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Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

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Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#321

Post by rhuru »

This reminds me of my village story. Two brothers married and lived next to each other. The wives hated each other and competed on everything. If brother 1 got something brother 2 had to buy the same thing but bigger.

Over time they ended up building homes in this manner too and one of the brothers purchases the largest available plastic watertant on roof. Offended the other brother decided that he will build even bigger water tank. So they built a massive concrete water taken on the roof.

However the problem with this tank was that it would simply not retain the water which was pumped into it via a small motor pump which pulled the water from nearby well.

This resulted into the brother accusing the brother of "black magic" and engaging in daily fist fights and abuse.

Eventually someone figured out that the person who connected the intake pipe connected it at the bottom of the tank. So wehn the tank was full the water would simply go back to the well.

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#322

Post by astrange »

genewitch wrote: post #223
Ikatza wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Those might be field engineers, but I have heard of the WiFi teams at computer companies going out to people's houses to test especially weird situations.

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#323

Post by WirelessGigabit »

sjackso wrote: post #283
w-m wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While screens of earlier MacBooks could be turned off with a single magnet, my 2020 Intel MBP requires both the left and the right sensor (around the tab and the enter key) to trigger at the same time to consider it closed. It would be nearly impossible to trigger that accidentally. For starters, you'd need to wear two watches..

Maybe this has been fixed in recent models, but ten years ago it was easy to experience baffling laptop sleep states if you happened to set a working macbook down on top of another, similarly-sized macbook with its lid closed.

Probably helped as before this it was a magnet.

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#324

Post by astrange »

hinkley wrote: post #9
PaulHoule wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GM cars are notorious for (sometimes) developing strange problems that would have you think they are possessed with the devil. (Despite post-1990 GM cars being near peers to Japanese cars for reliability overall)

I learned a lot of things from my father. Unfortunately a lot of them were what not to do. Don’t buy cheap tools that you’ll have to replace three times in the lifespan of one that costs 50% more. And don’t buy GM. Mechanically they may be reliable, but 90’s GM forgot how to make paint stick to metal and had to pay to repaint a massive number of vehicles that simply pealed if parked outside for too long. How? And the…

> Mechanically they may be reliable, but 90’s GM forgot how to make paint stick to metal and had to pay to repaint a massive number of vehicles that simply pealed if parked outside for too long. How?

Could be an older component stopped being available. Like when Apple switched to environmentally friendly lead free solder, but then the NVidia laptop GPUs got so hot they unsoldered themselves.

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#325

Post by knodi123 »

tornato7 wrote: post #318

I can't vouch for the veracity of this story, but an older engineer who worked on a particle accelerator once told me this story from the 1980s: The particle accelerator would start overheating every day right after lunch time. They eventually figured out that enough people were using the bathroom after lunch that it was affecting the water pressure in the cooling system! I'm not very good at retelling stories.

I guess there's precedent:

https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/74326789852998041...

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#326

Post by dataveg »

m463 wrote: post #163
dylan604 wrote: post #47

These are the kinds of stories that made Car Talk so much fun. It was so much more than just hearing about mechanics repairing cars. It was the fact that the situations were so odd and unusual that the stories were interesting. It was also fun hearing how these mechanics had been around so long and seen so many of these unusual situations that they became normal to them. It didn't hurt that they were good story telle…

"Go to your mechanic and find the oldest guy in the shop. He might be able to work on a carburetor."

I liked their advice - “go to the auto store and buy a bottle of something with ‘miracle’ in the name.”

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#327

Post by r0m4n0 »

I’ll add to the crazy anecdotes with something that happened to me a few months ago.

I had a brand new AC/heater hvac system installed last year. Encountered this problem, the AC would just turn off. First time, called the AC company and they come out. After a few visits, they pinpoint the problem as the condensation pump, it’s just a small water pump that’s down in my basement to push water out a little PVC pipe. When the water fills up in the reservoir, a pump kicks on and moves water. If the water gets too full, a sensor turns the AC off. After the rd visit they decide that “the grade isn’t gradual enough and the pump turns off”. They replace the pvc. Fourth attempt they replace the pump, pump must have failed. Fifth visit, they replace the pump with a different brand. Sixth visit they disconnect the automatic shutoff of the AC, my basement floods with water. Seventh call they change the pvc pipe again. Eighth call they are baffled, say everything is working as it should, give it time.

After they leave, my wife goes “whenever I turn the basement light on, I hear a weird noise”. I immediately turn the switch off and walk down into the basement and test the outlet. The light oddly enough controls a random outlet the pump was connected to. Every time a tech came over, they turned the switch on.

I still wonder how many more phone calls it would have taken before they figured it out.

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#328

Post by aftbit »

notnaut wrote: post #250
genewitch wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think you’d get this problem, monopoly or not, whenever cost saving measures are in place (and they always are, for good reason) at the customer-interface level. Maybe there should always be a hidden option that only people that meet a certain troubleshooting ability threshold get access to when calling in for tech support….

SHIBBOLEET

https://xkcd.com/806/

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#329

Post by wink »

grecy wrote: post #308
m463 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Go to your mechanic and find the oldest guy in the shop. He might be able to work on a carburetor."

> He might be able to work on a carburetor I'm absolutely a car guy, and I'm 41 years old. Strangely enough, I've never owned a carburettored engine, and it seems unlikely I ever will (except, maybe, for a chainsaw)

I sat in one when it started burning on the highway, because of the carburetor :D

I think it was a Renault 11 and I'm not exactly sure how old I was, probably a bit before I got my license, so late 90s.

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#330

Post by m463 »

grecy wrote: post #308
m463 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Go to your mechanic and find the oldest guy in the shop. He might be able to work on a carburetor."

> He might be able to work on a carburetor I'm absolutely a car guy, and I'm 41 years old. Strangely enough, I've never owned a carburettored engine, and it seems unlikely I ever will (except, maybe, for a chainsaw)

I suspect a common reason would be for a classic car or motorcycle.
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