Roomba

I love my Roomba!

For those that don't know, a Roomba is a robotic vacuum. It's about 15" in diameter and 2" in height. It is programmed to vacuum up your rooms according to a random pattern. It bounces off, as well as follows walls and furniture, it is low enough to go under your couch (when was the last time you vacuumed there?) and when the battery runs low (about 2 hours), it finds its charging station and docks itself.

Whenever I run it I find myself watching (yes, I lead a boring life!). Tonight, while I was playing John Woo's Stranglehold (a way cool game that never got the buzz it should have gotten), I fired it up. The Roomba was to clean the front room and, connected by a 3 ' hallway, the den (where I was). I noticed a small piece of popcorn on the rug about 3 feet from me and as the Roomba was doing it's thing, I realized that the popcorn was still there. An hour passed and the Roomba had spent a while going back and forth but it still hadn't gotten the popcorn. At least 4 times it came within 2" of it but missed it everytime.

Being a computer programmer, I felt smug as I thought their algorithm needed a bit of work :). I even called in Colin, my son, who loves the idea that we have an actual robot, to point out that it had missed the popcorn a few times. We had a good laugh and I pointed out that while the Roomba was great, it cannot replace a human quite yet. With that, Colin went to bed.

Less than 15 minutes later the Roomba proved me a liar and finally wandered over to get that popcorn. Being the geek Dad that I am, I went and woke Colin up to tell him....

Now I just need a dust robot, dish robot and sex robot. backspace backspace backspace backspace backspace backspace backspace backspace backspace backspace .FUCK, it doesn't delete!

Oh shit, what's up with this damn editor....just ignore that last bit....okay?