This is a re-creation of the first proper version of Flight 515, née Centered Ambiguity, as best as I can remember it: version 1.1, codename Gray. (As the version number implies, this wasn’t the very first design; there was actually a version of this design with a hideous-looking green-on-blue header graphic that I have since disowned.) This was a slapdash effort created in about 15 minutes to replace a simplistic text-only index page, which contained a quote comparing cafeteria food to nicotine and a handful of links. Among them were the lyrics to the Bomb Iraq song, back when the then-pending invasion was still just a joke-rich possibility instead of the cringe-inducing years-long disaster that it eventually became.

I started the site’s first blog a couple of weeks after its opening, at first maintaining it with some silly desktop application before switching over to Movable Type. (Funny how some things never change.) Due to indecision over the right software to use, a lack of proper backups, and general apathy, the stuff I wrote before October 2003 has presumably been lost forever. I still have a copy of the database that powered the Update of the Irregular Time Period, the blog that succeeded it and ran until an unfortunate hard drive crash in January 2007, but aside from the occasional excerpt or four, I’m not planning on republishing it any time soon for fear of dying from embarrassment at the poor writing and general whininess of my middle teenage self.

Various incarnations of Flight 515 also had a forum, largely owing to the delusion that anybody other than myself would be interested in posting in it. I overcame this stunning misapprehension around the time of the aforementioned drive failure.

This version of the site lasted from February to May of 2003, at which point it moved on to the blacker — and thus much more stylish — version 2.