People with names that break computers

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Mar 26, 2016, 3:13 AM UTC

JorgeGT wrote: post #14

msielski wrote: post #8

I had a strange experience where my cable company's mobile app, which streams most channels, was missing audio on a few channels. After escalating the issue to an engineer, he finally got back to us and told us that if a username contained "ts" like mine did this issue would happen. After making a second username without that combination, all worked fine. I'd still like to know what logic in their application would g…

In the context of acoustics, "ts" almost always means time-step (inverse of frequency). But I don't have the faintest idea of how it would collide with the username string :|

Post by mikeash » Sat, Mar 26, 2016, 4:20 AM UTC

grecy wrote: post #180

phillc73 wrote: post #79

I have a close friend who lives in rural Ireland. That's not in a town, but on a small farm in a general area of about 15-20 other small farms. His address is just the name of the general area and the county. The Irish postal system is clever enough to know that the person with this name, in that general area lives in that house. In fact, he probably still isn't even really classified by his name, rather as the husba…

In Northern Canada there are a lot of towns that don't have street names, just references like "brown house". Everyone in town knows everyone, so it's simply not needed. Lately Canada Post has been trying to force them to have street names, so in the provisioning system of the telco that serves the area you get awesome addresses like "next to brown house" or "around corner from house next to brown house".

Post by grecy » Sat, Mar 26, 2016, 4:48 AM UTC

mikeash wrote: post #253

grecy wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Northern Canada there are a lot of towns that don't have street names, just references like "brown house". Everyone in town knows everyone, so it's simply not needed. Lately Canada Post has been trying to force them to have street names, so in the provisioning system of the telco that serves the area you get awesome addresses like "next to brown house" or "around corner from house next to brown house".

The house I grew up in had an address of "the first house east of the post office." We had a box at the post office for regular mail, but for stuff like mail order computer parts, we'd use that address. It mostly worked. Every so often we'd get a UPS driver with a bad sense of direction and we'd have to go pick up our package from our neighbors on the other side of the post office.

Post by ewindisch » Sat, Mar 26, 2016, 4:50 AM UTC

david-given wrote: post #160

silveira wrote: post #28

I have a first name composed of two names, and one of them with an acute accent. This is enough to cause some of my credit cards to be printed with a repeated name because they assume my "second first name" to be a middle name too. The acute accent results in encoding problems once in a while. But nothing compares the problems that people with names longer than 30 characters have to face. Creating a SSN card, or driv…

That list makes me very sad. Not because it's not interesting, which it is, but because it'd be so much more interesting if it discussed each item as it went. This one, for example: People’s names are assigned at birth. OK, maybe not at birth, but at least pretty close to birth. Alright, alright, within a year or so of birth. Five years? You’re kidding me, right? Don't leave me there! Tell me which culture assigns na…

Post by ommunist » Sat, Mar 26, 2016, 5:41 AM UTC