As we usually do around this time of year, we've just sent out a few hundred newsletters.  You may have one coming in the post, but if you just can't wait or if you don't usually get one by email, you can open it here and print your own. It's supposed to be printed on A4 paper and folded into a Christmas card.

We still send a lot out to people we haven't heard from for a long time and wonder if they reach the people they were intended for. Perhaps you used to get them but you have moved. We would love to hear that you are still getting them or if you don't any more but you would like to again, do get in touch. Contact info is in the downloadable letter.

It's not every day that African countries make huge language policy decisions, but today the BBC Africa news is reporting that the Rwandan parliament has decided that all education will be taught in English instead of French. It'll be interesting to see how this works out in practice. AIM has a number of people teaching theology in Rwanda at university level, I can't see that they will be switching to English until students are coming in with adequate English.

I'm typing this in Apple's Safari web browser, which has recently become available for Windows. Apple of course claim that it's the fastest and the best browser. Initial impressions were favourable but now things are not looking quite so good:

• Safari wants me to use the American spelling for 'favorable' and I can't find out how to tell it I want to use a British English spellchecker. Cultural imperialism - grrr!
• I wanted this and the previous paragraphs to have bullet points and I wanted to put in a link to the Safari download page, but most of the buttons in Joomla's web based text editor seem to be non-functional (i.e. the javascript isn't working correctly even though it isn't disabled) so I suppose I'll have to re-edit this in Firefox before publishing it.

Well I suppose I'll keep Safari installed so I can check how Mac users see websites I work on, but then again, I see a lot of Mac user's running Firefox, now I know some of the reasons why.

One of the distinctive features of ICCM this year was the increased number of people using Macs. I can see some of the attractions - Mac software looks nice and apparently build quality of the hardware is quite high, but prices of hardware and software are still high too. Yes I could run Windows in a virtual machine, but I don't see myself rushing out to buy an MacBook quite yet.