Merry Christmas!

We here at LFS would like to wish you and your family the merriest of Christmases! We hope your travels are safe, your reunions joyful and your egg nog is well 'nogged.'

We, and we are using the royal 'we' since there's only one of us, are deeply grateful to you, the reader for helping us build an informative and entertaining site. We are receiving regular visitors from the States, Indonesia, China, S. Korea, Australia, France, Germany, Canada, the UK, russia, and several other countries. We have gone, in less than one year, from 10 readers per month to 1,500, and growing daily. We can see that folks are coming from the RSS feed, Google, other sites like UrbanSurvival (thanks George), and emailed links to various stories. People are checking us out with browsers, iPods, Blackberries, and a half-dozen other toys. thanks to all of you, especially those who write in to offer their two-cents worth.

In the coming months, we hope to expand our content with interviews and news reports from around the world, but especially Indonesia and Southeast Asia. We will endeavor to bring you ideas and information that you hopefully will find interesting and challenging.

Our eBay store is a work in progress, but when it's up and running, it will have unique crafts, jewelry, art, and things you can only find here, in the jungles of the Archipelago. Our Amazon bookstore has titles that we find entertaining and informative, and hopefully challenging.

And, of course, there's our usual acerbic take on Hidupan, Alam Semesta dan Semuanya (Life, the Universe and Everything). We don't pull any punches. We've gone head-to-head with the Beast and lost pretty much everything, so what's to fear? As our motto goes, "Fear is NOT an option!"

We hope you will continue to come back and enjoy our rants and tales from the Far Side. We also hope you will pass on the link to your friends, who might enjoy the kind of stuff we crank out around here. And if there's something you would like to see, tell us so we can make this site a going concern.

May you enjoy the blessings of liberty, the free pursuit of happiness and the health to use them. Thanks again, and God bless!

Sampai jumpa,
The Far Side Team (of one)