Our third issue! And we SELEDA editors have managed to fend off whimsical intellections of coup d'etats, violent overthrows of each other and forming splinter SELEDA publications. (We figure this smugness about our cohesion will last… oh, until the fifth issue.) We've even managed not to booby trap each others homes… well, at least not successfully. OK, fine… it was a harmless little bomb.

   The point is, we are as excited about SELEDA now, as we were when we first launched it. Your feedback has sustained our enthusiasm even during our most darkest moments, when we found ourselves banging our heads against our monitors, muttering "Min gud wust geban?… Min gud wust geban?"

   But we trudge on, and in an effort to out do ourselves, we are introducing a couple of new features in the June issue.

   Corporate Arbegna: we hope will be a mainstay column where Ethiopian professionals take an irreverent look at corporate life.

   Jebdu: Ethiopians on the Frontier: will ferret out people who have done/ are doing/are involved in careers and projects outside of, er, the 'normal' Ethiopian realm. (No offense to engineers, systems analysts and accountants everywhere.) It will be their stories in their own words, and in their own style.

   As always, we hope all of you will take an interactive role in making SELEDA a vibrant, innovative and dysfunction-free forum. We are always looking for writers, so, may we suggest SELEDA milmela komitayes all over this land to help us identify those amongst us who are doing great things and fighting for noble causes. (By noble causes we don't mean concerted efforts everywhere to make us abeshas understand the concept of s'AT makber… That goes under "Noble yet Hopeless Causes.")

   But we digress…

   The news is that with the July issue, SELEDA will be sporting a brand new look! No more will you have to suffer the indignity of fuddy-duddy, random acts of big graphic files.

   For the record, to those of you in the "endet sira atachiwu?" camp, believe us, we had no problem with the current front page. We just couldn't take the relentless netreka by a core group of sergogeb computer aficionado SELEDA-ities, who used computer-speak that we want declared as hate speech to intimidate us into revamping our look.

   Abo! Selam situn! Fine. Whatever. What do we care what these snobs do with the front page… as long as they don't mind getting verbally emaciated in "million dollar words" if the new do turns out to be a dud. (If you are one of those graphically/artistically adept computer types who would like to assist in this jihad, please let us know--in English!)-- how we can mooch off your considerable talents.)

   We, too, will be anxiously awaiting the new and improved look. We wish we could tell you what to expect, but, alas, we were not able to remain awake during the brainstorming session. (The only words we could pick up on were "frames… blah.. maneuverability… blah.. blah.. less graphics… blah… color contrasts.. blah, blah… man, you gotta kill all those ****-ing graphics!"

   Charming.

   For all we know, when you type in the address for SELEDA next month, you might a) be magically transported to one good looking page, or b) find yourself browsing through a not-so-family-friendly site… It all depends on how well we treat these bellicose computer types.

   For now, we hope you enjoy the June issue.

   We always welcome your feedback, suggestions and "demo endegena zarachiu tenesa" letters. Our email address is Seleda@yahoo.com

   See you in July.