I do it for the toys:
OK, it’s not like they gave me a robot vacuum cleaner because of the blog, but I spent some of the money I got paid for blogging on this. It helped that there was a talk by Colin Angle of iRobot on campus a while back, talking about the history of the company, as part of the dedication of a new robotics lab in the CS department. He was an excellent speaker and a fairly charming guy, and more importantly, he handed out a bunch of 20% off coupons to people after the talk…
There are a bunch of justifications for buying this: Kate and I both hate doing housework, I have allergy problems that might be dust-related, etc. But, really, I’m just geeky enough to think it’s really cool to own a cleaning robot…
As for the picture, it’s sort of fascinating to watch the random pattern it follows while cleaning– it spent what seemed like an inordinate amount of time noodling around on one side of the living room, making us wonder if it would ever get to the kitchen, but it did eventually wander over there. It seems to have done a good job, and gotten all the rooms (we went out to dinner while it was still cleaning). Kate’s really tempted to scatter baking soda all around the house, to see if it really does get everywhere, but we’re trying to resist.
The Queen of Niskayuna found the whole thing a little disconcerting, but didn’t freak out completely. She mostly gave it as wide a berth as possible (as you can see), but there wasn’t any barking, which is good.