Roomba

Because Laura's the best girlfriend ever, she got me a Roomba for Christmas. It took a while to get here, and I wanted to test it for a while before writing a glowing review.

In short, the Roomba sucks.

And that's exactly what it's supposed to do. It sucks without my intervention, except a few times when it got stuck or trapped, and it does a damn fine job of sucking. It sucks up cat hair, cat litter, cat feces, cat barf, cat dandruff, and all the other various parts of cat that are strewn around my house. It sucks up sand-dune sized litter drifts without a complaint, and it sweeps up the gnawed corpses of toilet paper rolls left by the dog. It handles 2/3 of the floorspace of my house in about an hour, and has some battery charge left over.

The main reason the Roomba is so cool, so utterly awesome, is the fact that with a slight amount of prepwork -- no more than what I'd do if I were going to vacuum with a regular vac -- I can turn it on, let it start vacuuming, and then I can go do something else.

In all fairness, the downsides are: the Roomba ain't smart. I've had cellphones with more brains. It probably doesn't need to be very smart anyway, but it could stand to have a little more in the "how do I get out from under this chair" department. It also gets very dirty, what with all the cat chunks it's sweeping up.

You'll notice in the picture that I added NOS to my Roomba. Actually, it's just a sticker, but stickers seem to fool most of the kids here in Atlanta. My NOS sticker decreases cleaning time by a full 50%.

Once I add the aluminum-and-cardboard spoiler, the neon undercarriage lights, and the racing stripes, my Roomba should be able to clean my whole house in fifteen seconds.