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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)

#71

Post by BoxOfRain »

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…

>I joked when I moved to Seattle that the main problem is since there is no salt, there are still Citations on the road and that is unnatural. Their place in the natural order is the junk yard.

This was the fate of many British Leyland cars, even the ones that people genuinely liked such as as the classic Mini and the MGB were practically hygroscopic.

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#72

Post by gwbas1c »

doodpants wrote: post #28

> Vanilla, being the most popular flavor, was in a separate case at the front of the store for quick pickup. Vanilla is the most popular flavor? That makes me skeptical of the whole story. ;-)

Have you ever given ice cream to young children?

I was a picky eater as a kid, yet I still can't fathom why so many kids prefer vanilla over other flavors.

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#74

Post by rmnclmnt »

deelowe wrote: post #20

Reminds me of a short book I like that talks about these sort of tings titled "An Engineer's Guide to Solving Problems." It starts with a similar situation - "The Dog Barks When the Phone Rings." Eventually, you get to a section called “If I Could See it, I Could Fix it!” which discusses the importance of understanding the problem before attempting fixes.

Understanding the problem usually comes later, first step is to be able to reproduce the problem!

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#75

Post by pixl97 »

addaon wrote: post #40
bell-cot wrote: post #2

This reminds me of a GM minivan that my youngest brother-in-law drove, back in the '80's. He'd gotten it from his father, who was a career GM automotive engineer - and complained that, occasionally & randomly, it would not start. It seemed like the minivan's whole electrical system was dead... Brother-in-law was known to be "not so good" with cars - so his automotive engineer father didn't take the complaints serious…

I have a 2009 Mercedes SLK that had the same symptom. It was absolutely fine 99.9% of the time, but one time in a thousand it wouldn't even try to start. No clicks, no indication that it even knew I was in there turning the key. Just dead. And then seven or eight hours later... it would start fine, as if nothing ever happened. Couldn't correlate it to anything. Had it towed to a service center a few times when this h…

I had a truck do this kind of behavior once.

Finally figured it out after months when I moved a wire and it started, then move the wire close to another wire and it would no longer start. These were wires that would typically be close, so my guess is one of the wires was now generating enough noise that it was bleeding over into some other system and causing it to fail. As the car bounced around the proximity of the wires changed and lead to the random behavior.

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#76

Post by macintux »

maweaver wrote: post #34

> Moral of the story: even insane-looking problems are sometimes real. To me the moral of the story (and my experience) is: user's problems are usually real, but don't trust their ability to diagnose the actual cause.

Related: as a troubleshooter, don’t get locked into a theory too quickly. You can easily overlook other information that doesn’t fit.

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#77

Post by macintux »

moffkalast wrote: post #53
doodpants wrote: post #28

> Vanilla, being the most popular flavor, was in a separate case at the front of the store for quick pickup. Vanilla is the most popular flavor? That makes me skeptical of the whole story. ;-)

Given that it's become a synonym for 'conventional', I'm not sure why you'd be sceptical. It's the least common denominator flavour.

Same reason grayscale cars are very common: even if a family likes bright colors, they may not like the same bright colors, and may not trust they’ll be able to sell it to someone else later.

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#78

Post by drivers99 »

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…

Definitely an urban legend at this point. A reddit thread[0] mentions it being collected in 1990 from computer stories going around in the 80s[1]

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/5yrs1...

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3227607-the-devouring-fu...

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#79

Post by BashiBazouk »

doodpants wrote: post #28

> Vanilla, being the most popular flavor, was in a separate case at the front of the store for quick pickup. Vanilla is the most popular flavor? That makes me skeptical of the whole story. ;-)

Vanilla accounts for about a quarter of all ice cream sales in the US. Chocolate is a close second but I think vanilla wins as it is also the most common to serve with other desserts. Apple pie a la mode is always with vanilla ice cream for example...

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#80

Post by deelowe »

rmnclmnt wrote: post #74
deelowe wrote: post #20

Reminds me of a short book I like that talks about these sort of tings titled "An Engineer's Guide to Solving Problems." It starts with a similar situation - "The Dog Barks When the Phone Rings." Eventually, you get to a section called “If I Could See it, I Could Fix it!” which discusses the importance of understanding the problem before attempting fixes.

Understanding the problem usually comes later, first step is to be able to reproduce the problem!

Correct. That chapter actually might be more about reproducibility. It's been a while since I read it.
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