What's in the closet?

Ok ... you know how back in the days, way back, a lot of the content on the web were those horrible pages with backgrounds that made your eyes water and font colors that almost made you blind. Before the days of css, before anything like Dreamweaver or Frontpage was even made. When the novice didn't bother to learn tables and used "center" tags in a plane html page?

Well, I had one of those websites!!! Yeah it's been my deepest darkest secret ... but what the heck. In fact, in the old days, where hardly anyone had internet in Iran, and there was no Pendar.net or the thousand other sites that are stealing my name now, back in the days were there was no google, when you searched on Alta Vista or something for "Pendar", the first of the handful of results you got was "Pendar's Cool Website".

I had just came to Canada from the UAE, I was in high school and excited about this "world wide web". And even though I didnt know shit about making websites, I decided to build one. So I signed up for a free account on angelfire ... back in the good old days there were no pop-ups or ads either. It had a generic webpage generator, very funny, you just punched in the title and chose an ulgy background and there was this area you put in your text and it would pop out a horrible-looking page (funny it still works pretty much the same way)!

And I wasn't going to use generic buttons and graphics everyone else used those days, no way sir, I was going to design my OWN buttons. Of course I had no photoshop, corel, or anything. So I used good old MS PAINT (!!!!!), armed with the mouse, to make those nasty huge buttons. The main image I did with Autodesk Animator (OLLLLD school) .. which had then-fascinating features such as "color gradients".

Anyway, I haven't updated that site in 5 years, I think I only maintained it throughout high school and maybe a little bit in first year uni, and since then it's been gathering virtual dust. It was funny, I don't know why I was checking it out again today.

It's a funny document I think, evidence to my growing up. It's funny almost, how in so many ways my taste has changed (I can't believe I quoted Oprah on the quotes page !!!!!) and how in so many ways it hasn't.

I had totally forgotten about that page, til I got an email a few months ago from some guy, saying he had stumbled across it, after years of searching for the Mastercard Commercial theme song for the Ad that used to play during World Cup 98. The song was Era's Ameno ... and he had finally found it on my site (or at least found out who the song is from) and wanted to thank me.

It's like old teen pics everyone wants to hide and are ashamed of, but I guess after you grow old you don't mind them anymore, and show them to people. I'm still not that old, but I think it's time for this to come out of the closet.

The funniest thing now is reading people's entries on my guestbook. Too bad so many of them are "private", and only I can read them, but they are the best ones. Like this one from Pendar Sillwood in England:

"I was just doing a search for other Pendar's in the world. I don't know why I was so
surprised when I found that there are some!
What's the origin of yours? Mine is from an ancient English king (different spelling).
Adios."

Or this

i just wanted to let you know that i think you're a great guy and a perfect boyfriend!! you make me feel wonderful

You hear that ladies? ;) Hehe, how ironic.

I tried to do some other, more pioneering work as well. Shortly after I made this, I also made what was then the first and only Perisan MP3 music site. It was called Weekly Persian MP3, and at some point had acquired considerable traffic. Of course I wasn't looking to, nor did I ever, make any money from it. I just wanted to be the first person who does things, and I'm glad I was. I remember uploading an mp3 each week, which took me an hour or so with dialup, on the meager angelfire server. It was also my first/only experience with Flash. The main page used to look good, but at some point it got messed up and the header got to the horrible misaligned shape that it is now!

Anyway, so if you're ready for an eye-sore and a pop-up assault, check them out. (if you close the pop-up it reopens on every new page, so leave it open, or just use Google tool bar to kill all the pop ups)

Pendar's Cool Website
Weekly Persian MP3