Freaky Gmail

I suddenly started getting Facebook messages sent to my gmail account. I traced it back and found another Morgan Dawn on Facebook - she signed up to Facebook using her new gmail account. But it turns out she was using my email address by mistake.  On google you own the full name even with dots and + and other symbols.

So morgandawn is the same as morgan.dawn as is m.organ.dawn

So if you use the wrong gmail address to sign up for another service, you will never have control of the other service (Facebook, banks, etc)

Since this is not a hack, just someone who does not know how Google works I tried to send her a Facebook message to tell her she needs to create a new gmail account  that does not use morgandawn and that she  needs to change her Facebook email address to that new gmail address.  Unfortunately, she does not accept Facebook messages from non-friends. But since I am being flooded with messages from her friends, I tracked down two who do have Facebook messaging enabled and asked them to have her contact me (at another email address). She probably wont be able to log into Facebook for a while.  And luckily she has only used my email for Facebook (I think).  I did make certain that my gmail recovery email is set to another address and that I have the appropriate gmail security.

Tumblr Post: a trip back in time with me to the mid-90s

If you are on tumblr, go here to reblog, comment or read other comments in the notes.

For those of you not on tumblr, marmolita has this to share:

a trip back in time with me to the mid-90s

• if you were up to date your computer was probably running windows 95
• there was no standard word processing application (I used Word Perfect, who remembers that one?)
• “the internet” was usually synonymous with “AOL” (although some folks used Prodigy or Compuserve)
• AOL had a lot of content, including message boards, chat rooms, IM, etc.
• fandom existed primarily on newsgroups, mailing lists, and message boards
• if you were on AOL, you might find fellow fans by SEARCHING THE PROFILES OF ALL AOL USERS FOR INTEREST IN YOUR FANDOM AND THEN RANDOMLY IMING THEM CAN YOU BELIEVE WE USED TO DO THAT AND IT WORKED JFC
• chatting for non-aol users was accomplished with IRC and ICQ (uh oh!)
• the best web browser was Netscape Navigator
• you paid for internet BY THE MINUTE and it was a great day when AOL changed to a flat monthly fee for unlimited access
• you didn’t use the internet for too long at a time anyway because you were tying up your phone line. Or, you got a second line for your computer.
• websites involved lots of tiled backgrounds, flashing text, and marquees. Most had a single banner image because graphics took forever to load.
• the word “blog” did not exist
• fanfiction was hosted on your own personal website or on an archive website someone in your fandom set up. You might have fic in multiple archives.
• to share fanfic with people IRL you either had to save to a floppy for them or print it out.
• the bulk of mailing lists were on egroups which later was purchased by yahoo and turned into yahoo groups
• website hosting services included GeoCities, angelfire, Xoom, and others I feel like I’m forgetting right now
• web search was ineffective and fairly useless. You had to search multiple providers (yahoo, alta vista, lycos) which would each give vastly different results, until metasearch came along and consolidated them for you
• to find sites in your fandom you would go to one site and see which webrings they were a member of, then look through the webrings. Some people wouldn’t let you into their webring if they didn’t think you were cool enough.
• every website with fanfic had layers and layers of disclaimers and if applicable adult content warnings you had to click through to get to the content
• we have come a long way in the past 20 years (also jfc I’m old)

my favorite tumblr comments:
"REMEMBER WHEN DOWNLOAD RESUME BECAME A THING?
REMEMBER THOSE TEARS OF JOY??"

and
"as I read this the sound of a dial-up connection played in the background in my brain"

and
"Because I love you guys this much, I actually dug up a mirror of my old Geocities site. This went up in my junior year of high school, coded by one of my friends at the time."

and
""get off AOL, I need to make a phone call". Serious every day."

and
"This brought back memories of getting into trouble for using up my mom’s entire printer cartridge by printing out reams of X-Files fanfic. Totally worth it."

and
"Oh god, I remember all of this. You guys have literally no idea the lengths we used to have to go through, not only to find fanworks, but fellow people! But, on the other hand: who’s still in contact with people you met from those times? Because I am. More so than people I’ve met in the last 3-5 years. Things were a lot harder back then, but it was completely worth it."

and
"I still have those X-Files VHS tapes that other Philes made and mailed to me so I could catch up."

and
"Yeah, yeah, yeah, you had it rough. Trip back in tme to the mid-’70s: I paid hundreds of dollars a month in long-distance fees to talk to my fannish friends on the phone, because only one of them lived in my city. I wrote thirty page letters every day to some of my other friends and mailed them, then waited for mailed replies. Fanfiction was typed or handwritten and mailed, then laboriously edited with ink, then finally typed, laid out with paper and ink on larger sheets of paper, then printed offset or xerox (xerox sucked back then) and art had to be pen and ink to avoid the cost of half-tones. Then the pages were bound with staples or perfect binding and sold as fanzines. We were thrilled when word processors, and then computers, came out. Fandom was a very exclusive place back then; almost no one outside of fandom knew it existed. Sometimes i miss those days. But I do love the convenience of computers. Next time: telepics (using a 35mm camera, maybe with a tripod, maybe not, rolls of film, and a VCR with freeze frame and frame-by-frame advance to take photos off the TV)."

and
"You would go to your friend’s house “to use the internet,” and that was its own activity — because you only had one friend who had a fast enough connection and computer (and cool/hands-off parents) to make it worthwhile to sit there and snack while you both clicked around for fun. Sometimes you took personality tests on sparknotes. Or waited an hour for a Quicktime trailer to download. You would do these and not have any place to talk about them later except with each other, because no one cared.

Newspapers didn’t have comments at the bottom of articles.

There used to be a list of free email providers, which included a chart detailing email quotas, speed, if you had to pay after a certain time, etc… because this was waaaayyy pre-Gmail. Y

ou had to delete a lot of stuff in Hotmail because the quota was so small. (I didn’t save my sent messages, which proved very annoying.)

Frames. (“Click here to break out of frames!”)

Inserting a ZIP disk hoping you wouldn’t get the click of death.

2 MB being considered a very large attachment.

The first iMacs being the most amazing thing on campus."