Cars Suck

Cars Suck

That's what it said on the front of a T shirt Marshall Mathews once wore to a Ferrrari Club event. Marshall was the body shop manager for Carlsen Porsche in Palo Alto at the time...so you would figure he should know, right?

Oh yeah? Cars, at least those built before about 1990, are so much less “sucky” than computers it isn't even funny. Yeah, I know, this blog is not supposed to be about the latter, but in today's world they are so much a part of vehicles it is hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Have you seen the Mercedes commercials lately? “It's a super computer, it's a stereo system, it leaps tall buildings all by itself...” in short, it seems to be everything but a car!

At least with pre-90s cars, for the most part you could look at and figure out what was happening if things were going wrong (well, that excludes many electrical glitches of course, but then a computer is nothing but electrical glitches packaged up in a sleek aluminum case). Is there gas in the tank? Add a couple of gallons from a can to be sure. Is the fuel reaching the carb or injectors? Pull a hose, energize the fuel pump, and see if liquid flows out. Are those mysterious electrons getting to the cylinders? Pull a plug, ground it and see if a spark jumps across the electrodes (yeah, I know it can sometimes be dicey and not recommended, but I've never had an issue in 50 years of testing this way). Pretty simple for the most part.

Not so a computer, nor a modern car. It starts by the manufacturer intentionally doing things to keep you from knowing what is going on “under the hood.”

“We can't possibly let a peasant like you look into the innards of our wonderful product to figure out what is wrong with it. We are so sure of ourselves that we think we built it so nothing WILL go wrong with it, and if it does we will use yet another wonder gizmo you have no access to and is yet another computer to figure it out.” And heaven help you when (not if) the symptoms your Belchfire is experiencing has not been written into that diagnostic program. Time for the great parts swap fire drill! Step right up folks while we put in what the computer sez even though it makes no sense...or maybe we'll just reset the damn “check engine light” for free after several busted attempts to change something to make it go away. And that light? It basically says that you, dear driver, are too damn stupid to be given any meaningful information, so instead we light up a warning that could mean anything from an air leak in your gas cap (nope, that didn't make the light stop coming on) to “your engine is going to blow up in 30 seconds. Immediately open the door and jump out.”

Yes, the above is a real example of the “light gremlin” in my 99 Dodge 2500 truck. So every so often when the light comes on, I simply have the guys reset it when I'm due for an oil change.

“Oh,” you ask, “but what if this time there really IS a problem?” I guess I had better start wearing a helmet and Nomex underwear when I drive it, anticipating that dive out the door.

But I digress ( a LOT!). Yesterday Sherri's computer decided to have some fun with me. Not her, because, like most of the planet, she doesn't want to, nor could she, become a systems administrator, which is pretty much what is required of anyone owning today's little electronic wonders...other than a car, of course. That one is just hopeless and there is no option but to get the damn thing in to the so-called “professionals” and hope for the best.

She launched Apple's Safari web browser, which opened OK, and then that spinning beach ball from hell appeared. Every computer company (well, at least the ones who make operating systems) thinks that a blue screen, a tumbling hourglass, or a spinning beach ball will keep the animals amused while the system is actually choking to death with no way to get out of it. It's busy, it means...but doing WHAT is anyone's guess. In any case, about all you can do is some sort of “in case of fire break glass” technique (CTL/ALT/DEL...or COMMAND/OPTION/ESC) to force the hung program to quit. In the case it is the whole system, at some point you learn that pressing the power button and just sitting on it will cause a full power off. Gee...and Steve Jobs always wanted to get rid of on/off switches (yeah, and Elon Musk and most of the car companies want to get rid of drivers).

You might, in some cases, be able to do something like display a log...for all the good that does. It is totally unintelligible to anyone who does not know far too much about techie stuff to likely to exist in any household outside the confines of the San Francisco peninsula. But you can often send the log off to the computer company, though heaven knows what they do with it. In 50 years as a reasonably technical cog in the computer business I have yet to ever seen anything come back from that black hole.

So I forced Safari to quit, and relaunched it, with exactly the same result. Next step? Restart the computer. This often allows the little beast to spit out whatever it was choking on. Not unlike taking a running start with your foot to the floor to get a vehicle like our old 67 VW van up Nob Hill.

Our Second Generation VW
Lacked the Westphalia raisable roof
But included the bed and sink cabinet,
though without the sink or fridge

That thing did not have enough guts to get out of its own way. But I'm digressing again. It did manage to take us 4500 miles through some pretty wonderful countryside in 1977, but that's a story for another day.

Other than staring at goat entrails, the next step can only be to shut the system down and power it up again. This sometimes works when using “restart” doesn't. But no, not this time, sucker. What appeared was...oh crap! The operating system won't load and it is asking to either load from a backup made with Apple's “Time Machine” backup software, or...Nooooooooo!...download a new OS copy from Apple.

Puleeeze don't tell me there is no recent backup! I had a full copy of the entire system (called a “clone”) on an external drive, but that was done just before upgrading her to the new OS...which had to be done before, among other things, the tech gurus at Apple were likely to want to speak with me about any other problems I might be interested in trying to solve...like why, despite all the apparently correct iCloud settings, stuff did sometimes NOT get to all her devices.

This stuff is getting so complex that the first line of defense for Support staffs is either “are you on the latest OS?” or “are you on WiFi?” If the answer to the first is negative or the second positive, what you will most like hear next is to upgrade to the latest version in the first example, or patch around the WiFi in the second. It's ALWAYS someone else's problem other than the guy your are talking with.

And...as luck would have it, despite being really disciplined in both my work on cars and my administration of the increasingly complex world of our home electronics, somehow Time Machine had gotten turned off in the past, and while I had recognized that after the OS upgrade and turned it back on, it had not yet backed the system up...so I had a clone of the disc and a Time Machine backup, but both were from before the OS upgrade. If I used either many settings and options changed and tweaked as part of the upgrade would have to be redone. A long pain in the...

This was starting to look like trying to regap the points on your motorcycle, only to find that the side cover to the engine had one screw that would not come out, which you of course then totally buggered the head of by trying. Several hours, tools, and curses later...

See? This is about cars after all!

The only other option left was to download the OS all over again. But like that VW van, here in the back 40 our internet is, by 2107 standards, decidedly lacking horsepower. And operating system downloads are massive. It was going to take an hour and a half just to get the thing.

Except it didn't. I've see this before. Opening the aforementioned log I could see that I was indeed connected to Apple's download server...it's named “Commerce” and please don't ask me why I know that. I just told you I'd seen this problem before. There is sometimes something going on between my Internet Service Provider (ISP) and that Apple server which causes it to go into a mode where it keeps downloading...forever...and never completes the process. And neither Apple nor the ISP eer owned up to what was the cause. After three hours I was seeing a completion of over 200% indicated, and yet a time estimate displayed of “less than one minute” remaining.

Did the same guys program that who did those silly diagnostic software programs the car dealers rely on?

I killed the download and tried again...TWICE. Same results (isn't doing the same thing over and over expecting different results one of the tests for insanity?). But with 40 years experience with computers...experience which is much deeper than what I have with cars , I still had one thing I could try before either contacting Apple or reverting to that cloned pre-upgrade backup. I decided to simply close the system down, power it off, and power it up again.

And (don't ask why, I have no clue)...it WORKED! Now I'm thinking maybe the hard drive is going bad or at least has a bad segment. I tested a couple of programs and they seemed just fine...until I got to Safari. There's the damn beach ball again. Back to square one. Full circle. Other than by now I had been chasing ghosts for about six hours. Time to contact Apple.

As always they were just great. I sure wish car repair places were as good, but then they don't think of themselves as primarily computer people...even though they really are. I did get thrown off by the first question the tech asked me in my online chat session. Did I have another browser I could use, like Chrome or Firefox. Wait...how did he think I got through to him after I told him all Safari was doing was looping around its own navel and I could not do anything with it? Did he think there was a way to do a chat session without a browser? IS there? How the hell would I or anyone else know?

He even had me chasing my tail with a wrong instruction. He wanted me to get into a high level folder called “Library...” one of those “keep your hands out of the engine” things Apple hides from you unless you have the secret password...which in this case is holding down the “Option” key (not “Command” as he at first told me) while clicking on the “Go” menu item at the top of the Finder screen. And then he walked me through deleting a whole bunch of arcane files and folder related to Safari, the only ones of which I recognized (and this after 40+ years of this) were “cache” and “cookies.”

Sure...any average Joe and housewife ought to be able to figure out the modern “oh...so intuitive you never need a manual” electronic wonders, right? They “just work...” except for when they don't, which is a hell of a lot more often than any pre-1990 non-electronic car. It might wear out in 60,000 miles while today's motors are good for 250K...but the problem is the electronics will all go nuts well before then and you can just scrap the darn thing cause no one will be able to figure out how to fix it.

So...after midnight...and 7+ hours, I restarted the system and everything, including Safari, worked like a champ. Of course I instantly created another backup, this one with those changed Safari settings in it. I just wonder what anyone not married to someone in the tech business does with problems like this.

Likely just buys a new computer...and don't companies like Apple just love that?