Now, I'm originally from Michigan, but I've been living in a small town in New Hampshire for the last few years. It was ... bland — in terms of everything, but especially the food. Every restaurant has the same menu, maybe featuring a different spin on some particular dish. But, if you love bar food or paying $35 for someone to heat up a frozen lasagna at an "Italian restaurant" for you, then New Hampshire is calling your name. It wasn't cutting it for me though.

I cannot tell you how excited I am to be in a place where I can choose among Middle Eastern, Mexican, Thai, Italian, Asian, and whatever else you can think of, all on one street.

But, speaking of streets — why is there a 1,000°F temperature differential between the outside air on the streets and the air inside? OK, OK ... maybe I exaggerated a little bit. It's probably more like 100°, but it "feels like" 1,000°.

Everywhere I go in New York, I'm hot. Coming from someone who's always cold, it's strange, for lack of a better word. Before, when I came here as a tourist, I just thought storeowners were really concerned about losing money to cold customers, so they decided to crank up the heat. In my case, I thought, "What a dumb business plan," because I've actually left several places I would have otherwise continued shopping at simply because I was too hot. It's not a business plan though. It's steam heat, or so I've been told.

Now, I understand that water is better at transferring heat than air — about 24 times better, according to the heat transfer coefficients — but, there's simply no way this is efficient HVAC.

My apartment is on the fourth floor. I have two radiators and zero thermostats. There's no thermostat because, you guessed it: There's no way to actually control the temperature. I've had the valves on my radiators set to fully closed since the moment I walked in and almost had a heat stroke. I also keep my windows open 100% of the time. A few of them are missing screens, and, since I have two adorable cats, I can only leave them cracked a bit. But, as soon as the chaos of moving settles down a bit, I will have screens made, and those windows will stay open. Looking at my building from the street, I can see that most of my fellow building tenants just use their window air conditioner units year-round.

So much for reducing my carbon footprint by using public transportation instead of a car, I'm literally blowing greenhouse gas emissions out of my window 24 hours a day.

I'm all for new, fancy technologies, but the built environment is not made up of the latest and greatest equipment that we see at tradeshows and greenfield construction sites. We're still using the old technologies, so can't we find some way to make them better?