The Official Status Thread
-
It's not like I'm going to 5 minute oil change express or something.
Actually, last time I went to a dealer I got it done for
free*$25 which is still barely more than the cost of 5 quarts anyway.*Mystery shopping
-
Additionally, when engines fail people tend to react with "Fucking Ford makes garbage! I'm never buying one of those again!" and not "I wonder if I saving 10 bucks every 6 months had anything to do with it"
-
Yeah, dealers generally do the right thing, but it's a loss leader so you spend 20 minutes staring at the shiny car parked in the waiting room, the used car guy sneaks a peek at yours, and decides if they have a need for your car in their inventory, that sort of thing.
In the end they make that money back on average.
-
Well, I'm not usually going to a dealer either. I'm going to places in-between those two ranges. (read: AAA car care and similar)
-
Cracked Heads Every Valve Rattles Oil Leaks Every Time
Found On Road Dead
Drive Only During Great Emergencies
-
Status****meme: Annoyed that RestyGwt doesn't respect default methods :/
-
If they do actual mechanical work, they work on the standard mechanic's business model and therefore are making their money by having the Shop Kid (who works for peanuts and is otherwise an overhead item) change your oil to get some experience before they let him do anything actually difficult. Or a regular mechanic who is sitting around doing not a damned thing.
Which is good. Places that only do oil, filters and wipers are the problem area.
-
Yep.
-
Cracked Heads Every Valve Rattles Oil Leaks Every Time
Found On Road Dead
Drive Only During Great Emergencies
Lots Of Trouble Usually Serious
-
Don't Dead
Open Inside
-
It occurred to me only after I put all the tools away that I was using caulk on a hot water feed, and I'm not sure if the temperature affects it.
It may depend on the kind of caulk you used. Silicone is generally very heat resistant. Latex no so much. It may be ok for the moderately hot water pipe, although I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't last as long as the 10 years, or whatever it says on the tube.
-
Found On Road Dead
Fixed Or Repaired Daily
That's actually pretty accurate for mine but only because it's heavily modified. The stupid leaking thermostat housing is all down to their pants-on-head design though.
-
So I recently had to replace my crankshaft sensor in my '06 Altima.
They designed the damn thing so you have to disconnect the sensor before removing it from the block. You have to push a button in and pull a plug. Of course it's cramped and there was no real way to grab the damn thing.
The replacement re-orients the plug so you can take the damn bolt off, pull it out of the block, and then disconnect it, like it should have been in the first place.
-
literally not putting oil in it (or failing to ensure the oil doesn't come back out).
My ex-wife had just such an experience at a well-known chain shop (or maybe she used the well-known name as a generic; it was before I knew her).
-
and put 97 octane premium fuel in a car that's only rated for 85, because "it burns cleaner"
yes it burns cleaner! it's a lot hotter and your engine is not designed for that extra heat!That's not what the Octane number is about. And also not how the chemistry involved works.
Hint: Different octane numbers don't necessitate different reaction enthalpies.
Now, if we were talking about the difference between E10 and E5, you'd be on to something.
-
I guess on very modern turbocharged engines if they were designed for only low octane and you put higher in then they could maybe overheat as they'd be able to run more boost until pre-ignition was detected.
Those things are incredibly highly-strung as they want the highest thermal efficiency = running juuust below knock all the time.
-
Well, yeah, maybe. But a run-of-the-mill engine? Nope :)
-
The replacement re-orients the plug so you can take the damn bolt off, pull it out of the block, and then disconnect it, like it should have been in the first place.
I had to remove my intake manifold once to change the oil filter. It was unusually tight and they've put the bloody thing on the back of the engine so it's between the intake manifold and drive shaft...good luck exerting a lot of force from below unless you're some sort extra-jointed alien.
-
It sounds like a form of insulation I had in the attic. Messy shit. Especially when you want to poke a hole in the ceiling for a new light fixture...
-
the 'uninstall' option seems to be greyed out for everything.
The buttons are actually grey, even when they're clickable.
must have had something to do with that.
-
Well, you typed in the XP name. It's called "programs and features" now (since Vista?) That works. (and what @choonster said)
-
The buttons are actually grey, even when they're clickable.
must have had something to do with that.I did try clicking them anyway and nothing happened. I guess that means I'm not sure now if they really were disabled or just plain broken
Well, you typed in the XP name. It's called "programs and features" now (since Vista?) That works. (and what @choonster said)
Yep, that brings up the right thing. It was more that I got something that looked pretty close to what I wanted except that it didn't do anything which made me go
-
Yup, I go to the dealer. They're a mile from work and they have wifi. Convenience!
-
status****strong text TIL: Design changes are now bugs because we didn't implement what we didn't know about.
-
/me is glaring at her first GM who is several playing cards short of a deck when it comes to technology of any sort
You realize GM (General Motors) is a car company, and when you spend an entire post talking about cars and then use the acronym "GM" people are going to assume you mean the car company.
But since that's gibberish in context with the rest of the sentence, since you used the word "who", so I'm going to ass-pull and assume you mean meant "general manager".
-
When I was a kid, my brother and I made one of those for Mitsubishi. But now I can't remember.
-
It may depend on the kind of caulk you used.
Being MASTER HARDWARE GENIUS I threw the tube away so I couldn't look. Well I guess I could have gone rooting through my garbage, but I didn't.
-
You realize GM (General Motors) is a car company
huh... they're still around?
really?!
I'm going to ass-pull and assume you mean meant "general manager".
sure?i meant Game Master (thing D&D Dungeon Master, but for other games) but that's not germane to this exchange so General Manager works just as well.
-
It sounds like a form of insulation I had in the attic.
That's reassuring actually.
I know the exterior walls of this house was "insulated" by saving all the sawdust they created while building the house and just pouring it in there. (I was hoping it would have been those houses insulated with newspapers, because it would be awesome to have like 10,000 1927 and older newspapers in my walls. But alas.)
What bothers me is that a lot or most of the chips had what looked like a insect chitin metallic-ish sheen to them. But like I said, I went to every site about wood-eating insects and none of them had a picture remotely similar to it. Maybe the sheen was metal from the tool they used to make the chips? I have no idea.
-
huh... they're still around?
Uh yeah? They're like number 3 in the world.
i meant Game Master (thing D&D Dungeon Master, but for other games)
Ah, see. In a million years, I would never have guessed "game master".
-
Ah, see. In a million years, I would never have guessed "game master".
and that's totally okay as it was not a fact that was pertinent to my postulate.
-
This stuff?
http://bannerchemical.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Vermiculite.jpgIt's vermiculite.
-
circulation in hands: nil.
That sounds like a dangerous situation. Is there circulation at your wrists?
Status: Finished putting out fires from an unexpected Windows Update Auto--Forced-Reboot on the server screwed the NLA system and broke EVERYTHING (due to cascaded failure dependencies).
More info...
Four hours wasted. Hooray.
-
I threw the tube away so I couldn't look.
At this point, it hardly matters. You used whatever you used, and it will last as long as it lasts, which will probably be at least a few years.
As for the insulation itself, it just occurred to me what it might be. Did it look like this?
If so, vermiculite. It's a mica-like mineral that contains water. The water turns to steam when it's heated, and expands the layers into fluffy little chunks. It's used in gardening, liquid propane burners and, I guess, maybe as insulation some time in the past.Edit:
-
It's vermiculite.
Aha, yes. That looks almost exactly like what I found.
Is it something you'd expect to find in the floor of a 1927 house?
EDIT: Googling says yes. Phew.
I thought it was an insect chewing up my house. Thank God. And it looks like my ad-hoc remediation was the correct thing to do. Yay.
-
It was in the attic of my 1940(something) house... So, yes.
-
Is it something you'd expect to find in the floor of a 1927 house?
I don't know, but it seems plausible. It's reasonably good insulation, and it's inorganic, so it wouldn't decay or attract wood-eating insects like sawdust or newspapers.
-
It was used as insulation starting in the 1920s. They stopped using it after they found out it was contaminated with asbestos. Wikipedia:
The United States government estimates that vermiculite was used in more than 35 million homes, but does not recommend its removal. Nevertheless, homes or structures containing vermiculite or vermiculite insulation dating from before the mid 1990s—and especially those known to contain the "Zonolite" brand—may contain asbestos, and therefore may be a health concern.
So maybe don't touch it.
-
Eh. Too late for that.
My house has tons of asbestos anyway. The concerns about it are overblown-- the people who got cancer all worked in factories full of the stuff. Homeowners aren't at risk unless they do something really dumb, like grab a nail file and just carve away at their asbestos pipe insulation while breathing in as much as possible.
BTW it seriously has a reflective sheen exactly like an insect's chitin. It's a pretty cool substance, now that I know it didn't come from a digestive system.
-
Status: Goddamnit .NET, why can't you tell me what happened? And why does the GET request fail and the POST request succeed?
Exception information: Exception type: HttpRequestException Exception message: An error occurred while sending the request. The server committed a protocol violation. Section=ResponseStatusLine at System.Net.HttpWebRequest.EndGetResponse(IAsyncResult asyncResult) at System.Net.Http.HttpClientHandler.GetResponseCallback(IAsyncResult ar)
-
I hate that one.
Time to dive into your HTTP debugger. Usually it's something like a missing ContentType, or a ContentType that doesn't match the content served, or something.
EDIT: Oh. Yeah, the stupid KeepAlive header. It could be that.
Set KeepAlive to false in your config file:<system.net> <settings> <httpWebRequest keepAlive="false" /> </settings> </system.net>Solution blatantly stolen from StackOverflow.Turns out you need to set KeepAlive = false in code, setting it in web.config isn't sufficient. Lame, .net.
BTW, for all the wags in the audience: while it's a pain, this error comes up because and only because a LOT of web servers that claim to support HTTP 1.1 fuck it up somehow. So the "solution" is always to disable various things that HTTP 1.1 web servers are supposed to correctly support.
Or in short, unless the server is also being served from .net, it's not a .net problem. It's a "this server done fucked up the protocol" problem.
Naturally, this being Discourse, the "del" tag doesn't work if there's a code block in the middle of it. In fact, there appears to be no way at all to use the "del" tag on a code block. What the fuck ever.
-
@blakeyrat said:
You realize GM (General Motors) is a car company
huh... they're still around?
really?!
I have much to teach you, young padawan
-
And this is why web developer angst is a thing, the entire thing is a fragile fucking mess held together with duct tape and string, and not enough of either.
If people want to quote me as describing Discourse like that, go for it.
-
-
Yeah but on the other hand, HTTP is a really simple fucking protocol, and there are a fucking LOT of servers that fuck it up.
Have you ever tried running Fiddler (or presumably another HTTP debugger) while doing basic daily browsing? How many protocol errors did Fiddler report back to you? For me, it's like one every 5 minutes.
What really sucks is that .net's strictness, while good and laudable, moves the burden of "fix this shit" to the poor client. But the client's not the one fucking up.
(Especially when actual web browsers generally just suck-it-up and ignore the errors. Which is probably exactly why all these servers are still buggy as shit all these years later.)
-
the entire thing is a fragile fucking mess held together with
ductsello tape and string, and not enough of either.You give them too much credit.
-
@Arantor said:
the entire thing is a fragile fucking mess held together with
ductsello tape and string, and not enough of either.You give them too much credit.
don't forget the knockoff bondo epoxy (that cracks and breaks if you look at it wrong) and the extremely rusty bailing wire.
-
Oh, it turns out the other server is terminating the connection because .NET isn't sending any User-Agent header at all. Thanks, StackOverflow!
-
See, good example.
User-Agentheader isn't required, so your server's doing it wrong.
-
@Lorne_Kates said:
I've been looking at replacing the shocks. The car's a bit bumpy.
Most cars now have MacPherson struts (specially in the front), so you'll need coil-spring compressor to change it.
Something like thatMaybe you should start with something simple, like changing brake pads.
