I’m home…unpacking and sizing things up around the house after having been away for just over three weeks.  The first thing I notice is that one of my detector alarms is chirping at me that it needs a new battery.  So I have to walk around the house and figure out which one is hungry.  I’ve got five detectors here at Casa del Garrett…three smoke detectors, one for each floor, and two carbon monoxide detectors, which come in handy now and then.  Problem is when the damn things get hungry for a new battery they just emit these short little chirps every minute or so and in this house you practically have to be standing right next to it to know which one it is. 

I check the house thermostat.  The new heating and cooling system thermostat has a ‘vacation’ mode for when there’s nobody home.  It won’t let it get so cold the pipes freeze or so hot that things start to melt inside, but it lets things get way out of the comfort zone to save on the energy bill.  It’s still on Vacation mode when I check it.  The house is a bit warm, but not stifling.  I turn vacation mode off, because the forecast today is for brutal heat here in Baltimore.

After a morning on the road, I want to wash up.  I turned off the water to Casa del Garrett before I left, and shut off the hot water heater.  So before I start unloading the car I go down to the basement, open the tap at the utility sink, go to the main water valve and turn it on, then go back to the sink, make sure the air gets out of the pipes and then close it.  No I have to fire up the hot water heater and let it come up to temperature.  I figure while it’s heating up I can unload the car and figure out which detector is hungry for a new battery.  But my first few tries at getting the new hot water heater going fail.  This new one has an electric igniter and after several tries it still isn’t lighting the pilot.  Oh great…

I plug the UPS feeding Bagheera, my art room G5 tower, back in, but I don’t fire up Bagheera just yet.  I want to get Mowgli, my main household network workstation going first. I go upstairs, plug in and power up Mowgli’s UPS, and then hit the bathroom for a bit and wash my hands…with cold water.  All this time I’m listening to hear which detector is chirping as I walk around the house and so far I still can’t tell which one it is.  I try to fire up Mowgli.  When I hit Mowgli’s power switch nothing happens.  Oh great…

So with my luggage still in the car within minutes of getting home I’m debugging a hardware failure.  Welcome Home Bruce!  Eventually I get it narrowed down to my keyboard cable.  Somehow it got loose in the keyboard socket, perhaps because of the temperature swings in the house while the air conditioning system was in vacation mode.  The upstairs part of the house gets it worse in the summer.  I reseated the cable in its socket and Mowgli booted up without trouble.  Here’s a tip for all you other geeks out there: leave enough slack in your computer cabling so you can pull it out of wherever you have it tucked away…under a desk or wherever…and open it up with everything still plugged in.  Makes checking out problems easier.

Eventually I got Mowgli up and running.  I figured out it was the bedroom carbon monoxide detector that was hungry and fed it some new batteries.  I got the hot water heater going after several tries.  I got Bagheera up and running and downloading the software updates that came out while I was on the road.  After it’s done with that I’ll plug in the iPhone and get the new firmware update. 

It used to be I just unpacked when I got home.  Now I have to restart the house.  Perhaps the home of the future will just have a reset switch or something.