Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you imagined.
— Henry David Thoreau

Life is about making choices. Every day, you have the opportunity to choose how you want your life to be. Those of us who run a small business have even more choices to make, which is both the challenge and the opportunity of owning your own business. Few things rival the thrill of talking to satisfied clients who love your work. Few things rival the aggravation of clients who make unreasonable demands and then don't pay for the work you do. (A wise business person recently told me "I like to give guys like that to the competition.")

But, as usual, I digress. Every year at this time, people make new year's resolutions. This issue contains a number of articles to help you with a few of those life choices. If your inability to type is keeping you from advancing your computing skills, the article on voice recognition introduces you to new technology that can free you from your keyboard (maybe). There's also an article on how to earn information technology certifications to help you jump-start your career. This issue also includes articles on getting yourself organized with Web-based tools or with a handheld personal digital assistant.

Here at Logical Expressions, Inc. we've got big plans too. Most people know now that all the articles from all the issues we've published (since September 1999) are on our web site: www.logicalexpressions.com. But in the next few months, we plan to separate out the Computor Companion information onto its own site. Because the programming side of LEI specializes in creating data-driven web sites, we're busily creating new tools that will work behind the scenes, so the new magazine site will be easier to use. Among other new things, because the articles will be stored in a database, you'll be able to search through all the articles from all the issues by date, keywords, or author. We'd like to make the new site as useful to readers as possible. So, if you have other ideas of things you'd like to see on our new site, please send me an e-mail at sdaffron AT logicalexpressions.com.

As a final note, a few people have asked about the spelling of the magazine name. A computOr is one who computes, as opposed to a computEr, the machine itself. We figure that the machine doesn't need a companion, but maybe those of you operating those computers could stand a little sympathy and support.

One of our favorite phrases around here is "you make your own luck." Every day you can bring good or bad things into your life by the choices you make. Here's hoping all of you resolve to make some great luck for yourselves in 2001.

Susan Daffron

Editor