Tuesday, December 4th, 2007...8:20 pm
Car Fire
So I haven’t blogged in a while. Not for lack of subjects. My TiVo died. We got a great new camera. I flew to Ohio for $10 each way. I ran over my cell phone, but it still works except for the screen. I helped release some pretty interesting software. I’m looking at the Zimbra plugin for Evolution. Our 6 month old is still not sleeping through the night. Our 4 year old is teaching himself to read. Amy is working again.
None of those things were actually enough to make me blog, for some reason. But finally something got my attention.
We hired a baby sitter take care of Josh, the above mentioned 6 month old since Amy and I are both working. She’s very nice and arrives on time, and seems great with both boys. But today she was late. On a whim, I looked out the window and saw her car trying to get up our 100 foot driveway. (Which is icy and snow covered even through our neighbor spent a ton of time clearing it after the snowstorm — which I also didn’t blog about.)
I threw on clothes and ran outside to get her salt so her car could get up the driveway, but she met me at the door.
“My car is on fire!”
Well, it really was. Lots of smoke — both white and black. Flames. Melting things.
I called the fire department. I got everyone out of the house. The fire trucks arrived 2 minutes later.
The car didn’t explode.
I didn’t think to get pictures until the car was towed away. I’m not sure why.
6 Comments
December 4th, 2007 at 9:32 pm
Ben,
I’m working on getting the Zimbra plugin in shape as much as possible. I have an updated version of the plugin on my laptop. Please let me know if you want me to send it over.
December 4th, 2007 at 10:34 pm
Hi,
cars explode only in films. You need some kind of explosive for that. Gas doesn’t cut it. There’s a video about it: http://medien.wdr.de/m/1173211200/quarks/qc_20070306.mp4 . At about 37:30 they try to explode a car.
Markus
December 5th, 2007 at 3:10 pm
Emil,
I’m not sure how I feel about the Zimbra Evolution Connector right now. Maybe that’s not true, but probably I should just blog about it. What updates do you have? I have a patch for an obvious segfault and a patch to make it compile against later versions of Evolution. I’d be interested in anything you’ve got right now.
But I’ve found two repos with the connector already, but none with recent commits. One repo I found showed the license as being totally public domain — a little scary.
The project needs a single home, and probably a development lead. Then it needs a few people to care about it.
December 5th, 2007 at 3:15 pm
Markus,
So I’m not sure you’re correct. Gasoline can indeed fuel an explosion. Today’s Boston news tells the story better than I can: http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2007/12/a_fiery_river_o.html
As for whether this means a car can explode? I don’t think it would be a huge explosion like the one above… But you have a flammable material contained in a small rigid space — that sounds like something that can explode. And, in fact, a simple web search turns up this: http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/show_story.php?id=6428
I believe that something like that could have caused damage to the house and people standing around it — if only when the windows blow out.
December 5th, 2007 at 4:39 pm
Ben,
The canonical location of the project is at http://www.sf.net/projects/zimbraevo and the license is listed as being either “public domain” or the LGPL reading this post on the Zimbra forum (http://www.zimbra.com/forums/evolution-connector/12857-evolution-connector-changes.html)
The changes I’ve made to the source have been mostly fixes for compile time warnings, a segfault for x86_64 machines, and code style fixes.
Also, I’m not too happy with the Connector source being up at Sourceforge. I would like to move it under the Evolution plugins directory in the GNOME SVN.
December 6th, 2007 at 4:31 am
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