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Submit Response is a weblog by Jack Mottram, a journalist who lives in Glasgow, Scotland. There are 1308 posts in the archives. You can subscribe to a feed. This post was made on April 24, 2003 and belongs in the misc. category. The previous post was SixApart launch TypePad, and the next post is Kung Log.

Extreme Frustration

I couldn’t con­nect to the inter­net this morn­ing. At first I thought I must’ve for­got­ten to pay a bill, as the error mes­sage was ‘Authentification Failed.’ After the req­ui­site eter­nity on hold, I find that this is not the case. So there’s a prob­lem at my end. I checked every­thing imag­in­able. Twice. Noth­ing seems amiss. I decided to call BTOpen­world tech­ni­cal sup­port (usu­ally a couple of resorts after the last resort, but at least they answer promptly. Unlike Apple.) They asked me to check every­thing I already checked. Twice. They gave up. I gave up, and got on with a bit of writ­ing work.

On per­form­ing a spellcheck, I found many words flagged as incor­rect, with sug­gested replace­ments in Amer­i­canese. That wee flag in the Tool­bar was set to the Stars & Stripes, instead of the Union Jack (Which, by the way, I rather resent being per­ma­nently dis­played on my screen). I changed it back. Lord knows why the lan­guage set­ting impacts on Inter­net Con­nect, but here I am on the inter­web typing this.

So, which one of youse broke into my house and made my com­puter Amer­i­can? Come on, own up!

Posted at 1pm on 24/04/03 by Jack Mottram to the misc. category.
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  1. Remem­ber all those .mil addresses that appeared in the logs? I think you now have your explanation…

    Posted by Leon at 3pm on 24.04.03

  2. Stealth amer­i­can­i­sa­tion - ‘Any cit­i­zen of the world involved in the ter­ror­ist activ­ity of spelling Eng­lish cor­rectly will be punished.;

    Posted by Jack at 3pm on 24.04.03

  3. hi, I just wanted to pass on the word about a pretty unique peace-​activism site, Faces​For​Peace.org, where people are post­ing their photos and anti­war state­ments in one place, kind of an “online peace rally” (this war may be about over but the con­di­tions for future pre­emp­tive, near-​unilateral wars are obvi­ously still in place). Hope you can check it out, if you like it please spread the word.

    peace, tim

    http://​www.​faces​for​peace.org

    Posted by tim at 4pm on 24.04.03

  4. Cheers Tim - that’s the kind of spam we don’t mind getting!

    Posted by Jack at 4pm on 24.04.03

  5. you know you can get rid of the flag by dis­abling amer­i­can set­tings alto­gether. you only get the flag menu when you have more than one regional set­ting active. go to the system prefs dialog about it and untick amer­i­can. i had the same problem.

    Posted by sean at 5pm on 24.04.03

  6. Sean - thanks for the tip. Polit­i­cally sus­pect flag removed ;-)

    In case anyone’s inter­ested - it looks it was the instal­la­tion of the latest Air­port soft­ware update that reset the system to US. Be warned!

    Posted by Jack at 5pm on 24.04.03

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