Now winter is upon us in the Land of Oz. Sydney mirrors the climate of Los Angeles rather than Boston. Houses here get by with space heaters that no Yankee would stick in a chicken coop. Nevertheless, it grows colder here even as the folks back home are debugging lawn mowers.

My e-mail has settled down to a barely acceptable level of mediocrity. I lose a significant fraction of the mail that percolates around the globe. I have yet to convince the local mailer daemons to send my messages on to Europe. They still believe I am foolishly routing mail through Australia instead of from here.

Worst of all, The C Users Journal is losing its Managing Editor. This is the last issue you will see Howard Hyten's name on our masthead. He has chosen to move on to other ventures and I wish him Godspeed.

In case you don't know it, the M.E. is the person who really puts a magazine together each month. Editors and publishers get the attention and the three-martini lunches. We can take the time only because we have a competent M.E. minding the store.

Howard has been far more than competent. As columnist, contributor, and Technical Editor for various publications over the years, I have worked with many an M.E. Believe me when I say that Howard is tops at his trade. It has been a pure pleasure to work with him.

It won't be fun for awhile after he leaves, but I suspect we'll muddle through. The magazine has a life of its own now, so no single person is indispensable. (Certainly not me.) Still, I'll have to shelve my complacency for a spell. I'm only glad I had the chance to get settled in Down Under while life was smoother.

We'll keep soliciting and printing the best articles on C we can find. The e-mail will probably get better some day. And the sunbathers will return to Bondi beach. After all, if summer comes, can fall be far behind?

P.J. Plauger
pjp@plauger.uunet