Our Roomba is currently going to town in the dining room. We had used it in the hall as a test the other day, and today we actually got around to picking all the stuff up to allow it to do some real rooms. It did a darn fine job in our living room/family room area. The only bit of concern was when the strings on an area rug got wrapped up in the beaters. We had to trim all the strings on all four corners to make sure it didn't happen again and the one corner is in pretty rough shape (it was before this, but getting attacked by a robot didn't help it at all.) Other than that incident, it did as good a job at getting the floors clean as I could have expected. We've got a little bit of a learning curve about things like where to place the IR emitter "virtual walls" and such, but I think this experiment is a success. uring the thick of 98-99. an effort to read them. See previous comments about retiring young. automation system I built for WREK, the scripts I have that automatically download the WREK programs I want from the MP3 archive, these are all my halting attempts to make the robots work for me. I want to put this stuff in my service, not because I think it is cool or sci-fi stuff but because I have all this power at my fingertips and I want it to make things easier in my life. Even when the tasks are not supremely important, like finding things I want in Usenet groups automatically, if the robots do them for me and well, that's more of my time I can devote elsewhere. I'm all about maximizing my throughput.

And as a side note, there's a web page about the WREK systems we built. I think I get a little shafted on here, because the bullet point structure kind of gives equal weighting to us - three guys did four bullet points. In reality, although Jim Evans work was hugely important and without it nothing could have happened, it was a fraction of the actual hours I spent. If I had billed them at the rate I get when I contract, my work of summer 2001 would have cost them $30,000 and over the whole project more than $60,0000. This is not whinging or diminishing the important efforts of everyone else, just pointing out that the simple representation of tasks hides a lot of complexity. The one line description "Automation music sequencer/scheduler logic" includes hundreds of hours of programming, debugging and testing time. Not even included are the other hundreds of hours I spent in a production studio, digitizing music, doing voiceovers and doing every bit of the work to make the full integrated system work. I'm happy that I did it, and the station sounds great and is in much better shape for it, but when I think about other things I could have done with that time, I shudder. I could have got my own startup rolling with that kind of effort! Oh well, no one twisted my arm. It's on my resume, and deservedly so.