Eblo

Roomba and Vonage, Welcome to 2002

So yesterday, feeling flush with freshly deposited State and Federal tax returns, we semi-impulse bought a Roomba. I say "semi-impulse" because we had discussed buying one int he past and had gone back and forth on it several times. Yesterday happened to be the day we both were in the "yes" camp and also had the cash burning a hole in our pocket while we were at Sam's Club.

So after chasing the cat with it a little yesterday, I set it to charge overnight (it recommends a 16 hour charge to start with). I just let it loose in our bedroom and hallway and while at first it didn't look like it was doing much, when it came time to empty the dust bin, it was clear the thing had been working well. It's disgustingly amazing, or amazingly disgusting just how much crud was on the floors. The darned thing even picked up a dime somewhere. And of course it got to places a regular vacuum never would - under the bed, dresser, etc. I got some video of it chasing the cat. That was fun/funny. As dorky as it sounds, we, as a family, sat in the doorway and watched it clean the hall. Emmer was completely enthralled.

I spent about 10 minutes cleaning the brushes, and while doing that I thought, "So, the time you save not pushing a vacuum around is spent cleaning the Roomba?" But really, if done regularly, there won't be as much crud/hair as there was this time. Also, the kit came with handy knife/brush (kind of like one of those letter openers with a protected razor blade) that makes pretty quick work of de-funking the brushes. The kit Sam's sells seems to be a hybrid kit of what you'd order from iRobot.com directly. We got the Sage vac, the yellow battery (I think it's a longer lasting one), the charging home base, one virtual wall, remote, and one replacement filter. It was $200. iRobot has a similar $200 kit, but it swaps the charging base for a second virtual wall. I like the deal we got better. The cool thing is that for $30, we could add the scheduling remote to make the Roomba work while we do. Maybe down the road.

BTW, poking arond the iRobot site, they have two new bots I didn't know about. The first is the Dirt Dog designed as a bit of a shop vac. It supposedly picks up nuts, bolts, sawdust, etc. That might be what we'd need to pick up bunny poop in "The Pet Room." We haven't unleashed the poor Sage bot in there yet to see how it fares. I think Anya will freak ;) The plan in there is to actually run the regular vac first and then run the Roomba regularly after that for upkeep.

The second cool thing I saw on the Roomba site is the iRobot Create (tm) programmable robot. Enough people were hacking the Roomba, I guess iRobot decided to cash in on that. It the same form factor as the Roomba, but it has a 'cargo bay' for controllers, sensors, etc., and I don't think it has the cleaning brushes, etc. Kind of cool.

Anyway, while going through bills yesterday, we noticed we've been getting billed about $85/mo. for our home phone which we use like never. The base package was like $25 and the rest was tax and fee B.S. WTF? So after some research and a few conversations with current Vonage customers, we decided to order Vonage's 500 minute per month plan. Supposedly we get to keep our current phone number. I can't wait to see how that goes. The online access to voicemails (complete with e-mail notification/forwarding if you choose) is pretty nifty. Geekariffic. Unless there are some hidden charges I haven't seen yet, we should save about $60 on our monthly phone bill (a phone we hardly ever use - thanks for the pounding, MCI, but couldn't you at least have kissed us first?).

So now we're all super hip and up-to-date on the technologies that were introduced in 2002. It's funny, we used to access the internet over the phone. Now we'll access our phone via the internet. Heh.

A few random postscripts;

One Minute Howto gives a cool view of my Feedburner stats for my RSS feed. I think I originally got this link from Scott Fletcher's Podcheck Review, although I can not find the originating post right now.

Regarding Twitter (which I mentioned in my last post and a recently recorded, yet to be posted podcast), C.C. Chapman, renowned podcast music enabler, started an interesting discussion on its potential over at his blog, Managing the Gray: Twittering Outside the Box. I'm still not convinced it'll fly, but he's got some pretty cool ideas.

Wow, blogoriffic. I need to edit that podcast now. Before or after I clean the bunny cage?