Slashdot Mirror
Computer Voodoo?
jbeaupre asks: "A corollary to 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic' is that sometimes users have to resort to what I call 'computer voodoo.' You don't know why it works, you barely care how it works, but you find yourself doing the strangest things because it just seems to work. I'm talking about things like: smacking a PC every 5 seconds for an hour to keep it from stalling on a hard drive reformat (with nary a problem after the reformat); or figuring out the only way to get a PC partially fried by lightning to recognize an ethernet card, after booting into Windows, is to start the computer by yanking the card out and shoving it back in (thereby starting the boot processes). What wacky stuff have you done that makes no obvious sense, but just works?"
For most problems, I find smacking the user is more effective than smacking the computer.
...i had to code a html page without dreamweaver
now thats voodoo
back in the day we didnt have no old school
When somebody has a problem that they want me to fix, my mere presence and their attempt to repeat the problem makes it go away.
No, seriously. For some reason my presence is enough to get some computer problems to go away.
(until I leave...)
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." -Plato
I gotta stop using gentoo.
A bad analogy is like a leaky screwdriver.
On the first pc I built one of the best ways to keep it in line in its last few weeks with me was to randomly yell and smack the pc, it didnt know when it would happen so it didnt risk crapping out on me :P
Nah, Ive never had to rely on any voodoo to keep my pc running .. but to eliminate some annoying buzzing sounds from fans nothing beats a swift smack on the top left corner of the case.
I had a roommate that smacked his pc cause it wasnt working the way he wanted it to .. but it was working perfectly fine (no hardware or software issues - all user issues) .. I told him I'd have to start a support group for his electronics (he hit everything) if he kept it up. Electronic Victims of **** still lives to this day (name censored so he doesnt come after me :P)
If it takes effort to do, let someone else do it.
Why in God's holy name does Windows fail to boot one time, and then boot successfully the second time?
Hardware problems.
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
Tell the enduser their network cable "got reversed" and somebody will have to go over there and turn it around for them.
First, if you ask someone to put the phone down to check for link light, they'll answer back in 3 seconds without checking.
Second, even if they actually wouldn't lie about it, they'd never get under a desk to fix it in the first place.
Even guys in suits do it every time, if you say someone will be over "later" to reverse their (known loose) network cable.
End result -- works every time if you do it right, and no credibility lost since everybody understands what happened.
I keep various old expansion cards, motherboards, and processors hanging on the wall in plain sight of my beige box. The threat of disembowelment seems to keep it inline.
"Me fail English, that's unpossible." --Ralphie
True story: I used to identify bad RAM chips in old Apple II units with a dowsing rod. Finding one bad RAM chip out of 24 was a horrible pain in the ass, the normal procedure was to remove half of them, replace those with known-good RAM chips, see if the mem diagnostic passed, ok, it wasn't in the half I removed, put those back. Take out half of the chips that weren't removed before, replace with known good chips, repeat, etc. in a binary search pattern. This was horribly unproductive, particularly if the memory fault was intermittent. And even worse, once in a while, due to all the handling and insertion/extraction, or maybe just from static discharges, you'd ruin a chip in the known-good set, which really screwed things up, you could go back and forth for HOURS.
I remember when I was a little kid, I used to watch the old Tom Snyder Tomorrow show on late night TV, and some weird guy demonstrated how to dowse using a couple of bent wires made from coat hangers. I was skeptical, but eventually I became known for some rather startling dowsing stunts, I used to challenge people to hide my keys in a location I was unfamiliar with, in houses or buildings I'd never been to, and could find them 4 times out of 5. So when I became a computer tech, I figured, what the hell, it couldn't hurt, it couldn't possibly take MORE time to try dowsing than to do the elaborate binary search method. And to my astonishment, it was a LOT faster. Sometimes it took me a couple of tries, but pulling just a couple of individual chips was a lot faster than pulling 12 chips at a time, and my results were way above the expected average of just pulling a chip at random. BUT.. I made absolutely sure that nobody ever saw me dowsing on their machines. This is Computer SCIENCE, after all, it isn't computer VOODOO. Ha!
Hey, I tried what you said, but it didn't make my computer work better, it broke it! How come?
Find free books.
Didn't you ever play the role playing game "Paranoia?"
:)
Machine Empathy is a mutant power that makes all things electronic (be they computers, appliances, or killbots) into your best friends.
I submit that people who program computers, and like computers, naturally develop this mutant power.
(Incidentally, the best part of the game was that computer programmers were called "high programmers" and were worshipped (and feared) by the rest of society. That is how it should be.)
defenestration!
What wacky stuff have you done that makes no obvious sense, but just works?
Ask Slashdot.
(...though I'm not quite sure it works...)
--<Mike>--
I had (still have, actually) this old Compaq Presario computer with a Pentium 200 MMX processor. The thing was never the most stable computer out there and was a pain in the but to work on, having non-standard screws and proprietay memory, as most Compaqs of that era did. One day I realized that I had a bunch of old hard drives lying around, so I decide to make this Compaq into a makeshift file server by adding the two larger drives in to the machine and brought it to school with my at the start of my Senior year. The machine's sole purpose was to act as a file server AND as a second internet/instant messaging terminal that I could use when my primary desktop was otherwise engaged. The machine didn't do this well as it seemed to suffer a 25% random reboot rate while using it. (Windows 98, couldn't even get Linux to come close to running on it.) This wasn't really any different from the sort of behavior it had shown since the day we purchased it, shortly after the MMX processors were released, so I just put up with it until...
;)
One day I'm playing Serious Sam over the LAN with some friends. There's a brief lull in the action and so I reach over for the 1 gallon bottle of apple juice I was drinking from. Well, instead of picking up the apple juice, I tip it over and the entire contents spill out ON TOP OF the Compaq. I of course, immediately jump in to disaster recovery mode and race to the kitchen to grab the paper towels. I start cleaning up the mess, expecting the wrost for the Compaq in the process. I could see where there was apple juice in all of the little crevices and I'm darn sure some of it actually got into the computer. Some had spilled on to some school papers lying next to the machine and I wanted to make sure I didn't lose any notes so I took plenty of time to salvage those papers.
After I finished cleaning up the mess, I check the computer. Mouse and keyboard input seem OK. I start up Winamp and it seems to work OK. I run scandisk on all of the drives and they all report being OK. I can't find a single thing wrong with this computer. And I'll be damned if that computer didn't have a single random reboot after I spilled apple juice on it. It became the object of admiration and jokes amongst my friends, and one friend even managed to find one of those fruity, rainbow colored Apple Computer stickers that he wanted me to put on the case. I never even bothered to open up the computer to asses the damages (partly becuase I was lazy and didn't have a torx screw driver at school). Truth be told, I was afraid to even move the comptuer or otherwise disturb it since it seemed to be working OK.
A quick addendum to this story... right before graduation I purchased another hard drive for my primary desktop machine that was about 4 times the total capacity of the drives in the apple computer. I copied all of my data off the apple computer on to this drive and pretty much relegated the apple solely to web surfing detail. About a year and a half later, I need another hard drive for a client machine and so I decide to finally open the apple computer to raid one of the hard drives in it. I was even more amazed then that the computer still worked. There was brown, sticky apple juice residue on everything in the computer. There was even a puddle of this gooey gel that had pooled at the bottom of the case. It was all over the cables, the drives, everything. I was even more surprised and even a little bit proud that the computer still worked after that ordeal.
I guess that just goes to show: if you want a stable computer, get an Apple.
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
We wrote a script once that would gradually slow down the mouse pointer. We installed it on the interns computers and watched them get frustrated when their mouse pointer wouldn't move. We explained to them that they had to unplug the mouse, swing the plug end rapidly around their heads, and then plug it back in, and it would be fixed.
We would conspiciously watch from quite a few cubes away and watch this mice get whipped around in the air! It was the most hilarous thing we've ever seen! You'd think that they wouldn't buy it, but when push came to shove they did it and it worked for them after looking like fools!
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
Found a reference to it: John Dvorak had a funny discussion about the article here
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
It was always handy to add a BUGS=OFF line.
I have a friend. Her and her husband's computer works completely normal. To him, anyway, when he only "checks email occasionally". But for some reason, when the wife uses it, she says their antispy software shows the husband's profile/browsing history is mysteriously always infected cookies from a bunch of porno sites that they never visited! Seems like it's worse when she gets back from being out of town. Like the ghostly hackers know when she's been gone, or something.
There's some spooky voodoo for ya, right there. They should probably call Ghostbusters, or something.
VOTE!
Do you mean the first time or the second time?
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
Years ago, I spoke with a repair tech at a local repair shop. He told me about a problem with Apple II machines that exhibited very specific symptoms. A customer would call him, describe the problem, bring the computer to his shop, and the machine would suddenly work perfectly. The actual problem was a loose connector (or expansion card, I don't remember) and the simple act of putting the machine in the car and driving to the shop was enough to reseat it and correct the problem.
He was eventually able to recognize the problem over the phone. He would tell the customer that the computer was lonely, and should be taken for a ride around the block. It worked almost every time.
Back in the day when I was a network admin (think 286 and the powerhouse 386 with a whooping 8mb RAM), we had occasional issues with one networked PC or another. Most of the time I'd carry a fairly large hammer with me and would place it on top of the computer case while I had it open to investigate the problem and work on the machine. The sight of the hammer freaked out more than one person in the office because they thought I intended to really use the thing. Apparently it had a similar effect on the computer because I never had a problem getting the thing to work again in short order. They also behaved just fine after that implicit threat (the computers, not the people).
--Udo.
My father got an 386SX 25Mhz with 4MB of RAM when it was THE thing to have.
:)
Later on we upgraded to 8MB and then it was time to get the overdrive processor that had it's own slot on the motherboard, I was a happy camper, finaly a floatingpoint co-processor for my povray renderings.
Well we plugged it in and noticed that instead of the 50Mhz we should be getting we were getting 66Mhz.
Since it didn't have any active cooling devices and this was a desktop computer we left the hood off to see if it got to warm. After some heavy use of the new processor (I think it was Warcraft 2) I can hear a creaking sound coming from the computer and then the screen goes blank, everything stops. Suddenly *boing* the co-processor flies out of it's socket. I'm sitting in my office chair and from that I'm throwing myself (still sitting in the chair) and I catch the co-processor mid flight, and I emidiately start juggling it since it's hot as h*ll. I get it on to the desk and I let it cool down.
After it's cooled I plug it in again and it works... phew... so I start playing WC2 again and the next time I hear the creaking sound I take my thumb and press it down on to the co-processor, I can hear and feel the burn on my thumb but since then it hasn't jumped out again. Infact I think it's stuck now
Nobody wanted to tell him that moving the mouse by hand would have the same effect...
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
There isn't a lot left on Slashdot that will make me wince, but this did. ;)
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
That was the /. equivalent of "So I put my finger over the hole in his heart and gave him mouth-to-mouth until the surgeon arrived."
I do agree, but selling lusers expensive bandaids can be quite lucrative. I charge $90 an hour to clean out spyware and they keep coming back!
This is really going to date me but here goes....
Once upon a time, CD burners were a very new thing. We had just gotten one in at work. We didn't burn much because the disks were expensive. This new guy started in our shipping department and he asked if we would copy a game for him if he bought the disk. We told him that would be fine. He brings in his software and his blank disk. We carefully put everything in the machine and set the disk to burn.
When it's done, I very calmly pull some oven mitts out of my desk drawer and pull them on as I wander over to the machine. I pick up the newly burned disk and juggle it for a bit (like a hot potato) as I walk over to his desk. He looks up and sees me, taking in the oven mitts "What're those for?" "Oh...because the disk is hot. Why do you think it's called burning a CD?" I toss him the CD and tell him not to burn himself.
He sits there juggling his new disk for about 30 seconds before he realizes that it's not really hot. In retaliation, he chases me around the warehouse with Nerf gun.
The only real requirements are the ability to keep a straight face and to come up with something that is remotely plausible.
2 cents,
QueenB
HDGary secures my bank