It took me a second to see it and then....damn.

Damn the racist ghost in the machine.

...Maybe it was an illegal entry?

(I know -- bad joke, bad time)

*sigh*

...

*sighs*

Doncha know? We don't allow any of them funny "special characters" around here. You wanna do things in English, you'll make do with our uninflected letters and you'll bloody well like it!

(Heh. That's the only explanation I could come up with. The "i" appears to be an í, intead. Which makes sense, of course... and doesn't change the conclusion any. But is a little more subtle than my first reaction, which was "what, Joaquín isn't a real name now?! I can only imagine what they'd do with my name...." Technically, anyway. Forgetting to allow 'special characters' is at least slightly better than outright disallowing non-whitebread names, if only because it's so hard for PC users to create them.)

And on a random geeky tangent, there's actually a lot (okay, "some") scholarship on the way feedback is given, and the "okay" phenomenon. The language of interfaces has interesting implications for both usability theory and interactivity... not to mention some gender/race/sexuality implications.

Sherry Turkle mentioned that the language of computing could be read as hostile by women ("abort/retry/fail" "crash" "hack" "thrash" etc.), in Life on the Screen: Identity in the age of the Internet. While I find her reasoning on that line to be a little thin (seriously... cooking terminology? the realm of women for ages and ages? is at least that violent, and nobody says much of anything about it being alienating), it does raise an interesting point.

(She's one of those writers who makes me absolutely furious.. because she has wonderful observations and then goes off into crazyville with many of her conclusions. Granted, there's a temporal element there too.. but still)

... heh. Can you tell that this is my field of study?

great comments, magniloquence. i'm off to do other things, so i dont have time to comment at length. only to say that that particular dialogue box to one person could simply feel they used a character that could not be decoded by the form, and to another could feel they were being given the same response that they've had since they were a child in reaction to their name that white america (less and less, but way more where i lived a lot and 30 years ago) considers "invalid."

and then—yes—being asked to approve the idea that they are invalid with a click of a button they have no choice but to click. like (and i realize this is an extreme metaphor, but again, i'm in a bit of a rush)someone beating you up and then saying (under threat of further violence if you were to disagree): "did you like that?" its not that extreme because i am a bit used to my name being "invalid" to the English Language norms in this country. but it has that feeling of agreeing to something that hurts me, something that i disagree with. but that i have no choice but to go along with.

its why i'm very tied to the discussion of "ENGLISH IS THE OFFICIAL LANGUAGE" and all the othe racist shit lately connected to hating on Español. because its been aprt of my life, this sentiment. always following me, that i am strange, alien, invalid here in Englishy America.

To be honest I have had a similar problem because my last name contains the letter ñ. Its insulting when an machine tells you that you are invalid.

exactamente. especially if the machine is also a country.