It’s hard to believe it’s December already. Then again, this month seems longer than usual this year. I noticed the candy corn and scary masks pushed aside on the sale tables a week before Halloween to make room for Christmas and Hanuakkah stuff. What happened to Thanksgiving? Don’t get me wrong. I do love the holidays, but there are only so many times I can listen to “Felice Navidad” and “Auld Lang Syne” before I start actually looking forward to the bitter cold of February in New England.

As the year comes to a close, I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who contributed to the magazine in 2004. We’ve run some fantastic features this past year thanks to the ingenuity of our writers. I hope you’ll join me in also thanking our hard-working columnists–Jeff Bachiochi, Fred Eady, Tom Cantrell, and Ed Nisley–for bringing us practical solutions and keeping us up to date on the latest and greatest components and technologies. I also wanted to thank our loyal readers, many of whom have been subscribers since the first issue back in 1988.

When we conduct reader surveys, one thing always jumps out at me. It’s remarkable how many readers hold on to their issues. One of our magazine’s best characteristics is that it works so well as a resource guide. As some of you may know, we have a college program that provides free issues to professors for their engineering classes. Recently, I received an e-mail from someone just starting his professional career. When he graduated from college a few years ago, he grabbed a stack of issues his professor had leftover. He told me that, although some of the projects were tough to follow in college, he is glad he held on to them because now he’s ready to work on the more advanced applications that he’s found most interesting and useful.

If you’re missing any issues from your personal library, you can order the back issues from our web site (www.circuitcellar.com/products/cd.asp). For those of you who don’t have the space to keep stacks and stacks of magazines, you’ll be happy to know that we’ll have the 2004 CD-ROM ready in early 2005. The CD-ROM will feature full-color PDFs of the complete year of issues. You’ll be able to place your order on our web site in January (www.circuitcellar.com/products/cd.asp).

This has been a great year for design contests as well. The Atmel AVR 2004 Design Contest, the ZiLOG 2004 Flash Nets Cash Design Contest, and the Cypress PSoC High Integration Challenge 2004 were successful thanks to the generosity and support of the sponsors and the dedicated entrants who designed so many highly optimized applications. (For more information about past and present contests, go to www.circuitcellar.com/magazine/contests.htm.) We have more design contests in store for next year, so stay tuned.

I wish you all happy holidays!

jennifer.huber@circuitcellar.com