I was in a Starbucks in downtown Seattle today and they were playing their usual music track when something terrible happened. They played an elevator music version of "Smells Like Teen Spirit." That is just wrong on so many levels. First of all, grunge made into elevator music is just not right. This implies that it is old music and I am not old. No no no. Not only that, but "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is basically the grunge anthem. Angry, angst filled young people sang it at the top of their lungs - and now it is elevator music? The blasphemy part is that a Seattle company - Starbucks - was playing this travesty, in a Seattle espresso shop, just a few blocks from where the band played some of its first shows. A Seattle music movement, a Seattle band, and a Seattle coffee shop playing an elevator music disaster. If I was in a grocery store in another state, for example, I would have just been saying that the song was wrong. For Starbucks, of all companies, to have that song on its play list should be against the law.
For Christmas my wife gave me a Netatmo weather station because I am a home weather station nerd. The Netatmo is very cool, but it has an unexpected feature: it measures indoor Carbon Dioxide (CO2) levels. As soon as I set it up, the Netatmo began to alert that our indoor CO2 was at an unsafe level. The notes said that outdoor CO2 is usually around 400 ppm, and numbers above 1500 ppm could be unhealthy. On that first day, my house was at around 1300 ppm. Prior to that, I never gave indoor CO2 levels a thought. I began to do some research and discovered high levels of CO2 can cause symptoms such as fatigue, headache, breathing difficulties, strained eyes and itchy skin. My family does have all of these issues, especially on the weekends when we are home all day, but I never connected that to indoor air quality. Previously, I installed a Nest thermostat . The Nest is very smart and saves energy by learning your habits and programming itself. Unfortunately, it is so efficient, that t
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