3 notes in tech
Finally got the email and went through the process to re-enable my Facebook account. You may have seen me talking about it here recently.
(Not my photo, but I thought a door to nowhere was appropriate imagery here.)
So now I'm back in. Is this a good thing or a bad thing, ultimately? 🤔
Remember to keep your contact info updated across social media platforms—especially for the two-factor authentication stuff.
I’m currently locked out of my Facebook account because I don’t have access to a phone number I thought I’d already updated in settings.
Wonder what those five notifications are—or if they’ll let me back in after reviewing the pic of my ID I submitted.
I don’t remember having these problems back in the fax machine days.
Contact me here on my site anytime.
I remember it kind of clearly even though it was probably 25 years ago now.
Above is an actual printed photograph that Fragile Porcelain Mice manager Chris mailed to me from the New York area, so I could see what our website looked like on his personal device.
I'd just learned to build websites for people to visit from their computers, and now the new trend was supposedly pushing to have websites that worked on cellphones, PalmPilots, and other "personal digital assistant (PDA)" devices at the time.
Pretty sure I added a "splash page" that you'd see when visiting the Fragile Porcelain Mice website. A splash page was one of those old-school gateway pages that asked you to choose your own adventure before you'd seen a single thing. "Click here for the standard site. Click here for the mobile version." As if anyone was excited to opt into the inferior experience on purpose.
The mobile version was basically a mostly-text-only copy of the standard site, except for one big, monochromatic FPM .bmp logo sitting proudly at the top (because even on a two-inch screen, branding mattered).
Simple as the designs were, it still required the use of free device emulator tools available at the time to test everything. I'd toggle between views of the sleek, modern Motorola Razr, assorted BlackBerries and PDAs, and your standard little Nokia flip-phone—squinting at my monitor trying to judge whether something looked right on a screen I'd never actually held. Half the time the emulators disagreed with each other anyway, so you'd just pick the one that made your site look the least broken and call it a day.
And then there was my attempt at a MIDI ringtone featuring the bassline from Fragile Porcelain Mice's "Concept of Grief"—which, after being translated into MIDI, sounded less like music and more like one of those old LCD football games gone mad.
