millennium | ten

I like cars. Over the past few years, I have had several, all for different purposes and with different capabilities.

2001 Nissan Silvia Spec-R

My first car was a S15 Silvia, which I owned in New Zealand. I took delivery on March 21, 2001. The car had a 250hp turbocharged SR20DET (2.0 liter I4) driving the rear wheels through a 6-speed transmission and a helical limited slip differential.

The Silvia was sold in New Zealand as the “200SX” but the badging campaign was limited to just replacing the lightning bolt “S” logo on hood with a Nissan logo, and replacing the “Silvia” script on the trunk lid with “200SX”. The Silvia script on the dashboard and inside each of the headlight clusters was retained, as was the “S” lightning bolt on the steering wheel cap and shift knob.

My car was yellow (”Lightning Yellow” in the Japanese catalog, or “Sunstruck” in the NZ one). I had a bit of difficulty driving it at first since the transmission was unlike most cars I’d driven before, very notchy, and very stiff through second and third gears. My favorite aspects of this car was its incredible performance - it was very fast and remains to this day the one I think that had the best driving position/steering/feedback of any I’ve driven. The steering was a lot more direct and heavy than pretty much anything else, even the STis that I’ve driven. The steering was similar to that in the un-assisted NSX while driving, but with some power boost at slow speeds.

Aside from just pure performance, the car was classically styled with GT proportions. A lot of people stick stupid wings on these things, but my opinion is that almost any modification to this car visually ruins the style. It was IMO one of the few truly beautiful cars that have been made by the Japanese.

The equipment was bare bones, but just enough - power windows, climate AC. The interior was simple and reminded me of a classic sports car with few controls, round air vents, a small leather steering wheel and a well placed shifter. The gauge pack was filled with a huge tach in the middle. A boost gauge on the A-pillar let you know the forced induction was working. Detail touches were good - the S logos mentioned above and the chromed script on the left side of the dashboard made the car feel classy.

The Silvia was the first car I owned that had the vanity plate, “XUL”. The plate (now scuffed and scratched) is now on display in my office at Google.

I put about 18,000 miles on this car in the two years I owned it. I had to sell it before moving to the states. In the old version of this site, I had a page that talked more about the car.

Photos below:

Netscape Campus, looking down one of the internal roads towards Planet Moz and Building 21, February 2000…

Trying to figure out a new name to replace “Firebird”… (December 2003). Small factoid: The idea for the name “Firefox” came from kerz, who I think was only half serious, because the other two names he suggested at the same time were “Firecrap” and “Fireturd”.

Following M5, I went into a long period of not being able to figure out what to do for M6. I developed numerous prototypes but nothing ever really stuck. During this time (1998-early 1999) I got the chance to flex my creative side.

Ulysses

Ulysses was a return to JavaScript whiz-bang. It used load events from the 50 or 60 small images that composed its DHTML navigation system to show a running in-page progress dialog as it loaded.

Assorted Sketches

Eventually I gave up on M6, and moved right on to M7… (hey if Netscape could do it, so could I!)

During the same time, I also contributed to the design of several iterations of the Needleleaf Society homepage (whilst moonlighting as Iron Mouse):

And also other SM sites such as SMWPR.

Millennium 7

I finally developed Millennium 7 (no pictures right now) as an evolution of the design of Millennium IV, lots of blue, wavy lines, and DHTML. Again heavily nested tables were used. The nesting was so severe in places that I had to show a background layer for Netscape 4.0 to explain why the page froze the browser for a good 30-45 seconds while it was rendering.

By the time Millennium 7 “shipped” (as it were), my interest in Sailor Moon and anime was fading, and I’d found a new project to turn my JavaScript skills to. Before I gave up, I designed a few more prototypes, one (the “Andromeda” prototype) which would be the template to the predecessor of this site:

I wasn’t in the mood to actually implement it though, since that would have taken weeks. Towards the end of 1999 I threw together a quick site and called it Millennium Eight. M5 remained on sailormoon.org until they stopped offering free web hosting, so the content was now a hodge-podge of non-Sailor Moon related stuff, mostly my Mozilla patches and ideas.

In 2000, I went to Mountain View to work for Netscape on Netscape 6. My web design ambition pretty much died during this time as I had something new and more interesting to work on. Midway through 2000 I registered bengoodger.com and tried to resurrect some of the content of M7, but it was too difficult to maintain so I replaced it with a simple page with contact info. In 2002 I resurrected the Andromeda prototype. The site was called Millennium, but bore no number. It was M9. Oddly enough, it was the longest lived design iteration, mostly due to lack of interest/time.

And that brings us to today, with M10. It’s been almost ten years too, and things have changed quite a bit for me over that time.

My previous post discussed some of the technical details about this upgrade, and the reasons for it. What I did not really cover though was the content of this site, and that’s probably a more interesting story.

This site is called “Millennium X” (ten) because it’s the tenth in a series of major design upgrades to occur since its inception nine years ago. I enjoy this site a great deal, even though my work on it has become sporadic, because this is where I got into hacking.

Early Days

On April 1, 1997 I uploaded my first site to Geocities. It’s gone now (maybe I’ll upload all of my old sites to this server at a later time). My subject matter was Sailor Moon, and I was just becoming interested in Anime and the Internet. The site was called “Central Control” after a construct in the Americanized version of the show. The site never had much interesting content (at least not in retrospect!) but I enjoyed working on it. Over a few months, I developed my HTML skills.

• Central Control 2
• Central Control 5
• v1, 3 and 4 are lost to the ages.

One day I was in the convenience store in the Shell Station by the Royal Oak Mall and I picked up a copy of NZ NetGuide. There was an article offering tips on how to spruce up your website with JavaScript, and had links to sites where you could find more info. I memorized the URL, and looked it up later. I began integrating scripts I found with my website, which became “Central Control JE” (”Java” Enhanced - someone eventually told me the two weren’t the same thing).

• Central Control JE
• Central Control JE/2
• Central Control SE/”Central Control Millennium” lost to the ages.

The site became more elaborate, and I renamed it “Millennium”. The first was just a re-skin of the CCJE site. I was more interested in creating style variants than working on the content! I branched out and created numerous prototypes. Every site overhaul was now a huge monolithic exercise that took weeks since all content had to be updated to match the new style.

I discovered the new version of Netscape Navigator - the 4.0 series, and found some demos showing off what was possible with layers. I was amazed, and quickly realized my select boxes and rollovers were woefully inadequate. I began work on a comprehensive update to Millennium II called (logically) Millennium III. It had a number of slick style updates and a lots of gratuitous layer usage and image maps. Since I was still learning JavaScript and the new APIs in Netscape 4.0, the curve was steep and the site took a couple of months to produce. By the time I was done, I realized I no longer really liked the style. Drag. Time for another major overhaul!

• Millennium II
• Millennium II-2

The next one was the first significant overhaul since I began to monkey with scripting. Millennium IV (”Antares”) featured an updated graphic design and a sophisticated DHTML menu structure. It still used frames, but hid it well. The site also had more actual original Sailor-Moon related content, enough to win it an award on the WSMWPE.

• Millennium IV

Following Millennium IV, I decided to tone down the fancy effects and came up with Millennium V. Instead of overdoing it on the JavaScript, I overdid it on the gratuitous scanlines. There was a lot of sophsiticated detail in thsi site, and the design was fairly baroque with a mammoth hierarchy of nested tables.

• Millennium V
  

The next article in this series talks about the post-M5 Sailor Moon sites I worked on.

I started this site at bengoodger.com six years ago to maintain personal information about me, as well as to serve as a dumping ground for files I wanted to share with others. By April 2002, I had decided to be more ambitious, and launched a weblog here. I was interested in the automated publishing medium, but I saw it more as an experiment than as a complete publishing solution, so much of the site was developed as static content. This turned out to be a problem, since I seldom updated it. Initially, I had grand plans to update the site monthly, but that never materialized. My last update to the front page was in August 2003, just after I got my last car.

At the same time, the archaic structure of the site, whose design and code I had largely lifted from a prototype I made in 1998 before I knew about CSS had become unmaintainable. I put together a new prototype, based on CSS. It took advantage of many features that IE could not understand - advanced CSS and translucent PNGs, but also some Mozilla proprietary features - XBL bindings etc to simplify the underlying HTML. The page rendered well in Firefox but was very slow. It rendered adequately in Safari, and forget about IE6. I gave up for three years.

For some reason, today I got a bee in my bonnet. I grabbed my 2003 prototype, attempted to work on it for a bit, gave up, and rebuilt it from scratch. You’re looking at the result. It should display excellently in a Gecko or WebKit browser. There are some issues in IE7 that I might get around to looking at at some point. Again, forget about IE6.

So anyway more importantly, all of the public facing content of this site is moving into Movable Type. It’s really a much easier way for me to update things. What this means in the short term is that some of the old content here may disappear or be moved. I’m going to do my best to make sure that any link that was public before remains at that location forever, but the navigation is going to change.

To access the old site and use its navigation structure, visit the front page archive.

I’m going to post up a storm in the next few minutes to fill out some of the basic sections, and then I think we’ll be done.