We’ve spent an interesting month with our new Roomba Scheduler. The role it fills is a “between-vacuuming” cleanup.

It works really well on carpets. It gets pretty much every spot that it can reach, and its small, round shape lets it get a lot of spots.

How it works on tile is a different matter altogether. I don’t know if it’s because our kitchen tile is a dark color, but we’ve found that it missed pretty much all the dirt along the edges of the kitchen, and a fair bit in the middle too. I guess the Scooba is designed to excel at this part of the cleaning, but it would be nice if Roomba had better support for cleaning smooth surfaces.

It’s been good at keeping out of trouble so far. You pretty much have to pick up any rugs or mats that Roomba might encounter. I believe they claim that Roomba will just seamlessly transition over these rugs, but most of the time you’ll find it pulling the rugs over themselves and occasionally getting caught. The net result of this is us spending roughly five minutes before each Roomba run picking everything up.

For a “between-vacuuming” device, the Roomba certainly helps out a lot. The carpets look nice and clean after it finishes and there isn’t half as much stuff on them when it comes time to do the real vacuum.

We haven’t used the scheduling functionality yet because between the two of us we are home pretty much all the time. It’s easier to start it as you are heading out or run it while you are home.

For a gadget nut, this is a perfect device!

Saw V for Vendetta for the second time. Bought it this time.

It has the same mood that the original Matrix movie had. Recommended!

The intention of the plot is certainly obvious and the message of control by fear isn’t obfuscated.

This, of course, reminds me of the nagging question: why is there a “green” on the colour-coded terror alert if they are never going to use it?

I’ve been a little slack lately on the blog posting, most likely baby-related.

In case you weren’t keeping track, Everett is five months old now. He’s doing well, but seems only to be able to roll to the left. I suppose that’s pretty amazing considering that the two halves of his brain have only had a few months to become acquainted with each other. ;)

Here is a comprehensive list of argument fallacies.

I haven’t studied this stuff since I accidentally took an argumentative logic class instead of a boolean logic class back in university and I don’t think people will ever learn what begging the question really means. ;)

On a somewhat related note, I serendipitously came across an interesting new word while browsing some of the other pages on infidels.org: solipsism. After a bit of Googling, I came across this gem of a joke attached to a random slashdot post (spelling mistakes reproduced for authenticity):

A professor is teaching a philosophy course, and he explains to his class solopism, the theroy that reality is a creation in ones mind. After the lecture, several students rush up and introduce themselves to the professor and explain that the theroy was really intune with how they felt and its really opened their minds and they just wanted to tell him in person how the felt about his lecture … to this the professor replies “Thats wonderfull, so rarely does one solipsist meet another.”

While I find it interesting that somebody has coined a word for the concept, I find this quote from the Wikipedia entry to be somewhat relevant:

Some philosophers hold the viewpoint that solipsism is entirely empty and without content. Like a ‘faith’ argument, it seems sterile, i.e., allows no further argument, nor can it be falsified. The world remains absolutely the same—- so where could a solipsist go from there?

It has about as much potential as the thought experiment that involves imagining what would be if the universe didn’t exist. I find that the latter usually ends up with a popping sensation in my brain and my eyes watering. ;)

</ streamofconsciousness>

No, I’m not dead. Having a baby just sucks the energy out of you to do anything besides looking after the baby. ;)

In other news, Everett was born on March 1 and he’s getting pretty big now!

eInk is offering a development kit for its new active matrix electronic paper prototype. For only $3000, you can build yourself an e-book reader with their Linux-based evaluation board.

I think I’ll bite when this drops below $300.

I’ve decided to take the plunge and switch RSS readers. I was using SharpReader at work under Windows and Liferea at home under Linux. Neither reader met my needs very well. I found that SharpReader was a big memory hog and suffered from the general heaviness of most client-side .NET applications. Liferea at home was fast and supported the page-per-blog model, but it was somewhat crashy.

Starting today, I’m using the Sage RSS Reader at home and work for my RSS reading. It’s a firefox plugin, so I can use Adblock to block those annoying feedburner ads in some of the feeds that I read.

Sage is very fast and the integration with Firefox is a big plus for me. I enjoy having tabbed browsing available with the feed items (something not available in SharpReader). Another plus is that it stores the RSS feed list in my bookmarks list, allowing me to use an extension like Syncmarks to keep my feed list synchronized between work and home.

There’s an active wiki for the Sage community where you can find stylesheets for your feed list and GreaseMonkey scripts. Who would have thought that you could use Greasemonkey scripts in your RSS reader?