Bye Gretta.
I was not a founding member, but I recall joining in the very early part of the 2000s. My join date was reset by an inept IT guy who did an update on the software.
I really enjoyed meeting all the folks from the Silicon Valley area. They got me into machining my own designs as well as modding. Don (McGizmo) brought the VP of development at Surefire to several of our get togethers. We saw the Beast before anyone else knew that it existed. That was pretty cool. I was quite pleased when Don showed me a prototype where he used my "two stage tailcap" idea to modify one of his mules into a high/low output model. It was the first time that anyone had asked permission to utilize one of my designs for their own work. In the spirit of CPF, I gladly agreed to the use.
But then we started losing the more active innovators when Kelly started to set up separate sub forums for them. Mc Gizmo and Mr Bulk left for more wide open places.
I sort of dropped out of CPF when two things happened at about the same time. Earthlink was providing image hosting and they shut down support for that service without much notice. Around the same time yet another CPF software update wiped out the links from my posts to the images as well as screwing up a lot of the links to other posts. Gretta was not interested in providing any sort of migration path to find all the things that were lost with each upgrade. I was left with no way to fix all the posts that I'd made over the course of a decade or so.
I still check in once in a while, and I still have my "shrine of shine" with the first generation ARC flashlights, the inovative multi level VIP with the PWM Dragon dirver, my own designs and even most of the early Surefire LED models. See all ya all around.
Daniel