Place: Quizno's
Lunch: Mesquite Chicken w/Bacon (no tomato), chili, Pepsi
Quizno's has posters up promoting their new "Italian Classics" line. This includes the new Spicy Sausage sandwich and a "new recipe" Italian Meatball. What's not on the poster? The Classic Italian, which was once Quizno's best seller (before the Mesquite Chicken came along). Seriously...why would you NOT put the Classic Italian on the Italian Classics poster? Give the REAL classic a little love, Quizno's.
It's a good chili day, even if it isn't nearly as cold as it has been earlier in the week when we were significantly below zero even before the wind chill. Still, it's been single digits and teens at best. Not a good time for the heat in my house to quit. But that's what happened Tuesday night.
I have a Nest thermostat. Have since they came out two years ago. I love the thing. It looks cool, it lights up to clearly show you the current temperature and settings when you walk by it, it does all sorts of tricks (especially with the A/C) that have clearly lowered my electric bill (I'm all electric, no gas), and it can be controlled and monitored on smart devices via an app. And Nest keeps it up to date with firmware updates that automatically download and apply. It's smart. But it was not so smart of Nest to dump a bad firmware update into the thing on one of the coldest nights of the year, effectively rendering it useless, and making it impossible for the furnace to kick on.
This didn't just happen to me. It happened to a lot of people. Social media confirms this, even if Nest is pretending like nothing's wrong, and their insane support volume is, in their words, due to new customers that got Nest products over the Christmas holiday.
Nest is in denial.
Anyway, unable to get my Nest troubleshooted and fixed, I picked up an old timey rotary dial Honeywell thermostat, spent fifteen minutes installing it, and had heat again. No big deal. But I really love the Nest and would like it working again.
Doesn't stop there.
My upstairs toilet needs a new flush valve. The tank is draining water into the bowl like it's constantly running. So I shut off the water to it to stop the running until I get around to the repair job, which involves removing the tank. Seems like a lot of effort, and my downstairs toilet works fine, so I'm really being lazy about it.
Doesn't stop there.
My work laptop hard drive blew up a couple of weeks ago. Managed to back up my files and nothing was lost, but the drive was damaged enough that IT couldn't do a full backup and restoral. The OS and programs had to be re-loaded. So I'm going through the phase of re-adding and re-configuring stuff I forgot about in the initial build. It's going okay, though. And the new drive is a solid state drive, so the machine works much faster than before and should be more reliable.
Doesn't stop there.
My home PC stopped going to sleep. Even if I put it to sleep manually, it wakes right back up like ten seconds later. It never did that before. So I put a login password on it and even disconnected it from the network for awhile to make sure nobody was hacking in. Didn't help. Even if I manually put it to sleep, which requires the login to fire it back up, it fires back up anyway. Skips the password. So I started shutting it down completely when I'm not using it. And maybe I forgot to shut it down yesterday, but I'm pretty sure I did, and it was ON AGAIN WHEN I GOT HOME.
So I made sure I shut it off this morning. If it's on again when I get home tonight, I'm calling the Ghost Hunters people.
I suspect the new 2014 antivirus software is causing this. That's the only change I've made to the machine in forever.
So please, stuff. Stop breaking.
Let my life be boring again.
