Comment by rented_mule
14 hours ago
About the same time the 500-mile email problem happened (mid 1990s), I had a difficult to understand issue with my office PC. Every morning, I'd come in, slide my hard drive sled in, and turn the computer on. We had 128 Kbps ISDN internet at the office and I had the same at home, but that was too slow to do much work. So I'd take the drive home so I could work at night, especially in the winter when the office was too cold at night.
Suddenly one winter morning, the PC wouldn't boot. I had to run to a meeting. When I got back, I turned the PC off and on again and everything was fine. The next morning, the same thing happened. The third day, I didn't have a meeting. I turned it off and back on, still no boot. I'd gotten in late, so I just turned it off and took an early lunch. When I got back, it still wouldn't boot. But I had a meeting, so I ran to that, leaving the computer on. When I got back, it booted fine.
The next morning, same thing. I decided to look inside, not having any idea what might cause such symptoms. As I took the shell off, a tiny mouse came out, jump off my desk, and ran across my lap before jumping on the floor and scurrying out of sight. From inside the computer came the smell of mouse urine. Apparently he'd been crawling in through the open drive bay to keep warm every night, and urinating while he was in there. Once the computer had been on for a while, the heat and airflow would dry it out enough to eliminate whatever electrical short was keeping it from booting. I went to the store and bought an empty drive sled to put in the drive bay whenever I took my drive out, and the problem never came back. I felt lucky that the liquid didn't cause permanent damage.
Someone posted a similar story on one of the other times the 500 mile email was posted - where a car would fail to start if the owner bought strawberry ice-cream from the store, but would work if they have vanilla. I love the processes that go into finding the actual issue (regardless of if the ice cream story is true!): https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cone-of-silence/
> Vanilla, being the most popular flavor, was in a separate case at the front of the store for quick pickup.
wish modern stores optimized for customer convenience instead of seeing most shelves along the way to the usual
OT, but I find this a perfect example why "data-driven design" is an empty term if you don't know what it's being designed for - i.e. what metrics are used to evaluate it in the end.
Both, optimizing for ease of shopping and optimizing for stringing the customer along as long as possible rely on the same purchase data - they just use diametrically opposite metrics for evaluation.
I can hear Click and Clack, the Tappett Brothers, hooting and guffawing on Car Talk as I’m reading this Snopes article!
Why'd you have to make me sad.
Finally a real computer mouse! What a funny story :)
Mice can fit through tiny holes. An old rule says that if a pencil can get through - a mouse will get through. Some mice even fly. I once had a bat clinging on my good old CAT cable. So even leaving windows open at night might affect bandwidth...
Another classic is the "Frog on Keyboard error". Software developers have to be prepared for everything...
https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Classic-WTF-Cursed-and-ReCu...
There used to be an option called "Cat guard" built into several historical (BBS ) software. On (and cannot remember the name) one software that did synchronization with other networks (e.g., FIDO, uunet) it was considered a major feature.
Primary purpose was to lock the keyboard so when the cat walked all over it, it would not disconnect.
My mouse doesn't do that
Kind of similar to the story about the origins of the word "bug" in software
If this would have caught on we might have called bugs mice
Too many people remember the “bug” story as “Grace Hopper invented the term ‘bug’” when the real takeaway is “Grace Hopper was very funny.”
And in colloquial speak, a grasshopper is, of course, a bug.
Isn't that story more myth than reality?
The history section of the Wikipedia entry for "bug" [1] suggests it predates computers by decades.
1- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bug_(engineering)
It's also more moth than reality.
Moths are, technically [0], not bugs.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemiptera
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The actual story is not myth. It just isn't the origin of the term.
Hopper's note didn't suggest the word was new, but was funny exactly because it was not.
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Seems like 'he' came out without damage, too :)
In another world, I guess bugs would be called mice. But then what would we call mice?