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“My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

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Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

#181

It kinda pisses me off that the second line of the body became a sexist joke phrase title in hacker news. If you're not clued in on sexism: The stereotype reinforcement that women are dumb with technology is the punchline. It doesn't matter that there was actually an issue with the pipeline from OpenOffice -> Cups, but the hacker news title was cleverly crafted to reinforce a stereotype. I don't care that this will b…

Don't take this the wrong way, but I think you're overthinking this.

I personally read it this morning and honestly it didn't register to me in the way you're describing at all. I did not use the title as a sexist joke as you're saying, nor did I think that his wife is "dumb" because she thought that something is wrong with OpenOffice. The joke (if there's one) is that there's a twist, which is that programmers expect the worst description from non-technical users when explaining bugs, and "something doesn't work on Tuesdays" sounds a little absurd at first (like most interesting bugs). But even if it had occurred to me, omitting it just for the sake of not having the potential negative connotation is even worse imho.

I haven't seen a single comment in this entire thread that addresses the issue as you're suggesting, not even hinting at it. Just because you thought that it could possibly have that implication doesn't mean that it actually does.

Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is why you should engineer things properly. Not duck tape them together with shell scripts!

> duck tape That's a fascinatingly apt mixed metaphor: duct taping meets duck typing.

Ha I just looked up duck tape on wikipedia and it says "not to be confused with duck typing"!

Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

#183
post #180
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

*duct, ironically.

Duck Tape is the brand name of the original product. "Duct tape" is the generic name that the industry settled on. ("Duck" refers to the water-resistant nature of the tape. Duct doesn't actually mean anything other than sounding like "duck". Ironically, duct tape is the wrong type of tape to use on heating ducts.) If you're going to be pedantic, then get it right. ;-)

Actually I just looked it up and it's "duck" because it was made from "cotton duck", a type of fabric.

Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

#184

I had a 2011 Macbook Air that would go blank randomly. After some investigation, I determined it was often when I was moving it from one place to another (sometimes even just repositioning on my lap), and that it was going to sleep, not completely crashing. Of course, MBAs have no moving parts, and there were no rattles when I shook the machine and listened. Apple also could not figure it out. After replacing several…

My wife had effectively the same issue where her macbook would "die", but only during video calls. We replaced it, then it happened again with the new one. A smart Apple tech eventually had her bring in everything on her desk and make a mockup video call in the store. The glitch happened when the magnetic cover she had curled up to use as a stand on her mini iPad (for her notes for the call) got a little too close to the latch sensor.

Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

#185
post #180
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

*duct, ironically.

Duck Tape is the brand name of the original product. "Duct tape" is the generic name that the industry settled on. ("Duck" refers to the water-resistant nature of the tape. Duct doesn't actually mean anything other than sounding like "duck". Ironically, duct tape is the wrong type of tape to use on heating ducts.) If you're going to be pedantic, then get it right. ;-)

Wow, I always thought it was duct tape because it was originally made for taping ducts. And that duck tape was just a brand name like gorilla glue. Thanks for that.

Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

#187
I had an intermittent printer issue recently. As a Mac user I have to submit jobs to the University printers via a web portal. I try to print very little so it’s not something I use a lot, however I end up printing large numbers of midterm scripts every semester.

On occasion I would log into the portal, upload my file and select the printer and it would tell me the file was printed. However when I went to the printer there were no jobs to be seen. IT insisted that my files were somehow corrupt but eventually they sent someone over to see my issue and they too were stumped.

Finally they logged the server side activity of my printer interaction and they noticed that there was a space appended to my username, presumably by iCloud Keychain and the behaviour was possibly changing between OS updates.

The web portal would let me log in, the server managed the files but the printer would ignore the job all because of that space.

Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

#188
I love these debug stories. My interesting one was from a job repairing computers in high school.

My older colleague was upgrading a 486, and couldn't get the system to boot on the first try, but if you hit the reset button after it was already on then it would boot just fine. All the hardware tested fine in other systems.

I figured out the problem by listening to the hard drive. I could tell it wasn't spinning at full speed when it was initially booting. The system would get through the POST process before the hard drive could finish spinning up. So the initial boot from power-off would fail.

The solution ended up being to upgrade the hard drive (or downgrade the motherboard).

Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

#189
I now suspect he made it up for devious reasons, but I had a professor who told about the time random characters and cursor movements kept appearing during data input from a lady at a remote office at his org.

Phone support couldn't solve the problem after many tries, including asking her to try a different work-station. So they flew in a technician. The technician arrived and sat to observe the lady as she did data entry. The technician eventually realized her rather large breasts were bumping the keyboard from time to time.

Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

#190

One of my favorite pieces of debug folklore was the story of a minicomputer or some other serious machine rebooting in the middle of the night. I can't remember exactly but it was in some university during the 70s/80s. An important server would spontaneously reboot in the middle of the night on some days but not all. Finally, someone sat up all night to watch what happens and observed a cleaning lady unplugging the m…

Re: " someone wrote a program to swing the heads on one of those old giant hard drives back and forth. At the right frequency...cause the drive to walk away"

On some TRS-80 models I discovered a certain POKE command would make the screen flash, click, and "bounce" the image, similar to a power spike. So in the university lab I wrote up a small BASIC script with a delay timer to repeat "DANGER: Computer Overheating!" as the clicking/flickering increased in rate. I stood back to watch and waited for the timer to kick in. Nearby students would freak out. When the script was done, it deleted itself in case they got the lab assistant to come over. I was a stinker.

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