Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

cs.cmu.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 517 posts

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#221

Post by genewitch »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #114
drivers99 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely an urban legend at this point. A reddit thread[0] mentions it being collected in 1990 from computer stories going around in the 80s[1] [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/5yrs1... [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3227607-the-devouring-fu...

Essentially all these stories are apocryphal. Even this vapor lock story. Sorry but even before today, having a automotive engineer sent to a random person's home over what clearly sounds like a quack letter seems implausible to me. The dictates of capitalism, human resources, and the politics of the workplace would make this difficult if not impossible. Even in the past when there was more human capital in support p…

I've had the CEO of a municipal water company at my house looking at what his contractors did to my property frontage and potentially my well. Also, my other story in this thread is documented in posterity on a forum, you can see i didn't embellish any of it, and that involved a manager or supervisor having to drive quite a long time to my house at 10 PM with a technician to source a problem i had had for weeks or months.

So, in essence, "it depends". Good stories, in the memetic sense, will have hooks to ensure that the moral or point of the story is remembered; in a great story, the memetic hooks are so great that you can repeat the story nearly verbatim to other people, after hearing it yourself.

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#222

Post by jonhohle »

jjbinx007 wrote: post #49

We 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…

When it’s sunny, my wife’s car can’t open the garage door, and my car requires getting extremely close. Once the sun goes down, we can both open the door from the street.

It turns out our solar panels (or the optimizers, or the inverter) emit radio frequencies that interfere with our garage door opener. When the sun is out and they are producing energy, the interference is stronger than the homelink garage door opener.

A few years ago the garage door openers started working fine. It took a few days to realize it was because the inverter had failed.

I’m fairly certain there are some FCC regulations that would require our installer to fix it, but that relationship soured during installation and I’d rather deal with an unusable garage remote than dealing with them for warranty work.

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#223

Post by genewitch »

Ikatza wrote: post #189
drzaiusapelord wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Essentially all these stories are apocryphal. Even this vapor lock story. Sorry but even before today, having a automotive engineer sent to a random person's home over what clearly sounds like a quack letter seems implausible to me. The dictates of capitalism, human resources, and the politics of the workplace would make this difficult if not impossible. Even in the past when there was more human capital in support p…

Your lack of faith is disturbing, specially when there are first hand accounts of [Apple/Microsoft/Insert Co] sending engineers to people's houses to diagnose unique problems. This could be a perfectly real story, a different thing would be that you choose not to believe it.

during the PPC 603 era of Macintosh Performa series, we had a bad motherboard, and apple sent an engineer to our house to replace it. This is around the time that the story of apple sending engineers to houses to remove motherboards, raise them 2 feet above a flat surface, and drop them was being passed around. Something about reseating chips that one of their pick and place machines was misaligned on or something.

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#224

Post by WirelessGigabit »

MarkusWandel wrote: post #141

Someone in my extended family had a Toyota Highlander which would randomly decide "you don't need window defog today", leading to a near inability to drive the car if fogging was an issue. The dealer didn't believe him until one day it actually happened while they were watching. They had no idea what to do or how to fix it. Solution: Trade the thing in against a Honda Passport. He's had that for quite a while now and…

Sell it to someone living in Phoenix. Don't need the defogger here.

Although the AC and car fans do overtime here.

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#225

Post by cmorrow415 »

I used to have wireless infrared headphones. Sometimes, the audio would go crazy, but only in a certain area of my office. As it turns out, the IR blaster on my TV was interfering with the signals. It was really interesting to hear the clicks of data being sent over IR, though.

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#226

Post by genewitch »

heywhatupboys wrote: post #187
dumbfounder wrote: post #66

This 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…

this is why denmark has an additional slanted plug for IT equipment and a winky one for hospitals

In the US the "winky" receptacles that go (-|) or (⊣|) - except the T faces the other way - are 20 amp outlets, 120 volts. every receptacle that differs from the "shocked face" means something. Our standard shocked face receptacles are 15A. In hospitals, you need a guarantee that your monitors or assistive devices aren't going to trip a breaker somewhere if someone plugs in a vacuum; making it impossible to use the receptacle for something else is something that only matters after it's too late, i'd think.

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#227

Post by Animats »

lxgr wrote: post #193
98codes wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?)

Telcos used to monitor their copper outside plant for moisture. This was called Automatic Line Insulation Testing in the Bell System. The ALIT system ran in the hours before dawn. It would connect to each idle line, and apply, for tens of milliseconds, about 400 volts limited to very low current between the two wires, and between each wire and ground, measuring the leakage current. This would detect moisture in the cable. This was dealt with by hooking up a tank of dry nitrogen to the cable to dry it out.

Here's a 1960s vintage Automatic Electric line insulation test system at work in a step-by-step central ofice. [1] Here's the manual for automatic line insulation testing in a 5ESS switch.[2] 5ESS is still the major AT&T switch for copper analog phone lines. After that, it's all packet switching.

For fiber, of course, moisture doesn't affect the signal.

This led to an urban legend: "bell tap". While Western Electric phones were designed to not react to the ALIT test signal, many cheap phones would emit some sound from the "ringer" when the 400V pulses came through, some time before dawn.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wt1GGdDa5jQ

[2] https://www.manualslib.com/manual/2755956/Lucent-Technologie...

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#228

Post by genewitch »

jstarfish wrote: post #160
PaulHoule wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's funny how GM came out with the "Cavalier" to compete with Honda's "Civic". Or that matter, there was a Chevy Cobalt (e.g. a "Kobold" is a demon that causes mine accidents) or an AMC Gremlin.

There's always the business-school legend about the failure of the Nova with the Spanish market.

Dat Soon?

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#229

Post by jefftk »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #114
drivers99 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely an urban legend at this point. A reddit thread[0] mentions it being collected in 1990 from computer stories going around in the 80s[1] [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/5yrs1... [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3227607-the-devouring-fu...

Essentially all these stories are apocryphal. Even this vapor lock story. Sorry but even before today, having a automotive engineer sent to a random person's home over what clearly sounds like a quack letter seems implausible to me. The dictates of capitalism, human resources, and the politics of the workplace would make this difficult if not impossible. Even in the past when there was more human capital in support p…

> Essentially all these stories are apocryphal. Even this vapor lock story.

The vapor lock ice cream story might go back to this 1997 Car Talk Puzzler, where Ray claims it was a customer of his: https://cartalk.com/radio/puzzler/finicky-volare

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#230

Post by Arrath »

hobomatic wrote: post #181

This reminds me of a strange recurring experience I used to have with electronics in my house. In that house,on certain days of the week at midnight, something that sounded like recordings of political speeches from WW2 would be audibly (but faintly so) from all of stationary electronics. It was so faint, that it was usually hard to pinpoint any one source, and the words used weren't understandable, so it usually sou…

That is amazing. I would have been putting salt barriers around my windows, jeez.
Post reply on HN