I'm back...

[Nils Holland]

Hi everyone,

well, I just wanted to let all of you know that I'm back. Yes, this is not 
world-moving news and most of you will probably not really remember me, but 
I've been a long-time FreeBSD user and was actually somewhat active on 
various FreeBSD mailing lists in about 2000 - 2005.

I have fond memories of these good old days: I was a Linux user in the mid 
to late 90's, and eventually decided that I would rather like to use 
FreeBSD. So exactly on the 31st of December 1999, when most people were 
preparing for celebrating the new millenium, I was sitting at home, trying 
to download the then-current stable FreeBSD release (3.something) ISO image 
via the painfully slow 56k modem connection I had back in the day. While I 
was downloading I was chatting in some IRC channels, and I remember joking 
with various folks that I was hoping my FreeBSD download would complete 
before midnight, because - as we all "knew" back then - on the 1st of 
January 2000 the Internet (or all computer systems, for that matter) would 
come to a sudden end - at least that was what the media hype was telling us.

As it turned out, my FreeBSD download completed successfully and I spent the 
1st of January 2000 setting it up. I've basically been hooked ever since! I 
remember "building world" every weekend, extensively using the ports 
collecting, lurking and occasionally posting on the mailing lists, and just 
promoting FreeBSD by recommending it to others and helping them with its 
usage. Really great days ... but then my life changed, I finished school and 
started working. And even though I got a job as a programmer, I worked on 
something entirely unrelated to FreeBSD and unfortunately, I was too much 
out of time to follow my personal FreeBSD interests as much as I would have 
liked to. As a result, I became inactive on the mailing lists and didn't do 
much more than just simply running FreeBSD.

Now in 2011, it seems that I will finally have some more time for the "fun" 
things in life, and as a result, I'm currently in the process of getting my 
machines up to date with the latest FreeBSD-Stable (currently, they're kind 
of outdated). Furthermore, I'm resubscribing to all the nice mailing lists 
and am planning to once again be more active on them in the future. And who 
knows, probably I'll even find the time to contribute a little by writing 
actual code - a thing I've always wanted to do in the past, but - despite of 
a few small patches for the ocassional port - have never come around to 
actually doing.

So, in short: FreeBSD community, keep ruling! I've been a quiet member of 
you during the last few years, and I'm hoping to be a more active one once 
again from now on. ;-)

Greetings to all of you out there,
Nils