So here it is...

It's been a long couple of weeks for all of us. Having OSP down for this long is not fun and for something with a reputation of being "An Addiction" I feel everyone's pain as I know we were all run through a bit of detox over the past 10 days.

There is more info about what Bliksem hosting did specifically here if you'd like to read it but I'm not going to go into it here.

It's a sad sad thing that has made me quite angry and I need to move past it. I really have been stirred up by this and I need to get back to a place of peace because we all know how anger can really control us and have very negative effects on our life.

I truly believe that everything happens for a reason and although I don't know what the reason for this is I do know that it has forced me to deal with some things both personally and professionaly that will hopefully help shape who I am in the future. Possibly the same is true for some of you. Maybe this time helped some of you reconnect with your family or get some things in your business straightened out. Again, I don't know why this happened but there are many good results and I need to spend more time focusing on those things rather than getting more upset over what is lost.

For the past four days our new host Invision Power, which is the same company that created the forum we use, has been working non-stop to get any little bits and pieces of our forum back online. The first couple attempts left us with a forum that had all the data but no topics so all 130,000 posts would be in a big mushpot of 1 post. I looked through it and it was a nightmare that nobody could make any sense of. So the other option was to go back exactly 1 year and pretend like 2006 didn't happen. Neither option is good but the odds of us ever getting a full database are so slim that I think it's better to just get back together and move forward.

In the next couple of weeks I'll have them install the database with all the posts into another forum so you can at least use the search to find something specific...and feel free to repost it if you'd like it to stay around. Some of you may want to go back and repost parts of your bio into our much cooler "Profile" section that allows you to add more info there so be sure to check that out.

Also, you'll notice that you can now add friends in your profile and leave people messages so that's a fun new feature.

You'll also notice that we don't have the OSP "skin" and graphics but we will get that soon. Another company develops that so as soon as they update it for the new forum we'll get it installed.

For now...enjoy being back and I want to leave you with this quote by William Durant who is the founder of General Motors,

"Forget past mistakes. Forget failures.
Forget everything except what you're going to do now and do it."

Let's make sure 2007 is even better than 2006 so we don't miss it!

:)
DJ