Lyle Seaman

Phoning One In

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Many years ago, at the height of the Industrial Revolution, the United States was criscrossed by a riot of regional railroads. Gradually, these were acquired or merged until now there are only about a half-dozen major national railroads. In a similar fashion, at the birth of the public Internet, there must have been thousands of community Internet service providers. It seemed like every town had its own entrepeneurial enterprise, with some racks of modems in an office somewhere. Those quickly got snapped up or forced into bankruptcy, as legacy cable telecoms companies leveraged their existing monopolies into a new line of business. Which brings us to this week's Error'd. Enjoy(?) it.

First up, Adrian McCarthy grumbles "Getting help can be difficult when your regional monopoly internet service provider cannot assemble a functional web site. Note that the understandably required Description field in this online support contact form is disabled."


Filling

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We got quite a few irregular submissions this week from regular contributors. Which is to say routine contributors. We're not qualified to make judgements about whether or not anyone is what what most folks would call normal.

First up, Isaac D. is struggling with localization, kvetching "Apparently this number format is ALIVE and WELL in parts of India and Afghanistan, but us poor Australians on desktop browsers also seem to be visually assaulted with it. I wonder if the Zuck will pay me $1,00,000 for reporting it or do real country borders mean nada in the Metaverse? ;)" This would ordinarily be controlled by some operating system or browser configuration, would it not?


Nothin Doin

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IBM Profs was introduced in 1980 including both email and calendaring support. Online calendaring is now old enough to have grandchildren, but we still can't get the simplest things right.

As our friend Romeo rhetorically wonders "Million dollar question: What calendar does Microsoft use?"


It Seats Zero

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Automotive afficionado Mike S. proudly relates "My first and only car has been a classic 1965 6-cyl Ford Null. I've always loved it but it does crash from time to time, even though I've received many pointers on how to avoid that. I've considered getting an Infiniti and then would divide my time between the two." Avoid pointers, Mike.


Take Off

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Slow news week at Error'd, so we're dusting off a couple of submissions from earlier. That last one's a beauty, eh?

Special Dave flexes "Got my annual request for a donation to Habitat for Humanity. Not sure if their new URL is meant to convey just how special I am as a donor, or if someone was goofing off with a test for formatting the form and forgot to change before their production run." We love you too, sweet cheeks.


Even Auld Lang Syner

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When the New Year just isn't exciting anymore, and you need an extra dose of that New Year smell, you can get it right here at Errorerr'd. Again. Dates are (not this) hard.

We are very satisfied with this submission from Ben S. who pithily noted "This was the 2023 survey."


Chill

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No real theme this week, just some random groaners to tide you through the weekend.

Historian Drew W. wonders "I'm not sure which is weirder: the fact that Verizon has a bunch of numbers after it or that AT&T seems to be stuck in roughly 2013 (when Sprint killed the Nextel network for good)."


You Spin Me Right Round

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Audiophile Gear H. enthused "Love me some Bob Dylan. But it looks like I'll need to save up to complete my collection."


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