At long last, my very own robot

I finally broke down and did it... Big Lots advertised a Roomba for less than $100, so I snagged one. I spent a fair part of today, erm, "testing" it around the house... for those of you thinking about getting one yourself:

• Uncarpeted floors are not its strength... it did a fair job getting the bigger bits up, but left a fair bit of dust behind.
• Regular-pile carpets and open rooms are its strength... at least, it did as good of a job as any amount of vacuuming I would be willing to perform on a semi-regular basis.
• Cluttered rooms and longer-pile carpets tend to take longer... in my case, the brushes actually bound up on cat hair before it considered itself "done", but it still did a more-than-passable job.

As an added bonus, it's somewhat quieter than a normal vacuum cleaner... which, among other things, means that cats won't necessarily run as soon as it turns on. The braver of mine was actually doing the "wading birds at the shoreline" bit with it... you know, "I could probably take it, I'll just stalk it a little... oh hell, it's coming right for me", that sort of thing. A little cheap entertainment plus some fire-and-forget cleaning, I'm calling it a good buy... :)