Herbie, my new roommate...

Life with Herbie, I'm now sharing my apartment with a guy 4" tall and 13" in diameter:

Furby and Herbie the Roomba

OK, I'm not the best house keeper and I inherited my Mom's tendency to pile stuff up, but I never really liked vacuuming the floors. It's boring, repetitive, and, well, messy. What I want is a robotic maid.

Not a real person, I'm kinda private person, but some... thing that could clean my place up.

Then came the first robot vacuums: pricey, cumbersome, and ugly. They ranged from the slick looking Trilobite to the ugly Minolta. They all started at $1000 and up in price and were big and heavy. Check out the line up at: http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/talks/Extras/vacs.2001.html

Then I saw the Roomba. Small, cute, and above all, cheap. For $200 bucks you can pick up a piece of technology that is the first step to having Rosie the Robot clean your house.

I even had a name for my Roomba before I bought him: Herbie.

That's destiny, to have a name for an inanimate object even before you've purchased one. I went into Brookstone at my local mall and picked him up within a few days of finding out that they existed. The sales person at Brookstone didn't even have to sell me on the Roomba, I was already hooked.

He told me that the Roombas were flying off the shelves and they were the hottest selling items he'd ever seen.

So I forked over $200 plus tax and had my Herbie.

I couldn't use him the first day, he wasn't charged, nor had I Roomba-fied my apartment. To make your place Roomba proof, you have to get cables off the floor, you have to either rollup your floor rugs with tassels or fold the tassels under the rug. I've found out that Herbie can high center himself on my throw rugs, so I either shove them against the wall or roll them up and use them as bumpers. My cable runs can high center him too, but... and this is the sweet bit, Herbie can un-high center himself if he still has one wheel on the ground.

Having had Herbie now for nearly a month, my floors are as clean as they could be.

To find out more about Roombas, check out the horse's mouth: http://www.roombavac.com/index.htm