Year of the House

Our friend Dave recently wrote a thorough blog post comparing the iRobot Roomba to the Electrolux Trilobite. Now, I find new technology pretty darned fun, so I've been intrigued by these robot floor cleaners since they came out. Dave lent us a Roomba, and last night, we fired it up.

The main floor of the house is mostly open plan, with medium pile carpet in the living room and hallway, sheet vinyl in the kitchen (NOT FOR LONG!!), and Pergo in the dining room. I was really only interested to see what kind of job it would do on the carpet, so we set up virtual walls and let the thing go to town.

What I didn't expect was that Reggie, the cat, started wigging out! I, being at heart a dog person, never really know what to expect out of our little Queen Kitty. I figured Rufus would just want to play with it for a while, maybe posture and bark at it a little, and then ignore it. But I never expected a skeerdy cat!

I recounted these events to my colleague Carole, who explained, "The Roomba is her size, but it doesn't smell like a cat, it doesn't sniff her butt, and it makes scary sounds and moves without apparent human intervention. It is a MONSTER."

Come to think of it, under the whining noise, it did kinda sound like it was mewing, "BRAAAAANES."

So, how well does the Roomba work? Eh. Too soon to really tell. We didn't let it run for a full hour, or on Max, or whatever. We just let it putz around for a while. It kinda picked up some specks on the floor. It left probably half of them. Had we let the Roomba run around longer, it probably would have cleaned more and more specks asymptotically, until the carpet did look as though it had actually been vacuumed.

We also had no end of obstacles in the room -- the movers came and things were in places they didn't belong, so there were quite a few fits and starts. On the regular cleaning cycle, the Roomba actually did a pretty good navigating around, with random but effective error correction. But in Spot mode, when it encountered something it wasn't expecting, it just sort of gave up after two or three tries.

We'll keep trying the Roomba, much to Reggie's chagrin, and give it a chance to show its true colors. If nothing else, it's good motivation to put away some 'obstacles'.

Posted by Kerri at 11:03 AM | Permalink

On our first dating anniversary, we got for each other, independently and without any sort of cross-consultation at all, wedding bands. They didn't match (it would have been eerie if they had), but that doesn't matter - we both wore them as symbols of our willingness to consider our relationship a permanent one, whether or not we elected to undertake the associated legal processes.

We had on occasion talked about getting married, and having both previously done it for the wrong reasons, we knew that this time we'd be doing it for all of the right reasons. But for us it wasn't a priority - labels aren't important, all that's important is how we feel about each other, and if those feelings are such that we are together for the rest of our lives, then a piece of paper that says we're married isn't going to make a difference. And if we aren't going to be together for the rest of our lives, the piece of paper won't make a difference there, either.

For our second anniversary (or twenty-fourth monthiversary, if you want it to sound a little more impressive), after much thought about what to get K. as a gift, I decided that the time was right to broach the topic of buying her a ring — not because I thought she wouldn't like the idea, but because it's an object that she will be wearing for the rest of our lives together, and so it makes a lot of sense to pick out something that she would like.

So, over dinner at Café Nuovo, I brought up the idea, and she was strongly in favor. On the spur of the moment, we decided to go diamond shopping at the mall, just to see what was out there. Unfortunately (fortunately?) the only jeweler we cared to look at didn't have any Asscher-cut stones (the only cut in which K. was really interested).

In the truest spirit of our relationship, we continued the search on line - sitting in the living room, she on her G5, I on my MacBook, we looked at diamonds and settings on Blue Nile. We found a stone we both liked (again, independently and almost simultaneously), K found a setting she liked (a decision that I left in her capable hands), and we were off to the races.

The ring was due to arrive this morning, and in fact it did — but not before we had fun employing the FedEx tracking system for our spectatorial amusement. When it arrived, I promptly unpacked it, took a picture, and sent it to her. Then I proposed bringing it up to her office, so that she could wear it to a big project presentation that she had to attend about two hours hence. The response from the other end?

"*Thud*"

So off I went.

This worked out great - ring applied, requisite oohing and ahhing from the colleagues, then we decided to escape for an early dinner — at Ten, a place that she'd taken me for my birthday and which we both liked. It was early, so we were the only ones in the place. Since I hadn't done it before, I "officially" asked her to marry me, and she said yes!

So then we finished dinner, and headed down to her folks' place, because it seemed like a good idea to get permission from her stepdad, what with him being a really good shot and all. Mom and stepdad both seemed happy with the concept of having me as a son-in-law, which hopefully will continue to be the case after the darts wear off.

So, we're gettin' married! No, we haven't set a date. But we will — just as soon as everything else settles down. We are agreed that we don't want to feed the wedding cartel, or make a spectacle out of ourselves in the process of getting married; and if the planning and execution stops being fun, we'll punt, go down to the town hall, dig up a couple of witnesses, and just do it. We can throw a party whenever we want.

p.s: picture here.

Posted by Rich Siegel at 10:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

So, Verizon came by on Monday to install FIOS. Although the nominal throughput is the same as that offered by the cable company, the latency seems a lot lower, and packets spend a lot less time rattling around the ISP's internal network, with the result that doing Internet stuff with FIOS feels a lot faster than it did over cable.

At the same time, we took advantage of the opportunity to do more cleaning and organizing in the basement - we had to, really, so that the Verizon tech could get into the corner of the basement where the wiring came into the house. We made a lot of good progress there, though there's still plenty to do.

Finally, the home networking setup is a lot saner. Previously, my (downstairs) office used a pair of Airport Extreme base stations connected by WDS to get to the Internet uplink (previously, the cable modem in the upstairs living room). This had a number of problems, in-house bandwidth being one of them, and a hostile 2.4GHz environment being another. For example, I was unable to use my Bluetooth earpiece in the house, because (as Glenn Fleishman so helpfully explained) Bluetooth 1.1 doesn't frequency-hop around the part of the spectrum used by Wi-Fi, with disastrous results for both, in the case of an access point and a Bluetooth pair in, say, the same room.

So, another project that was undertaken in advance of the FIOS install was to pull an Ethernet cable from the living room down to the basement. The placement was fortuitous; the corner in which everything happens is the same in both rooms, so it was a simple vertical drop. My future father in law did most of the hard work while I assisted, then I terminated both ends of the wire in a socket and wall plate. (I used the Leviton QuickPort connectors and wall plates, and they worked great.) So, now there's a high-speed (1Gbps) link from downstairs to upstairs. (In retrospect, I should have pulled multiple wires since that would have afforded more flexibility in the future, but if I feel ambitious I should be able to do that at my future convenience — and when the addition goes in, it'll probably happen anyway.)

A 5-port Netgear gigabit switch next to the router provides switching isolation for the internal LAN, so that gigabit devices don't get bottlenecked by the router's own switch (which is 100mbps). Another 5-port gigabit switch in my office is connected to the main switch, as is a 100mbps switch for the various networked printers, and upstairs an 8-port Netgear gigabit switch provides switching isolation for the machines upstairs, including the Airport Extreme base station which serves the wireless devices in the house. (And yes, even with all those switches, the network topology is much simpler than it was before the wiring was done.)

The upshot is that all of the fast machines on the wired LAN can talk to each other at full speed, regardless of whether they're upstairs or downstairs. The SqueezeBox in the living room no longer bogs down the LAN by saturating the wireless network. And I get to use my BlueTooth earpiece again — as long as I'm not sitting next to the AirPort Extreme in the living room...

Posted by Rich Siegel at 09:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So, it's been a little more than three weeks since Reggie joined us, and things are great. She's mellow, sociable, fun — in short, all of the great things you look for in a cat.

It turns out that she's a lot older than anyone suspected. The shelter thought "five, maybe six", but of course they didn't even get her sex right, so what do they know? The vet knew that wasn't right just by inspecting her teeth and tummy wattle, and suspected seven or eight (but of course it's hard to pin down an exact age by inspection).

I was able to get hold of her previous vet, and it turns out that she was born in June, 1995. That's right — our little friend will turn eleven next month. This doesn't change anything as far as we're all concerned, all it means is that we'll have less time with her than we had thought previously. It'll be a good time, though — she gets around like a cat half her age, and when she plays, she plays like a kitten. And the man in the cat detector van was rather put out, because her purr overloaded his gear. Such is life.

Posted by Rich Siegel at 08:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

OK, just because we haven't posted in a while doesn't mean lots hasn't been going on. We celebrated our second anniversary last weekend, and this weekend we spent a bunch of time in the basement again -- and made real progress. The FIOS people are coming tomorrow, so we needed to make sure there was plenty of room for them to navigate. So more junk's been sorted and is getting pitched, boxes and winter wheels have been stored under the stairs, and there's going to be a dump run on Tuesday.

Also, we've been taking lots of pictures with Rich's new camera. (Yes, it is HIS. I know this!) Of course, cat pictures. :-)

Make sure you zoom in on this.

Posted by Kerri at 09:07 AM | Permalink