What's happening? (3/52008)

Regular visitors to this site will have noticed that I have been distracted lately and haven't been keeping up with the weekly updates. This is because I am going through just about the busiest and most disruptive changes to my life since I got married. Someone once said that time was God's method of stopping everything happening at once, but there is a bit much happening at once for me right now. Here are some of the demands on my time:

• Getting the house ready for sale. Apparently prospective purchasers want to see fresh paint, clean gutters and tidy lawns and gardens.
• Weekly commuting between two locations about 350 kilometres apart.
• Taking on a new job teaching some high school students about Microsoft Office and other computer esoterica (such teaching taking place in a country town).
• Teaching some other students about the mysteries of computer network security (with this teaching taking place in the Great Big City).
• Doing all the peripheral stuff like lesson planning, assessment and reading to stay ahead of the students that comes with teaching something new every few weeks.
• A rather comprehensive training course to update my teaching qualifications.
• Marketing my consulting and web development business in a new geographical area. (With two web site management contracts already the door is open a crack.)
• Building skills in some new and upgraded software products related to that consulting business.
• Helping my daughters to move into their new homes, which they decided to do at the same time as I am trying to move myself.
• Keeping the accounts up to date.
• Learning to speak more slowly while chewing on a straw and discussing the drought and its effect on lambing and the sowing schedule, so as not to look too much like a city slicker.
• Doing all those things that come from normal living, like talking to friends and family.

Because of all this I have decided that The Millenium Project will be taking a short holiday. There will be a tentative return to business as usual on June 1, but as there is a big festival in my country town of part-time residence on the weekend of June 7 and 8 and I am quite likely to be involved in (or, more likely, dragged into) that, I will be back in full steam ahead mode on the weekend of June 14 and 15.

During the hiatus I will still be fiddling with the site as time allows - fixing up broken links, publishing amusing hate mails and so on. There is some behind-the-scenes tidying that I have been meaning to do for some time so that might even get done. Of course the email will still be working, so keep the comments and criticisms coming. I might even get around to answering some messages that are still in the inbox.

The other news for the future is that The Millenium Project will be hosting the 90th Skeptics' Circle on July 3. That means that I have to be back here a few weeks earlier to get the publicity going otherwise many people will be disappointed.

Of course, as is constantly pointed out to me by correspondents critical of my work, I am a compulsive liar and nothing I say can be believed or trusted. Due to this failing I could break my promise and actually come back early, so you might like to register with ChangeDetection (link over on the left) or watch the RSS feed to be advised of any outbreak of enthusiasm here.

If you get desperate and can't do without The Millenium Project, remember that you can get to all the commentary pages here, you can see and hear me talking here and you can go here to see almost everything that has ever appeared on the front page since time began.

Once again, I would like to thank all the regular visitors and the occasional dropper-inners who make running this site worthwhile. It wouldn't be nearly as much fun without the several thousand people who come here each week, and that includes the people who don't like it. (Imagine what life would be like if everyone agreed on everything - Blockbuster stores would just have thousands of copies of the DVD of Bridget Jones's Diary, bookshops would be filled with The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and you would have to be very quick to get tickets for a Celine Dion concert. Oops! I think I just undid months of therapy with that last suggestion and the nightmares will come back.)

See you in June.