Update at the end - in fact, you can skip to there and avoid a lot of reading!) but I am leaving it as is to reflect my thinking at the time.  Please note that here "killing DrJack" is meant to refer to my involvement with BLIPMAPs, the Blipmap Forum, etc and the time spent thereon - this is not the same as "killing BLIPMAPs".  I might have been less fanciful in my writing, but it does reflect my thinking at the time.

Financial considerations are not foremost to me - my time is much more important.  I retired two years ago and have not been able to do things I had planned on, such as travel or move to a more mountainous region, because my time has instead been spent on "DrJack" labors - keeping the models running, answering emails, and so on and on.  It's gotten especially ridiculous these past 3-4 months as I've been making the changes needed for this coming soaring season - I just don't have any "free" time.  Because there is an approaching deadline I must meet - since it's not going to be useful if things are not implemented until June/July/Aug - I haven't been able to do any work on my house or do any financial planning or even go flying.  The list of things that "need" to be done but aren't actually getting done keeps getting longer.  I'm not presently able to spend my time where I think it should be spent, and my mood reflects that.

The continuing demands that I can't seem to get ahead of have defintely made me irritable - not the individual requests necessarily, but just the sheer number of them and the time required to respond to them.  Those who have sent me an email recently may well have noted the delayed response and terseness in reply.  As the number of registered users has grown (now approaching 2800, though it is uncertain how many are actually active and some are duplicates) my email volume has steadily increased.  In the "old" days I enjoyed getting emails and hearing from my users because I had the time to do that - but now the number of requests has become difficult to handle.  Most emails contain what I consider legitimate requests or problems, yet I no longer have time to respond as fully as I'd like - and the fact that I cannot be as helpful as I'd like bothers me (but through no fault of the sender, I want to emphasize)!  And a few emails come from those who want information but have not read the website and want to be spoon-fed, which definitely irritates me.  I'd previously felt that if someone sent me a thoughtful message which took some time to compose then I should take the time to respond, but that has become unrealistic - so I am now asking questions to be directed to the Blipmap Forum not to me personally, which allows others to also benefit from any questions asked. 

Three days ago I got myself out of the house for a three hour hike during which I reached the epiphany that "DrJack must die" (visions of a firing squad, etc.) - and that thought felt good.  I am not sure how firm the "must" is, I do know that would be preferable to the present situation. 

One of my reasons for seeking subscriptions this year is of course to gain some recompense for my time, so that I feel less like a slave chained to this work.  But if the same amount of work were to be required next year, so I still felt chained to the work, that would not be worth any amount of compensation.  One thought is that I might use some of the subscription donations to pay others to do some work I am doing now, but I am not sure how realistic that is - while there are certainly some things I do that others could also do, much seems to require my specific knowledge.  The best hope I can see is that changes next year might be more minor and have more flexibility in their implementation, as opposed to this year which required the major step of introducing ETA forecasts with a definite deadline.  But if I can't reduce the time I am spending on DrJack then there is no way I can continue. 

All this is by way of letting my users know that they should not expect that DrJack will definitely continue beyond the end of this soaring season.  I am mentally preparing myself to kill DrJack and my users should similarly prepare themselves for that possibility.  I don't know for certain what the next year will bring, but I am determined that I will not be in the same position in a year that I find myself in today. 

While I can't presume know now how things will play out in the end, my present feeling is that it might be better for me to simply kill BLIPMAPs along with DrJack and have done with it.  While I can understand BLIPMAP users wanting to have them continue in some form, since that would be good for them, I think that that would not be easy to do and might well involve nearly as much work as trying to continue them myself - anyone who has spent more time trying to tell someone else how to do something that it would take to do themselves can understand that.  And I can envision someone else "just" having a few million or so questions if I passed things on to them.  I take pride in the standards I've set and want the site function at a high level, so it would grieve me to see it operating at a lower level.  From my present perspective, therefore, it seems cleaner to just walk away completely - sort of like "once there was a Camelot".  Much of what I have done over the past years has been due to my concern for my user's needs - but it is now time to instead think of myself.  Still, I won't be actually addressing myself to this question until this year is over - there are too many unknowns to predict how I will feel in October.  And I would certainly find it hard to abandon something it took so long to create, so in the end I would probably not actually let myself do that.  In any case I will not be discussing or responding to any emails concerning this - I've already gotten my feedback through the recent User Survey and there are more immediate concerns that I need to attend to.  For the present, I am committed to working on and providing BLIPMAPs for this season - so enjoy! 

May 5, 2004:
In filling out the "comments" box of the new donation webpage, a donor asked about my present expectations regarding my work on BLIPMAPs continuing beyond this soaring season (which to me means beyond Oct 1).  The simple answer is that I do not know what the future will be.  My present plan is simply to see how things go over this soaring season and make a decision at its end.  One obvious factor will be the amount of recompense that subscriptions provide - if that is insufficient then the decision will be easy.  But that is not the only factor - others include the amount of time that BLIPMAPs consume during this season (as discussed above!), the amount of general BLIPMAP hassle, and on the other hand the amount of good that I feel I can do for the soaring community.  It is possible, and in fact it is my hope, that I can reduce the amount of BLIPMAP-required time and hassle to a manageable level, in which case I would certainly expect to continue work on BLIPMAPs.  But only time will tell, since I cannot at this point know what the future will bring.  The one thing that I know for certain is, as stated above, that I will not continue to spend the amount of time on "DrJack" that I have in the past, whatever it takes to accomplish that.  However, I do expect that if I did walk away I would release the BLIPMAP program for others to use, as I did for my TIP program - but whether that would be a "soft" transition (where I would continue to help to some degree, as occurred for TIP) or a "hard" transition (in which I would not make any further efforts) would have to be determined by circumstances.

July 4, 2004:
My present plan is to free up time for myself by reducing time spent on BLIPMAPs to the maximum extent possible come October, and to that end I expect to put the BLIPMAP processing on "auto-pilot" status sometime between Oct 1 and Dec 31, for a period of at least a year.  The operational status of BLIPMAPs will then be maintained by its present system administrator, Richard Hanschu, and by my involvement when necessary.  The bad news is that I will then not be making any improvements to BLIPMAPs, no new BLIPSPOTs will be added, etc.  The good news is that because no development will be undertaken, yearly subscriptions to access to all BLIPMAP forecasts need cover only server maintenance costs and so will be greatly reduced, to less than half of what they are at present.  I do not yet have a finished "operational" program (I thought I did back in April, but that proved to be a false summit) so will spend this summer refining the present version to make it ready for "auto-pilot" operation in October.