Well, our Roomba experienced it's first failure (besides the replacement of the battery, which I consider to be a maintenance item). It seems that the bushing for the counter-rotating brush has loosened and no longer keeps the brush engaged to its drive gear. At least that's what appears to be the problem. If it turns out to be more, I'll be performing an autopsy of the thing to see how it all works (a sort-of silver lining), and go out an get a new one. I can use the new battery still, as well as the virtual wall unit. Still, it's a little dissapointing. Boo Hoo.

My oldest daughter calls the Roomba's virtual wall unit "Roomba's little helper". When we run our Roomba at night, I always tell her "don't forget Roomba's little helper," and she goes to turn on the virtual wall unit to keep the thing from getting stuck on the threshold between our front hall and kitchen (iRobot says it should be able to clear the threshold, but it *always* seems to get stuck trying to traverse the threshold at an angle).

We've been running our roomba (almost) every night for the past 8 months, and finally need to change the 2 D-cell batteries.

The Roomba battery pack itself is now starting to show signs of age, after an estimated 200+ hours of operation (and at least that many recharge cycles).

Well, I'm officially an oldguy (tm). It's funny, but I don't feel much different from when I was 12 (my wife thinks I still act that way, too).

So what cool geek stuff did my thoughtful wife get me, you might ask?

For one: Ducti Super Duct Tape Tri-fold wallet

Merry Christmas everyone. My wife got me a vacume cleaner for Christmas -- a Roomba robovac from iRobot. It's the coolest thing, and it even does a good job of cleaning our hardwood floors! I just wonder if anyone has hacked this thing yet.

I started playing around witht the festival speech synthesis package. Really cool and it runs great on my Powermac under YellowDog Linux 2.3. Cool. Now All I have to do is figure out how to get the speech to sound close to HAL, and to pipe it throughout my house!

This Friend/Foe thing is pretty cool. I just added Discoflamingo13 as a friend just because he has a Ti Powerbook running Gentoo Linux. Now that's pretty cool.

I'm sure the dynamics of this F/F stuff is worthy of a paper in IEEE's System, Man, and Cybernetics jounal, but with a 2-week-old daughter (and a 2 1/2 year-old daughter!), who has time?
 

Hey, what's this? A journal? A blog? neato.