you could be on the wrong network or the bot(gribble) could be down or on the other side of a split
Thanks, I tried to re-query gribble after some time and it seemed to work again!
I got stuck again when using bcregister further down the tutorial, cuz I tried signing the message on Bitcoin-QT using only [ #bitcoin-otc:a9f4598d42bb091a2be8bf3693559156f3b584217b1b178388844a10 ] as the key instead of the full [ freenode:#bitcoin-otc:a9f4598d42bb091a2be8bf3693559156f3b584217b1b178388844a10 ]! I did so cuz I copy pasted this from mIRC thinking it'd copy the whole string for me...
N00b mistake, but I hope that helps someone.