Man, I'm bummed, or maybe i should be happy. Oz, that's me and Olive Oil at the top of the page. Actually it's connected to the navigationbar and doesn't hang that much at all below the FT logo. The Web site speed was apparent before we loaded the new navigation bar on interior pages, so i think it is more related to the increase in traffic - yesterday was the third highest day ever for new members and the second highest day ever for user activity, All week long we've been hammered with peak traffic. While running some pretty good servers at FT, I'll look to see what we can do to tweak more performance or see what else is new for faster servers since it is likely the traffic will continue to grow on FT.

As for the cartoon characters - when we were in beta for a makeover for FT, we presented to a bunch of members of FT various prototypes for the new look - with and without the Olive Oil graphics and what you see was overwhelmingly the choice of those members (I think about 50 of them at random, long time members, international, US and Canada and even members we picked from new enrollees with us only for less than a month but with several posts, etc) who agreed to test things.

We've gotten a lot of positive feedback from the new front page so let's get used to this and see what the feed back is over time.

Thanks for the observing eye. Now, don't you think the popeye guy looks more like me? HA! Happy New Year.