Once more into the breach, dear friends; once more....

To the half-dozen or so of you reading this blog, thank you; and for those of you who wondered what's happened to me and this blog over the last several months, the answer is both "a great deal" and "not much at all".

I had been ill for a couple of months, with what the doctors insisted was just an ordinary flu, and then a cold, and then an ordinary (NOT H5N1, thank you very much) flu that has kept my close friends busy trying to spy the license tag number of the lorry that keeps running me down. I am better now, thank you.

I have also changed hosting providers for my professional Web site and email hosting; the new crew look to be a good outfit so far:

• they understand the value of responding quickly to customer enquiries, no matter how harebrained;
they understand Linux and Apache and (at least do a convincing appearance of) not just a "me-too" offering;
• their people know their way around their system (see the first comment);
• they have sensibly large limits on disk space and bandwidth; which means that
• they allow you to host a lot of tools and libraries and addons that you can manage yourself (think PEAR for you PHP types) without having to rely on the (necessarily limited) knowledge of a central administrator who may not be quite as up to scratch on version X of the FooBar publishing framework as you are.

In short, as I said, off to a good start. After getting some minor details worked out, and being on my feet again, the all-new seven-sigma.com Web site should be up within the next couple of days.