(no subject)

[tecknow.livejournal.com]

Do you ever get that tech support email or call from friends or family where they pretend very poorly that they actually just want to talk? But you can totally tell that it's a computer problem as soon as they say "Hello?"

It reminds me of the Margaret Cho skit about how everyone has to pretend to be friends with their dealer and act like the drugs are just a surprise! Of course if you say "I'm neck deep in stupid already and I really need to sit down, just tell me what's wrong," You're the bad guy.

My dad's wife's computer got stuck on the Google Denmark. Their browser language settings were fine and their homepage was http://www.google.com/firefox?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official but that and google.com both redirected them to google.dk

I don't know what caused it, but I got it fixed.

The best part was when I got her to the preferences page and told her she needed to find the setting for English in the drop down list.

"It's not there! the list doesn't say 'English,' everything else seems to be there."
"You need to find the word for English in the language it's displaying."
"The word for English is English!"
"Only in English."
"... ..."
"I'll bet you it's very similar, check the E's. No, not Esperanto."

Comments

[mouse-from-marz.livejournal.com]

"no, not Esperanto." ROFLMAO...

[gholam.livejournal.com]

You're lucky it got stuck on a language that uses a familiar alphabet - אנגלית, for example, would've been a lot harder to explain :)

[glitteringlynx.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was thinking that, too. I guess the Danes use the same letters we're so used to using in English.

The other thing I considered is that good thing it started with E, since in some languages it starts with A (e.g., anglais is French for English).

[oceanica.livejournal.com]

Or I, as in Spanish (inglés)

[demented-pants.livejournal.com]

Interesting.
At the bottom of my Google page, just now, when I changed it to Chinese (Simplified) which I definitely cannot read, there was a link that said "Google.com in English" in, well, English.

[gholam.livejournal.com]

[demented-pants.livejournal.com]

(http://tinypic.com)

[gholam.livejournal.com]

The highlighted language in the menu, by the way, is English. Pronounced "Anglit".

[demented-pants.livejournal.com]

Neat.

What language is that?

[gholam.livejournal.com]

Hebrew.

[demented-pants.livejournal.com]

You learn something new every day.

I thought it looked vaguely familiar but my brain was insisting it was probably Klingon.

[gholam.livejournal.com]

Klingon origins revealed! Film at eleven!

[mashiroikaze.livejournal.com]

Great - now I'm going to have mental images of Gowron and his bridge crew singing "Jews in Space" for the rest of the day.

"If you're in a pinch, just call on the Jews in Space...K'plah!"

[jecook]

*dies laughing*


I've had to deal with the hebrew version of windows 98 and XP. Oy Vey.

I *much* prefer XP to windows 98 and 2000 in that respect- XP handles multiple languages pretty decently.

[gholam.livejournal.com]

Praise the Lord you've never had to face Hebrew version of Windows ME. How do you like typing IP addresses backwards?

[jecook]

Meh. backwards, forwards, up to down, down to up, and upside down.

Now the *real* challange is doing it in binary. :D

[jecook]

with or without octal conversions inbetween? *snicker*

[tecknow.livejournal.com]

Yes, I didn't actually notice that until I went to google.dk myself to help her find the right items.

Strangely, even after she hit that, the main Google page had a similar "Click here for Google Denmark" button for her. I don't know why and it eventually disappeared after the "reload the page, restart the browser" ritual was repeated a few times.

[simoncion.livejournal.com]

Crazy proxy issue?

Surely she wasn't using Tor?

[jokergirl.livejournal.com]

I was trying to find the setting in a Japanese Windows version once. Needless to say, it took several tries.
Luckily, I managed to change it to Spanish by trial-and-error and start piecing together my way from there (I don't speak Spanish, but several other Romanic languages).

;)

[adamjaskie.livejournal.com]

The first language in the list for Google is Afrikaans, so if you end up with something in an unreadable alphabet you can use that. English is "Engles" so it's easy to recognize.

[jokergirl.livejournal.com]

In Google, but it might be different on a Japanese install of Windows itself (the order seemed to be weird, anyway). I just kept changing until I got to a setting that threw up Roman letters in the error message I wanted to read, worked pretty well :)

;)

[gholam.livejournal.com]

Not necessarily Afrikaans, that depends on what language the menu is displayed in. In Hebrew, for example, first language (after Elmer Fudd, which remains in English) is Uzbek. Then again, Elmer Fudd is likely good enough.