Welcome From The Chief Editor

March is here. Typically, you think of Spring (at least in the Northern Hemisphere), the plants and trees beginning to embark on another growing season, and warmth. Yet, as I write this on February 24, my home city has just received 10 inches (25.4 cm, for you metric folks) of snow, with another blast of 6 to 10 inches (15.25 to 25.4 cm) scheduled to arrive on Monday. I'm not like most folks. I actually don't mind the snow. I just wish we had gotten it spread out a bit throughout the season, instead of dumped on us all at once. Of course, I'm eagerly awaiting the arrival of warmer weather, so I can enjoy more time on my bicycle outdoors. Staring at the walls of my dining room while pedaling away on my indoor trainer (with one of my bikes attached to it) is getting rather boring.

March is, for us here at The PCLinuxOS Magazine, a sad month. The March 2013 issue represents the last Forum Foible column from ms_meme. Since she joined the magazine staff with the July 2009 "rebirth" of the magazine, she has only missed one month. That's a run of three years and nine months (45 months for those who may be counting). Fittingly, her last Forum Foible column is a "how-to" for creating the Forum Foible column, should anyone express an interest in carrying it forward. We'll still be seeing ms_meme around, though. She plans to keep on doing her "ms_meme's Nook" column – at least for the foreseeable future (however long that is).

To take the place of the Forum Foibles column, YouCanToo (does this man ever stop?) will be doing a monthly PCLinuxOS Recipe Corner column. You can catch his inaugural column in this month's issue. Given how much PCLinuxOS users talk about food in the PCLinuxOS forum, coupled with YouCanToo's prowess in the kitchen, we have no doubt that this will be a popular column.

Just in time for Texstar's birthday (February 2), the PCLinuxOS "packaging crew" and developers released the first long-awaited, much anticipated release candidate of the PCLinuxOS 64-bit version. If you have a spare 64 bit computer laying around, you might want to join the "festivities" and help run the release candidate through its paces. The more people who help test it on a wider variety of hardware, the better the end product will be. Plus, you get to have a hand in helping to making it the best it can be. Just remember ... install the release candidate on a computer that you don't depend on for your daily computing tasks. The release candidate is, after all, still in the beta stage.

Until next month, I bid you all peace, happiness, serenity and prosperity.