Sie haben eine Biene in deiner Damenslipeinlage

[Merlin]

So you lived in an imaginary world before? What was the name of this land? Are you a faerie or any other mythical creature?

Your leave, apparently, has been long and now you return from your exile. TFF welcomes you with open feet.

Also, Raistlin > Merlin.

My username comes from a type of falcon, known as the Merlin, not the fictional character. It was all part of my diabolical social network mind game experiments.

In other news, I graduated from college like 1 1/2 years ago and have been working for SRNS, which is a subcontractor for the DOE at SRS. Heh, if all the acronyms we use were in a book, it'd be thicker than a dictionary. I do a wide variety of internet/intranet programming for different customers. It's mostly Java-based stuff, but I also have been developing in Adobe Flex as well. It's a pretty fun job since I get to do so many different types of tasks, so I never get bored. One day I could be writing a servlet and the next I could be hardening an app against vulnerabilities.

As for the real world, it is definitely different than college life. I honestly have less free time than before, which is ironic since I worked 40 hours plus went to college full time. I live on my own now, so my free time is consumed doing remedial chores. I can't complain though. Being single is so stress free.

In FF news, I quit FFXI sometime at the end of last year. Alexander was so slow that I got fishing up to 100 while trying to set up parties. It got to the point that the only way to get EXP in a party was to level sync in Qufim. I had better things to do with my time. On the other hand I am looking forward to FFXIV. It looks pretty cool so far(other than the fact that some of it is rehashed elements from FFXI).

I just finally beat FFXIII, but that wasn't because it was taking me forever. I've been doing a run through the whole FF series. I was busy finishing up FFVII: CC at the time. I eventually took a break from my 100% completion of every game from FFI-FFXII to beat FFXIII. I still need to get 100% completion on it though. I hate how you have to beat the story before you can work on most of the side-quest stuff. It is such a turnoff. But that would be digressing.

And that is a quick summation of my life as it is now. I don't feel like writing an essay today. <(^_^)>

[Andromeda]

Well the level cap increasing 99 on FFXI might revive people's interest in doing exp parties. I'm still debating if I want to go back and do that, but I'll probably wait to see what sort of abilities and traits are given at those levels.

Either way, hope to see you on FFXIV then at the very least. We'll start at the beginning like last time, though I don't know if you were there before I was or not.

Sounds like you've got a nice job. It is always good to be able to have plenty of different tasks to do. It certainly does make it less boring to be able to do that. One of the reason I think I liked leading a team than just being on the team. Leading gave me more things than I could do in a day. So I was never bored.

Will you be sticking around with the nagging desire to fix everything that is still broken or bad in the forums? Or just enjoying a relaxing visit? Or you planning on departing fairly quickly?

And for the new members that don't know Merlin, he was an admin many years back. Afterward, you mainly did a lot of behind the scenes work fixing problems with the code or what not. Certainly did wonders for the place.

[Merlin]

I'm amazed nobody has commented on the title yet... XD

I wouldn't mind giving this place a much-needed face lift. The actual site needs to be taken off of life support and revitalized. I wouldn't be able to do it alone. There is waaay too much content that would need to be converted/updated/added, etc.

As for the forums, I would investigate different software. vBulletin® is corporate bloatware and outdated. I haven't really looked in detail at version 4, but from what I saw it was just an even more bloated version of 3.5. It looks like Jelsoft is trying to convert vBulletin® into the next Facebook or Twitter... which I disagree with. Bulletin Boards are collaboration tools, not social networking tools. They are two different kettles of fish. I feel sure there are probably better solutions out there... maybe even open source solutions.

But like I said, I wouldn't even begin to imagine doing this by myself. A team of people working a couple of hours a week on it could get something awesome happening here.

On another subject, how's the RP world doing? Is it still dead in the water?

[Andromeda]

Yeah RP is possible deader than when you left, but I'm not sure if that is really the case. It has its ups and downs. I run the annual Ball to promote RPing as well as show off casual RPing to try to get people to see there are other things than just the hardcore that the vets and me are known for doing, that tends to scare away would be recruits. I've also been busy trying to get a job and before doing my job so I haven't been able to do a lot of the work that I have wanted.

And this is quite true that it would require a significant effort by a coordinate team to update and clean up everything on TFF and site. We just don't have a dedicate group for that. Until we have dedicated people to do something that like I'd suspect it will probably stay as it is. Though speaking of dedicated people, Fuzz apparently hired (?) a person to be our marketing guy. He is around and more visible than Fuzz, but that doesn't take a lot. ^^; Not sure what plans he has since he only joined recently, but we'll see.

Loco is less visible these days than in the past, he's the lurking admin now I think even if he is the main admin still. Part of it is I don't think anyone wants the job. >.>

And don't worry I've already got your lucky charms, Merlin. ^^