Tuesday, April 09, 2002

There is one more thing I want to share, a kind of funny story happened over the weekend. As you guys probably figured out by now: we just moved into a new house. There is still some construction going on, and the constructor did a major cleaning job on Thurdsay and Friday. He ended up with a big metal container full of construction garbage (paper, wood, styrofoam, plastic, you name it - it was in there). All together something like 10 - 12 cubic meter of garbage sitting in a metal container on the street in front of the house. Saturday afternoon comes, the door bell rings, and our neighbor is there: 'Wolfgang, you better get a hose, your container is on fire!' I looked out of the door, and he was right - flames and dark black smoke coming out of the right side of the container. There was already no point in getting a hose, I run for the phone and called the fire deparmtent. Fortunately there was no immediate danger to people or property, the next house was about 10 meters (30 feet) away, and the next parked car on the street was my wife's car. My main concern was for a big tree which is right in front of the house, this tree is supposed to be more then 150 years old and is protected by some guidelines/laws. About 5-10 minutes later the fire department showed up with a big truck, by now the complete container was in flames, some combustions from inside the container didn't sound like 'paper and wood ONLY', I assume some paint and paint thinner helped to fuel the fire. The fire department first poured some foam onto the flames, and then started pouring water into the container until the container was completely filled with water. By now the police showed up, asked us if we knew how it happened etc. Noone was really surprised, the policeman told us that they will file charges against 'anonymous' for arsen, but we should not expect any outcome of it. The whole fuzz was over in 40 minutes, no harm done beside a ruined garbage container (the container was pretty much empty after the water run out of the container) ... what an excitement on a Saturday afternoon!   9:06:57 PM

One more big dev-change to do before we are really really done with it. Bug count is nice and low, nothing serious in there, I think we can get it done from the dev-side this week. Frank is back from vacation, unfortunately he had to go to the opto.... (eye doctor ;-) since his new glasses are creating splitting headaches while working on the computer. Hope he is up to it tomorrow. As a surprise I got a DSL splitter delivered by the German Telecom today. Don't know if this means I am already configured to use DSL, I'll try to give them a call tomorrow. But just in case I ordered the DSL modem today and a switch for the home network. This would be very cool if I can get DSL going in a week or so. My wiring for the home network is not yet done, this will have to wait until the weekend. I still have not found my server (Internet gateway, firewall) in the 30-40 remaining boxes. All the description on the boxes says something like books (bookshelfs not yet done) or 'closet master bedroom' (the walking closet not yet done). I hope the movers stashed the machine in one of these boxes. 8:42:02 PM

© Copyright 2002 Wolfgang Manousek. Last update: 4/9/2002; 8:42:03 PM.