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Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

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Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#251

Post by donalhunt »

98codes wrote: post #156
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…

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…

Common issue in Ireland for DSL customers. Damaged copper cabling would leak water when it rained causing dropouts and lower speeds. Telecom engineers would call out on days when the copper had dried out and be unable to find any fault. Turns out correlating such reports with weather reports is hard. :/

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#252

Post by cosmojg »

kyleee wrote: post #220
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…

Jesus works in mysterious ways

> I speak with the Comcast attorney about my call to State's Attorney's office. She says she was unaware that State's Attorney has denied the request to drop the charges, and that she will write another letter to ensure that the situation is taken care of. She also asks about whether the video trap has been installed and is working correctly. I tell her that everything is blocked except for 2 religious channels, 1 Spanish language channel, and the video portion of E! TV. She says something along the lines of, "I guess the signal of the Lord manages to find its way through somehow."

Source: http://telecom.csail.mit.edu/judy-sammel.html

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#253

Post by Dork1234 »

Since 2000 we they have publicly disclosed Janet Jackson crashing harddrives:

https://www.billboard.com/music/pop/janet-jackson-rhythm-nat...

and moving a controller crashes the PS1.

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/my-hardest-bug-eve...

Makes me thinks there are tons of these issues out there.

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#255

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

asddubs wrote: post #148
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…

Another similar anecdote I heard before was related to a wireless device, and some employees flying a drone during their break, generating interference.

We did a lot of wireless (2.4GHz range) sensor development at my last job. It was a rule of thumb to avoid any testing at lunch time since the microwave generated so much interference, everything would fail when someone wanted to heat up their meal.

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#256

Post by creeble »

genewitch wrote: post #209
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…

on dslreports or broadbandreports there's at least two instances of me complaining about two cable companies because, at last, it was figured out there was moisture ingress in the LE (line extender, usually on cable lines on poles). The only common denominator was it happened during prime time, every night, and went away around midnight. The other common denominator was the cable company refusing to believe it was an…

Interesting, I wonder if I’m experiencing something a little bit similar that Comcast can’t seem to debug.

Almost every day, in the heat of summer, I get one to five 10-minute outages as soon as the temp gets over about 80F. More when it’s hotter, usually. Usually it results in a modem reset, so it’s hard to tell how long the actual outage is.

Been happening for going on 5 years. They replaced the under-street cable from our house to the junction box across the street to no effect. I suspect it’s that junction box, but afaict, none of my neighbors that share that junction box have the same issue. Not very fun to have your WFH day collapse unexpectedly in the middle of the afternoon.

Strangely, for the last month we’ve had several days of 80+ temps with no sign of outage. So fun.

Edit: yes of course multiple modem replacements and inside cable checks, to no avail.

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#257

Post by singlow »

ggreer wrote: post #124
ctenb wrote: post #58

Why did the car only fail to start in front of the ice cream shop? Surely there are more occasions where you turn off the engine and turn it back on again within a short time?

Because the story is fiction. There are so many variables that would change the amount of time the engine is stopped: where you parked, how long the line at the register is, whether you had exact change or not. Also the ambient temperature would change both the likelihood and duration of vapor lock.

Yes. There are so many details in the story that are unbelievable. I will possibly believe that there was some original true story with some subset of these circumstanced but it got rearranged and exaggerated for effect.

I will never believe that GM sent an engineer to troubleshoot this problem. Maybe in a small town a local dealer's mechanic spent some time troubleshooting but he probably figured out it was based on the short shut off time. Then he speculated that it took less time to get Vanilla than the other flavors? I doubt that is true - most likely it was random. It is amazing how often a random sequence will have an extended sequence that our brains won't believe is random.

Not sure I even believe there was any genuine observation of correlation from the owner. These type of apocryphal technical support stories are almost always formed backward from a problem and someone tries to think of the most insane way it could have manifested. But people love to believe them.

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#258

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

xenadu02 wrote: post #155
pixl97 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a truck do this kind of behavior once. Finally figured it out after months when I moved a wire and it started, then move the wire close to another wire and it would no longer start. These were wires that would typically be close, so my guess is one of the wires was now generating enough noise that it was bleeding over into some other system and causing it to fail. As the car bounced around the proximity of the…

EMF can do some seemingly crazy things. I built a kiln controller and the initial version would sometimes randomly lockup, reboot in the middle of an operation, or do other seemingly "crazy" things. Sometimes even the hardware watchdog would stop functioning. Turns out contactors pulling in and out a 5000w load generates some strong EMF and sometimes that EMF is enough to cause random glitches to the CPU or other har…

Yeah. I wrote the code for a controller that managed the temperature of a lubricant. The heater was a propane-fired burner that was mounted on the same skid. Every so often we'd get a random reboot. Finally, when it was very quiet, I heard a soft 'tic' just before I noticed that the CPU had rebooted again. EMI from the spark gap that ignited the propane was coupling back into the I/O lines and would occasionally reset the CPU.

One of those things where if it had happened 100% of the time we'd have figured it out quickly. But it was so infrequent that no one thought of that as a cause.

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#260

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

roel_v wrote: post #43
Filligree wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it was surrounded by a crowd of engineers, surely someone would have tested the battery?

This is the point where I would tell the story of how I once got lost in Porto, while in a group of 25 geographers

But zero cartographers.
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