Answer: I still don't know. It's used in the context of a wafer inspection machine of some sort, but rüsseln isn't actually standard German. In Austria, it means "to sleep", and in Switzerland it means "to complain repetitively", so I just fudged and used complaint mode. Which is probably wrong.
There's some interesting discussion from Switzerland here.
Update 29 May 2012:
Or here, where a horse enters "Rüsselmodus", apparently complaining a lot and apparently in Switzerland, because a Google search on "Rüsselmodus" also turns up a fossil link to a now-defunct forum posting that contrasts "Aufrecht-Modus" with "Rüssel-Modus" (also on a horse forum, oddly enough), and that horse must have been Austrian, since "upright" contrasts well with "sleeping" but not so felicitously with "complaining".
Of course, by far the most common returns for the word are now this post and all the other posts on this blog that show it in the sidebar.
Update 29 May 2012:
Or here, where a horse enters "Rüsselmodus", apparently complaining a lot and apparently in Switzerland, because a Google search on "Rüsselmodus" also turns up a fossil link to a now-defunct forum posting that contrasts "Aufrecht-Modus" with "Rüssel-Modus" (also on a horse forum, oddly enough), and that horse must have been Austrian, since "upright" contrasts well with "sleeping" but not so felicitously with "complaining".
Of course, by far the most common returns for the word are now this post and all the other posts on this blog that show it in the sidebar.
