I haven't exactly been absent from here but not really present either. But I feel like checking in and expressing some gratitude.
I started here in 2002 as a geeky 14 year old who wanted to talk about NGPC and a few of his favorite games found in those fantastic red arcade machines, and get advice on buying a cab of my own. The forum was cool, but in my first few years I really got to know the community through IRC, #neo-geo on chat-solutions. I laughed at Kernow's grumpy British humor, I cried when Jigen passed away, and I treated Chad Okada like some sort of celebrity, you really just had to be there, this flash chat thing isn't the same at all.
Anyway, I owe a great deal to the tech forum here, and those that hang out there. I'd always been curious of the world around me (my dad worked as an engineer at the NBC station in Houston, I was the kind of kid who took every device and appliance apart to look at its internals, etc), and when I joined the forums it was the perfect time, since I was just starting to untangle a lot of the web of how all of this fantastic game stuff, and high tech stuff as a whole, actually worked. Throughout the years of lurking the archives and posting on N-G's tech forum, and probing the minds of the technically-minded folks here, I was able to feed my mind the nitty-gritty it so craves, and gain a deeper understanding of the various technologies in play behind the NeoGeo, enabling me to perform repairs upon my cab (thanks JHendrix!) and build several superguns (thanks Matt Ross, JMKurtz, VanillaThunder and Broken!), as well as some other tech stuff I so happened to pick up from here like my first forays into Linux (thanks Kernow! Setting up a newbie with Slackware though???). NeoGeo itself directly inspired me to learn about video signals and video capture, since while the composite from my supergun looked OK to me I had no TVs with S-Video, and the geeks here even way back in 2002 were saying that S-Video looked a ton better, and if you could achieve it, RGB was the holy grail...
So now I'm 27, and in the past several years I've gotten a Computer Science degree from UT Dallas, worked for a capture card company, worked as a game tester, had my hands inside of too many arcade cabs, controllers, and consoles to count, and as of a few weeks ago, I moved to California to work for Apple as an engineer. I sincerely believe that Neo-Geo.com's nurturing of my need to tinker with the world around me has led me to where I am today, and for that, I thank those of you who led me down this path.
PS: Any of you guys in Norcal, I plan to host lots of gamenights once I move into my new place in Sunnyvale, let's get in touch or reconnect so that once I'm set up, we can meet up and play lots of stuff!