For a while, firefox or IE said there was trouble connecting to the vmkf server, was it down or something?

Yes. We were experiencing a number of problems with the company that hosts the machines that VMKF, TTC, and DOW run on. Things should be back to normal. Or at least as normal as they ever are around here.

We had an additional 1 gig of ram added to the server. Tech support ran into some complications, but everything should be fixed now.

I was wondering the same.. I was able to log in to the pirates forums but not to vmkf.
I'm glad we are back :)