A few random things:

I hate Quiznos
I’ve never really liked Quiznos. They always seem to do something weird to the sandwiches and I end up regretting going there. Last week I went to Quiznos and found out they were giving away 1 million free subs. Hooray! I want back and filled out the form, giving them all my valuable data, and printed out my form.

Yesterday, seeing it expired that day I went back to get my free sub. It was a cold day and Quiznos is a bit further than our usual lunch places, but I went anyway, alone. I got there, the sandwich lady yelled at me for my order (which she always does) and then told me they didn’t take the free sub coupons anymore because they were no longer a “participating location”. So you can be a participating location one day and not the next? I paid for my sub, feeling duped.

Congratulations Quiznos, your brilliant promotional plan failed. I used to have only a mild dislike for your stores. Now I hate you and will never go back.

But it’s a dry heat
We’ve been looking at getting a humidification system installed in our house. After months of heating, the wood floors are separating, the paint is cracking and the static is enough to make one spontaneously combust.

You would think that in this economy, heating and cooling installers would be desperate to get our business. We’ve had four companies come to the house and in a week, only one has bothered to get back to us with an estimate, and he did it right there.

Even more disturbing is that none of them seem to agree on what we need. Some say we need multiple units, others say one. I know nothing about humidifier systems and I have no idea who to trust. Sigh.

UPnP is a PITA
I’ve spent way too many hours recently trying to set up my parents’ Slingbox. It worked fine inside their network, but you could not get to it from the outside, despite the setup assistant saying it was working. Through some strange series of reboots, I was able to get it to work, but not in any deterministic way.

What I was relying on was Universal Plug and Play (UPnP), which is a system by which the Slingbox can tell the router “Hey, let anybody on the outside talk to me if they talk on these channels.” What seemed to be happening is that UPnP is not persistent and the router would forget that it was supposed to let outside machines talk to the Slingbox. The solution? Don’t use UPnP. I set the Slingbox to use a static IP and set the router to forward port 5001 to it. Works beautifully.