Congratulations to Brad for an outstanding and continually informative and entertaining web site.

And to all of you fellow Film Handlers out there, thank you all so much for your help and input. Keep it up and spread the Film-Tech word, brothers (and sisters).

Is Mike Heenan Archer Troy???

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John P. Pytlak, Senior Technical Specialist
Worldwide Technical Services, Entertainment Imaging
Eastman Kodak Company
Research Labs, Building 69, Room 7419
Rochester, New York, 14650-1922 USA
Tel: 716-477-5325 Fax: 716-722-7243
E-Mail: john.pytlak@kodak.com

And I'd like to congratulate Brad on putting together such a sucessful web site. I can remember when this site was just an idea in Brad's head. And look at it now! Funny that I should wait almost a year to get a computer, get on-line, and be a part of it.

Well, to figure out who was around BFT (Before Film-Tech), just go to the last forum pages and anywhere you see a person's name listed as "unregistered"...that was a post from the old site before this forum program was implemented. The posts were simply transferred.

If memory serves Joe, it was you who suggested the final name "FilmGuard", which was obviously decided upon and I was the one who decided on "Film-Tech". (Much less law-sounding don't ya think? Of course, trying to convince Yahoo the name has changed is about has hard as convincing Steve Guttag that platters are the best thing since sliced bread. If you do a search for "Brad Miller and Associates", guess where you will end up?) Anyway, a few months later Dwayne said I should've called FilmGuard "Gleemonex" instead (named after the miracle drug from the movie "Kids in the Hall-Brain Candy"), but that was probably trademarked anyway.

100 hits in a given day was certainly a milestone at the time...especially since there was NO advertising or search engines that would pick the site up then. It was completely word-of-mouth back then, and I have a feeling a good amount of the traffic today still comes from word-of-mouth. I'll have to go in and check the figures. The last time I checked was about 5 or 6 weeks ago with that 33,000 record day. 20,000 a day is about the norm now.

Funny, even the first few months while I was on the AOL server I was even then struggling for space (I had 10 MEGS allotted to me then) because of the picture warehouse which had less than 10 theaters featured then. Now the site is spread over 3 servers and well over 1000 MEGS, and is one of the largest sites (storagewise) on the web...and I still can't seem to get enough storage space! Ken Layton gets credit for a good half of that thanks to his generosity in sending in copies of his manual collection. A lot of people may not realize this, but over HALF of the manuals on this site are available because of Ken! Ken, how much have you personally spent at Kinko's to help make all of that information available to techs and operators around the world?

While I'm "rolling credits" here, I cannot fail to mention Joe's constant behind-the-scenes assistance. Joe has personally taken every single picture in the warehouse and touched them up, corrected colors (where feasible), resized them, compressed them so they will load faster, etc all at an incredible expense of his personal time. Joe has also assisted with the logos (check his latest one at the top of the screen) and many other items with the site.

There's also a REALLY silent fellow who goes by the name of Jeremy Spracklen, who lurks around the forum constantly, but I think has only posted 3 times! Jeremy has always been there with his trademark "other way of looking at things" opinion and has greatly assisted in the little things everyone takes for granted and would be very difficult to even explain. I've probably embarassed him enough just mentioning his name, so I'll leave it at that.

Dwayne is my main helper right now. You will be seeing much of him in the future (well, at least you will be seeing his "magic hands").