I used to work as a Network Admin at a big university in Cape Town years back, and one of the urban legends at the time (late '90s) was that one of the long distance wireless (microwave? Line of sight required) network links were reported to drop every day at the exact same time for a a few minutes only. Lots of hours of troubleshooting hardware etc. later, and still no solution. Eventually a site-visit was done at both sides of the link, binoculars entow. The problem? The line of sight was going dangerously close to the top of a hill where a farmer had led his cattle every day at the same time. The cattle blocked the line of sight for 5 minutes every day.
No idea if this is true though.
“My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)
201–210 of 216 posts
Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was an admin for a company that had lots of open plan offices. In one of these offices a specific row of computers kept failing. Although they were cheap (Compaq Evos with NT4), they were pretty damn reliable throughout the rest of the company. Lot of head scratching ensued about the fault. Nothing really made sense. Totally by chance we found out what was wrong. One Saturday when the office was empty and with no a…
I had a similar story. I set up a home pc for recording tv and hooked it up to the main entertainment system. I built it on a budget so it did it’s job but later on as we switched to more HD content it struggled occasionally. I went off to college. My mom noticed the fan noise was increasing and found it distracting. She wrapped the pc in a couple of blankets to cut down on the noise. When I came home the thing was i…
I think this really says more about a lack of basic science education in high school. People plug 1800W space heaters into $4 power strips and cause fires. I think by the time you graduate you should at least be able to understand that watts of electricity are the same thing as heat.
Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)
#203I 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…
To be pedantic MBAs do have cpu fans so there is one moving part. It's tiny and hard to know it is there, but it definitely is. The now discontinued 12 inch MacBook was truly fanless.
Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had a similar story. I set up a home pc for recording tv and hooked it up to the main entertainment system. I built it on a budget so it did it’s job but later on as we switched to more HD content it struggled occasionally. I went off to college. My mom noticed the fan noise was increasing and found it distracting. She wrapped the pc in a couple of blankets to cut down on the noise. When I came home the thing was i…
I am not sure if the following is true or one of those stories that gets recycled. While I was working at Best Buy - the Geek squad told us a story of an older Lady who brought in a computer wrapped entirety in plastic saran wrap, to prevent the virus from escaping the computer and infecting people. She thought it was okay as she containing the virus and continued to use the computer before it turned off and didn't t…
My 'best' related Best Buy story (well, Future Shop a decade ago, but it is/was the same company) while working in the ConnectPro department (name for Geek Squad at Future Shop, all the same tools and procedures):
A person who had purchased a laptop a few hours prior came back into the store furious because the device shut off and wouldn't turn back on. I pressed the power button and it flashed indicating the battery was dead. I connected the laptop to power and told her it needed to be charged. She then threw a retail tantrum because the salesman had apparently told her it was wireless.
Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)
#205Windows 3.1 16-bit multi-functional modules app i.e. skeleton app which loaded multiple DLLs one for each type of functionality. When printing on a dot-matrix printer everything would work fine. However when printing on a (then new) Laser printer the entire system would hang randomly. Didn't matter which module was the initiator. Spent 2 weeks poring over the code in our common DLL used for printing and found nothing. Then started checking rest of the code in each module and found it. Each module called into the common "print dll" to print its graphs. On return back it would call a local function to print the "graph legends" and thats where the problem was. The last line of this function called "ReleaseDC" but the parameters "hWnd" and "hDC" were switched by mistake so Windows released some unexpected memory giving rise to the problem. This code was cut and pasted into each module with minor modifications and therefore existed in all the functional modules.
I was somewhat proud of solving this :-)
Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
Remember exactly same thing happening to me some 18-19 years ago lol! It was in the time when mice still had balls, so the reading sensor got blinded by sunlight in at least one direction - sometimes mouse won't work at all, sometimes would but only on X or only on Y axis. Fix: install window shutters.
So... This would not happen with Linux?
I wonder if the downvoters missed the joke?
>Fix: install window shutters.
Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)
#207I 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…
Lots of fun with those sensors. Some years ago, I think while I was migrating from an older laptop to a new one, the new one would randomly to to sleep. It took me a while to figure out why: Being really short on available desk space, I had stacked the new machine (lid open) atop the old one (lid closed). Of course that tricked the lid sensors into thinking the lid was down. I could kick myself …
Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a similar issue with my desktop computer: when I suspend or hibernate it, it sometimes wakes up again when I'm standing, getting up from my chair or leaving the room. This also occasionally happens (when hibernated) after I have physically switched off the power of the computer and switch it on again. The issue occurred first a few years after I bought it, but right now I have just given up debugging it, as I…
Depending on how it's configured to wake, my guess is it's your mouse. When you stand you move the desk just enough to cause the mouse to wake it. Happens to me all the time when I bump by desk when getting out of my chair.
Unfortunately, I can still reproduce it when the mouse is disconnected completely (tried it in the past as my first guess)
Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)
#209I'm gonna argue that the bug is not in "file". The bug is that the workflow uses file, which by it's very nature must be based on heuristics and will get things wrong occasionally. EDIT: Well file really had a bug in this case, where they didn't detect what they thought they were, but the point stands.
I wish filesystems would commonly support to store the Mime type. File extensions seem to me still a residue from MS DOS times. That would also make working with static (file) webservers much easier. (It's such a breeze to work with blob stores that allow to save the mime type...)
BeFS does use MIME types.
Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
Similar story in the USAF. We transitioned the academy from Banyon Vines to TCP/IP. An entire building wing went offline every day. A team was flown out with a network analyzer. Sure enough, same time every day, the entire wing of the building went offline. Turns out, the person buffing the floor needed a place to plug in the buffer and the only place they could find had this big box with lots of blinky LED's on it,…
This is an old one. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/polished-off/
The hospital story for sure, they have alarms on patient devices and battery backup for some, but I was there for the mmac-8 being unplugged.