Appreciate it, I'd been looking passively for this story for a year or two. I thought I heard it as a Car Talk puzzler, but it was probably this page.
Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)
191–200 of 517 posts
Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)
#192I was debugging a Heisenbug once, developing embedded FW for a mobile phone.
After some time, I noticed that the phone seemingly only crashed in one area of the open office floorplan where I was working.
I started walking around the office testing this theory, not really believing it. But after a while, I had hard evidence that the bug would only manifest once I entered that part of the office.
When I came to terms that I wasn’t hallucinating, I realised what the problem was. There was poor reception in that part of the office, causing the phone’s modem to switch from 4G wideband to narrowband (glossing over details here), which triggered the bug.
Easy to see with hindsight, but I was very confused there and then
Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)
#193We had a similar problem at work in the late 90s. A member of staff reported that their mouse would stop working between certain hours of the day. It had apparently been okay in the morning, stopped working over lunchtime then started again later. On some days it would work perfectly all day long, but on others it would stop working between those hours. The biggest clue was it would always work perfectly on overcast…
I had a similar problem, but in the opposite direction. My cable internet speeds at home were fairly good (for the US, anyway), but sometimes would absolutely bottom out. Not dead, just glacially slow. After troubleshooting everything under the sun, I came to realize that the problems would happen not when it was raining per se, but when it was heavily foggy or misting. Normal to heavy rain was fine. Called the cable…
Having had to debug many of such cable issues in the past, it's baffling to me that cable companies aren't proactively monitoring for things like this.
They have all the data available on their end, as far as I can tell! (Unless DOCSIS modems somehow don't have a standard "signal receive report" functionality?)
Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
Subaru just had a class action lawsuit about their stupid car infotainment systems draining the battery. https://www.subarubatterysettlement.com/ The dealers wanted a ton of money to diagnose the issue, even though I suspected it must have been the infotainment system draining the battery. I just ended up replacing the infotainment system with a cheap CarPlay compatible one and the problem went away. Problem is I can…
> Problem is I cannot get money from the class action settlement since the original infotainment system is already out and I fixed it myself. You only fixed it because it was a problem though. Not a/your lawyer though, so good luck and have fun navigating the American legal system!
But I cannot prove it without reinstalling the original infotainment system. That is many, many hours of work for little gain.
What I do not understand is how the settlement did not require Subaru to compensate all Subaru owners for the faulty design. Why was there proof required, other than the purchase of their car with the faulty components?
Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)
#195Hold my beer. I once had a fairly large CRT monitor which most of the time worked fine, but sometimes would show a warped, distorted image. After a while I noticed that warping was happening only on rainy days. I opened the case and discovered gooey stuff smelling cat urine on the monitor's electronics. Washing it with pure alcohol solved the problem. I have no idea what was going on there, but I consider my cat was an extremely lucky dude as I almost never turned that monitor completely off.
Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)
#196What is most incredible about this story is that the president heard about the story himself and that an engineer was sent to investigate. Now days if a car has problems under warranty it is often assumed the driver is at fault and of course problems never happen when you are showing the mechanic.
Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)
#197This is a secondhand anecdote, but it’s pretty funny. Back in the days of server rooms, a friend’s server for his company would reboot every day around 5pm. They checked everything they possibly could with the OS, they would be logged in and running checks on it and it would spontaneously go offline for about 5 minutes and reboot every day. Finally they decided to go stand in the presence of the server around the tim…
> Back in the days of server rooms
Huh? Yesterday? Or are you referring to the fact that servers are now often offsite, in 'clouds'?
Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)
#198I find it incredible that not only a family would eat ice cream every, but that they would travel to get it everyday instead of just having it on hand in the house.
Or that a store would put it's vanilla ice cream in a separate case in the front and all it's other flavors in another in the back, instead of putting all it's frozen foods together in the same area for logistical reasons.
Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)
#199I find it incredible that not only a family would eat ice cream every, but that they would travel to get it everyday instead of just having it on hand in the house.
Or that a store would put it's vanilla ice cream in a separate case in the front and all it's other flavors in another in the back, instead of putting all it's frozen foods together in the same area for logistical reasons.
Yes, now that you mention it, another part of the story that is suspect.
Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
Man I've heard this story so many times, this guy must have a million friends in a hundred countries he's told this story to. :-)
I think it's more like a common experience. My wife and I both work, so we have cleaners come in every two weeks for a deep clean. We've used several different companies, and apparently it's standard practice to unplug things when a power outlet is needed. They don't unplug computers that have monitors, and they don't unplug things with visible clocks that would need to be reset, so they do take some care not to inco…
For critical devices you could use red outlets.
Different colored outlets are scary.