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Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

cs.cmu.edu

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Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#471

Post by mschuster91 »

orbital-decay wrote: post #467
mschuster91 wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like fiber doesn't have its own weird failure modes. Favourite one I heard was shoddy belowground work while crossing a street. No problem with ordinary car traffic, but heavy trash haul trucks could interrupt the link.

An ISP my friend worked at was having weird outages in one area, and it turned out that they had an apartment block built right in the way of their free-space optical link. Surprisingly, it was fine at first because the link went straight through it without obstructions, window to window. But when they started to add window panes, finishing the construction, the link became spotty, and adding the doors blocked the si…

How does one even attempt to troubleshoot that, without resorting to a questionably legal drone or chopper flight?!

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#472

Post by brabarossa »

Paul-Craft wrote: post #466
K7PJP wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got an HP Laser Printer from about 15 years or so. About once a year, the printer stops responding and I have to remove the board, put it in the oven for 10 minutes or so to revive it.

What even is the theory on how that could possibly work? I believe you, it's just that I don't have any mental model of how baking a circuit board makes it work right for a year, and how it keeps working to fix the issue.

The theory is that 'baking" it could reflow a bad solder joint and fix it. A popular fix of last resort.

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#473

Post by alexthehurst »

nvy wrote: post #369
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…

Your car repeatedly doesn't start so instead of taking it to the shop, you... write a letter to the CEO of Pontiac who not only actually reads the letter but also personally dispatches an engineer to waste a week going out for ice cream? And Pontiacs have a known vapor lock design flaw that only you, the letter writer, are experiencing? And you've only experienced it on your ice cream runs? And you've never got the v…

And having a stranger along for the shopping trip doesn't affect the timing more than the extra walk to the back of the store?

And the engineer is sitting in the car on the first night and it "wouldn't start," which signals the end of the episode for the day. Were they stranded? Did the car start after a few tries, which would have given a huge hint about the root cause? Surely the engineer who had reproduced the issue would quickly narrow it down by running diagnoses on the car itself.

But the family dynamics are the most improbable part here. How does the family have this predictable routine and not simply stock up on ice cream? The family has enough kids that the consume a whole $unit of ice cream per day. So with that much chaos in the house, how does the dad justify going out for a drive after dinner when the chaos of family multi-tasking (cleanup, chores, homework, bedtime) is at its peak? "Oh, look. Out of ice cream again. I'll be back in a few!"

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#474

Post by mlegendre »

dharmab wrote: post #404
mlegendre wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your mouse story makes me think of the day the CI system at work turned out not to be robust to vibrations. One day we started having flaky tests, seemingly out of nowhere. We quickly identified that the issue affected tests involving graphical X client applications, but then we struggled to make further progress. The issue was just impossible to reproduce in other conditions... Well, as it happens, the CI jobs were…

> And for ungodly reasons, this had side effects on tests. Let me guess - tests with very tight timings?

Sadly I can't remember this part; I'm pretty sure there were comical bits to it.

This makes me want to dig out the gitlab issue, and turn it into a better write-up! This'll have to wait until I'm back from holidays though.

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#475

Post by hinkley »

jacquesm wrote: post #428
hinkley wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't realize the Countryman was bigger than a midsized sedan until I parked next to one the other day. Walking back to my car something seemed off. Wait, that's a Mini??

None of the 'Mini's' are Mini. They're just BMW that bought the brand and builds cars loosely inspired on the original, with sizes ranging from 1.25 times the original all the way up to definitely non-Mini crossovers. Our company had one of the smaller ones as a lease car and even though it drove ok'ish it definitely didn't feel or drive like a small car. It was a way for BMW to appeal more to women (with that demogr…

I think about eight, ten years ago they stopped being mini when collision safety laws changed. They had to raise the hood for pedestrian safety (hitting legs and spinning heads into the windshield is not allowed) and raise the door height for side impact safety. The whole car got normal sized because of it and then they just kinda said fuck it.

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#476

Post by hinkley »

bregma wrote: post #284
hinkley wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

After owning my 1988 Chevrolet Beretta for about a year, the paint came off in one big sheet one morning when I was brushing a light dusting of snow off with my wool toque. The first call to GM revealed that it was the acid rain (acid rain in the 1980s was what global warming is today -- the cause of all evil). Exposing my car to rain voided the warranty. The second call to GM revealed that ultraviolet light destroye…

I wonder if the irony of the situation is that some chemical engineer invented a new primer that sticks to metal extremely well and it turned out that it may stick to metal like glue but it doesn’t stick to paint as well as the old stuff.

But based on what peeled, I’d say thermal expansion or UV damage were involved. The former could still be the primer’s “fault”.

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#477

Post by creeble »

withinboredom wrote: post #415
creeble wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We had the same problem at an old house. There was a cable splitter in the attic that was expanding in the heat and losing connection to the cable. We bought a heftier one and moved it under the insulation in the attic.

Interesting, I removed a splitter from the attic many years ago and replaced it with an F-F coupler.

I wonder if the coupler’s center conductor contacts could be expanding just enough to break the connection?

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#478

Post by whartung »

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…

Similarly, we were just finishing up a project for a client and we’re just going through and connecting everything up.

The hardware consisted of 6 color terminals (Wyse 350s I think), the server, and 10 PCs with large, 20” tube monitors. We had these all in my bosses office powered through assorted outlets and power strips. The room was wall to wall machinery.

It was after hours when the janitor came in and plugged in his vacuum. I looked at him, he looked at me, I looked at my boss, who looked back. We then both turned back to the janitor, who looked at us.

Not a word was said as he fired it up. 2 seconds later, the power was out, we blew the breaker. Took us a half hour to get it back on. But it was funny at the time.

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#479

Post by rainbowzootsuit »

m463 wrote: post #144
MalcolmDwyer wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a countertop ice maker that gets jammed up and overloaded with ice on sunny days for a similar reason. There's an infrared beam and sensor. When the ice tray is full, it is supposed to block the beam, and then the machine stops making ice. On a sunny day, there's enough bright light in our kitchen to fool the sensor so it keeps making ice. We have a random magazine that we put on top of it to make it work cor…

I have a garage door that will not close on sunny days. Same sort of problem. The obstruction sensor at the bottom of the door is confused by the strong sunlight and the door stops closing part way and re-opens. I've tried a toilet-paper tube around the sensor but that isn't always successful. I really wish there was a laser sensor to replace it with.

Depending on the orientation of your garage door, exchanging the sensor could put it in an unaffected position.

It looks like an industrial photoelectric sensor, including laser based ones run around $100, so maybe that can be a realistic swap.

https://www.automationdirect.com/adc/shopping/catalog/sensor...

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#480

Post by doctorhandshake »

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…

I had a similar experience: I have a permanent dynamic lighting system installed in a food hall / night club. One day about a year after installing the owner called to tell me a fixture was on the blink. The following day, another, the following day, more, but different ones. This was worrying as all the hardware is custom and would be very hard to source replacements for. We investigated lightning strike or other power surge related to construction on the block, water damage, etc. Long story short we found out that the new cleaner, who was VERY VERY thorough, was pulling out the server rack to mop behind it nightly and straining the cat cable terminations.
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