The Doppler Effect

Today, which turned out to be an historic day in America, with the election of the first African-American President, Barack Obama, is less significantly the day that my house got listed for sale. Today, I can quit crossing my fingers for Mr. Obama, and keep them crossed for change. Change of residence, in my case. In case you're interested, the MLS# is 6259301, though as of the time of this writing, it doesn't seem to have propagated to any of the real estate sites that I frequent.

Two weekends ago on a Saturday, I was returning home from errands when I decided it was too nice a day to go straight home. In pondering where I'd like to drive, I decided that I'd head out east on MLK to check out this new neighborhood development people have been telling me about. It's called "Nine-Sixty-Nine", after the state farm-to-market road it's near. I've also heard it called "Agave."

( I wasn't planning on buying a house. I just wanted to see what everyone was excited about. )

But who knows, if pieces keep falling into place, maybe I'll be moving soon.

I've always hated mopping, so today I broke down and bought an iRobot Scooba 5900, which is the floor-mopping sibling of their popular Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner. I'd read up on it extensively on the internet, and saw mostly positive reviews. There were a few negative reviews, too, including some who thought the thing was worthless. Nevertheless, I decided it was worth a try; if it sucks, I'll get my money back, hopefully.

We hadn't mopped in over a month, and we have two dirty dogs and it's been raining recently, so the buildup of gunk on our dining room floor was pretty bad. I moved the dining table and chairs to other parts of the house, and kicked the dogs out and put their bedclothes in the laundry, and let my new Scooba rip. Right off the bat, it wasn't working properly, and the symptom was one I'd read about in a negative review: it wasn't spitting out any cleaning solution. I fixed it by filling a straw with water and jamming it down over the intake valve and starting the robot up while blowing into the straw. That seemed to unjam whatever was jammed, and the next time I fired Scooba up, it behaved. The fix is documented on iRobot's website.

About halfway through the first pass in the dining room, Scooba started acting strange; its vacuum shut down and it started moving really slowly. Finally, it stopped altogether and displayed the error code "F", which means its front wheel is jammed. It wasn't jammed, but I couldn't seem to convince it otherwise. I power-cycled it and it worked fine until it ran out of cleaning solution. After the first pass, the dining room floor looked splotchy. Mr. Scooba had covered probably 90% of the area, but some of the grime was so thick that it had only made a dent in the lesser-covered areas.

After the second pass, the dining room only has a few small splotchy places. I'm hopeful that after a couple more runs, the floor will be immaculate and reach a "baseline" clean, after which a twice-weekly run will keep it that way.

A nice thing about the Scooba is that it continuously sprays fresh cleaning solution ahead of its brush/vacuum, unlike a mop, where the mop water gets dirtier and dirtier as you progress. The gunk that I poured out of the exhaust tank was like a 5-gallon bucket of mop water condensed down to 1/4 gallon: thick, ugly gray goo. In other words, awesome.

So far, I'm a bit wary of this new robot floor overlord, because of the couple of quirks I've already noticed. I'm hoping that in the long run, it'll live up to the reputation of the Roomba vacuum that many of my friends rave about. I may or may not keep you posted, depending on my satisfaction level one way or the other.