Newsletter 85 is out. It's a bit thin, mainly because I'm in the process of turning out NLs quickly to catch up. One or two more NLs and I'm back on schedule. You can grab the NL as a zip file at http://www.ehnet.org/nl/hammer85.zip or http://swx.ca/nls/eh/zips/hammer85.zip It's also available online at http://www.ehnet.org/nl/85/ and http://swx.ca/nls/eh/85/ Thanks to Ari and Abk for providing the mirror space. My assistant is on leave for a couple of weeks, so this is a prime time to get submissions in. I'll be sending whatever I have when he gets back straight to him.

I will be finishing a review of COs soon. To be fair, it will only include those who were in their positions when I got XO. It will cover a variety of criteria and I will be making recommendations at the end, which will range from removal from position all the way through to an award or promotion. This is all part of a regular review I will be doing and is one of my goals stated when I first got XO - to increase the quality of the COs we have. The better the COs, the more fun the members have. Which is what this is all about.

I've purchased some space on Crystaltech. This space will serve a bunch of functions. Firstly, I'll be putting the TO site back on there. I've been given a new layout and I'll be doing some speed-coding to get it up and running. All course professors will be given FTP passwords, increasing the turnaround for course updates. Secondly, the space will be used as an offloading area to ease the strain on the TC domain. Currently, the TC domain regularly breaks its traffic limit due to the sheer volume of hits. I'm hoping that offloading certain content will decrease this traffic load. Certain sites such as the XO site and DGM sites will also be moving across. An added benefit of all this is decreasing the disk space being taken up, which is better used for the (always expanding) database.

The roster count seems to be all over the place lately. The TC, DB, BHG, Senate and CD all registered increases. However, the HF went down because of an AWOL check. Currently the EH is sitting around 4,730. It would be really nice to see the EH hit 5,000 and I may look into some sort of organised recruitment effort to achieve this. The TIE Corps platform ownership stats increase at an almost uniform pace. The idea behind tracking these numbers was to see if we could determine if any platforms were gaining more support than others. This would help plan any future platform migrations in the TIE Corps. More tracking will probably be needed.

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SA Astatine - XO