Traditionally the ancient Roman Gladiator's salute to their Emperor, the reality is, apparently, that it was not used by gladiators but only uttered once (by slaves who were being forced to take part in a mock battle for Claudius). Interesting though that may be, you are probably wondering why I am using it as the title for a Blog entry. That will, I trust, become apparent.
The short answer is that Marcia and I have reluctantly decided that we can no longer continue to write the "KitBox" column for FoxTalk magazine. As of August 2006 we will transferring our column (under a new, and yet-to-be decided name) to Advisor Guide to Microsoft Visual FoxPro. This is something of the end of an era for both of us.
I have been writing for the KitBox in FoxTalk since the April 1998 issue and have 98 articles in that series to my credit. Marcia has been doing it since December of 2001 and has co-authored 56 articles. Since we live, and work, together it was easy to continue with the dialog style when Marcia became my co-author although she has, of course, stamped her own inimitable personality on the column and the feedback that we have received, over the years, has been favorable. For that we thank you all, our readers.
The first 42 columns were written with my old friend and colleague, Paul Maskens. The basic style of the column was set by the fact that we really did write the columns sitting across the table from each other and debating topics, often in the "Lamb and Flag" pub near High Wycombe in England (though there were other venues). Paul finally retired from the column in 2001 and Marcia took over. Since then we have written 56 columns and covered a wide range of topics for three great editors who left us pretty much alone and let us get on with it. (First Whil Hentzen, then David Stevenson and finally Rainer Becker).
So why are we stopping writing for FoxTalk? The short answer is that since the magazine was sold to Eli Research we have found their requirements too restrictive for us. This is not to say that are not an excellent publishing organization, or that their content is in any way inferior, but they do operate as a large company with rigid rules and requirements. Their magazine style (three columns per page, articles broken into "sections" that have separate titles and so on) may be ideal for conventional articles but does not really sit comfortably with the back and forth style of our column. We found it too difficult to work with and too constraining - the result was that writing the column ceased to be fun and became hard work.
As those of you who write articles for magazines will know only too well, the pecuniary rewards for an article are such that when viewed as an hourly rate for the effort it would be more profitable to take a job slinging hamburgers in MacDonalds, especially when you have two authors on the article. So if it ceases to be fun, there is no point in doing it. We had reached that point and we felt that the column would only suffer if we continued to try and write it under conditions in which we were not comfortable. We wish FoxTalk all the success in the world under its new owners, it is a great magazine and has great authors writing for it. However, we will be treading a different path in the future .
Advisor Magazines very kindly offered us an alternative home and now we are excited about, and looking forward to, writing the column once again. We have new topics that we want to cover but we intend to keep to the same dialog-based formula, where we first pose a problem and then work through the process of getting to a solution.
Marcia and I would like to thank the many loyal readers who have been kind enough to tell us how much they liked the KitBox column, and who have followed our adventures in programming and design over the years. We hope that you will continue to read us in our new home in the Advisor Guide to Microsoft Visual FoxPro from August of this year.