The source of of this morning's pleasant wake up was a grill, that was forgotten working during the night. The grill did not fail at all, but the woodwork of a close-by window got so hot that it spontaneously set itself on fire. From there the pipe connecting the gas bottle to the grill melted and started leaking gas. I couldn't find a plausable explanation for the explosions I heard. I think it was gas accumulating and exploding so powerfully that it suffocated the fire around it and started accumulating again. The roof caught fire. Second floor was heavily smoked, but it didn't catch fire. The damage was less than I imagined, but still needs repaiting and new soft furniture.
Couldn't stop reading until 5. Finally got to sleep.
Imagine yourself sleeping, trying to catch that 4 hours of sleep before work.
....
Bamm....
....
....
Bamm....
....
Explosions? At errr ... (looked at the clock) ... 7'oclock ? Something's gotta be wrong!
Half aslept- Closed the window of the sleeping room in an effort to tone down that loud unknown sound. Got up. Walked around the aparment peeking out the windows. Nothing suspicious. What's this murmuring sound? Like water flowing or something... fire? Could be. Got dressed up. ... Hmm the light bulb does not work, the clock does not work, no electricity.
Bamm.... there it goes again. What the hell is going on?
Some panicky voices outside. I couldn't identify the source of it...
Someone knocks at the front door. By the rate and power of knocks I can tell it is important. The person on the other side almost broke the door. Hurried over, opened the door. It was Joga (one of my hosts), panicky.... Trying to tell me something but only being able to speak Icelandic because of the stress. .... Could it be fire upstairs? ... She ran through me to the other end of the appartment trying to open the yard door, which was locked. I helped her there. Valte (the other host) was just running in on the outside of the house. I watched them try to unfold the hose usually used for watering the flowers outside. Valte said there is nothing I can do to help them. Another Bamm.... Khm, when I think of it it does sound like firecrackers. And Icelanders are especially crazy about fireworks.
My hosts didn't manage to extinguish the fire with the silly watering hose. All three of us left the house. The fire brigade came in just a minute later and finished the whole thing like a well-tuned swiss clockwork. No damage to my floor at all. Even no water from fire brigade's work. Only this smoked smell all over the place.
It turns out that Valte bought some new firecrackers just the day before. I don't know how it all started. None of them was injured. But the two floors above were a total mess. Thick black smoke coming out the windows. The roof taken apart. From what I could see both floors upstairs will require a major overhaul.
So that's how my Friday started.
I just finished The Night of the Trifids by Simon Clark in Bulgarian. It is a nice sequel to the classic John Wyndham sci-fi novel.
Now I am reading The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown in English. Extremely nice piece of thriller art.
The political tone these days:
I'd very much like to see Americans come to their minds and not reelect their current monkey president. It is a pity that non-americans are not allowed to sponsor the election campaign. Otherwise I'd spare some bucks for John Kerry
Was it thursday or friday? I think it was thursday.
Woke up, got in the car. Drove for a some 200 meters to dicover a strange sound coming from the front right of the car. It was a flat tyre. Drove to the closest gas station, pumped it in. Drove to the office. Replaced the tyre with a help from a collegue. It's my first time anyway. Later in the day I went to a car repair shop, where the company has an account. They replaced the broken (because of the driving on it) flat spare tyre with a new one.
They said the flat tyre was fatally broken because of me driving on it and showed me the damage.
The outcome of it - never drive on a flat tyre, even for a 100 meters :)
Well, folks, it seems I've been working way too much the last couple of weeks. Not even a single blog entry... :)
News:
Marieta is coming to Iceland on the August 14.
I'm on vacation Sep 4 to Sep 19. I think we will be mostly around Iceland with Marieta.
Bulgaria is playing Iceland on Sep 4. That's here in Iceland. It is quite likely that my father and some family friends will come for the game.
Industria is growing. We are looking for networking people besides all the other stuff. If you understand why generating ICMP unreachables on Cisco 3550s takes central CPU time and if you can reverse undocumented BGP configurations with communities, reflectors and all that jazz, maybe you can fit in the position we need. Anyway, if you feel like beign cluefull in networks, especially MAN/WAN design, qos, security, routing and switching drop me an email at boyan at industria com. I'll give you more details.
Cheers!