Thank you for the welcome Luca, nite train, and Wes.
I plan to stick around for a long while should it be possible, so I hope things work out.
As for my experience, I have role-played on a couple of sites; one run by a small group of friends years ago, as well as a site by the name of the RPG Consortium. A mixture of people having to deal with real life taking up their time, and a trend amongst the people who were my friends to put decreasing amounts of effort into replying and actively discouraging me from writing longer, more detailed role-play replies led me to drop the medium for years.
Luckily, I was pointed here after talking to Moogle on a different site, and have since been reading wiki articles to learn more. As well, just yesterday I started reading the archived thread on the ICS Pheonix after being pointed there by the IRC chat when I asked for an example thread that would be good to read to get an idea of the nature, and feeling of the setting.
I am hoping that soon I'll be able to craft a character to experience the universe of SARP first hand, and join either an open RP or plot, however for the moment I feel that I want to learn a little more about the setting. Then all that will remain is determining how much my writing skills have decayed in this format and doing my best to improve them.
Again thank you all for your welcome, and I hope to be an active, and productive member of the community.