21st century begins now

I've entered the new century. Today, I bought a Roomba Discovery robotic vacuum cleaner. It was on sale at Canadian Tire, and I simply could not resist. The Discovery comes with a Home Base for charging the vacuum. After completing the initial charge, I activated the vacuum while the dogs were in the living room. I thought there'd be more commotion, but because the vacuum is relatively quiet and relatively small, the dogs were not intimidated. On the contrary, Buddy was initially aggressive, refusing to yield ground when the Roomba approached. Once he saw that the machine meant him no harm, he allowed it to run without interference.

I was eager to see the Roomba seek its home base, so I activated the "dock" command and watched the Roomba navigate its way back to the Home Base (charging station). It sat there for a few hours charging...

Later in the evening, when the dogs and wife had been put to bed, I activated the Roomba for an actual cleaning cycle. The main level of our home has a front part, and a rear part that is just slightly lower (about 1 inch lower). The Roomba has a sensor that detects drops that are too large to navigate, and the 1 inch drop was sufficient to trigger this detection. Unfortunately, there was one damaged linoleum tile on the lower level that stuck up just enough to fool the sensor into thinking the lower level was not very far away. So, during one of many approaches from the "high" ground towards the "low" ground, the Roomba decided to make the jump. It got hung up on the broken linoleum tile and had to be manually repositioned. At that point, I put up a baby gate to stop the Roomba from approaching the back of the house.

With this path plugged, I was anxious to see whether the Roomba would be able to manouvre itself through all the rooms on the main level (excluding my office, which has far too many loose items - clutter - scattered on the floor). To my surprise, the Roomba did a remarkable job cleaning the area. It found its way into every room during the 45 minutes or so that it was running, and did a decent cleaning job (needing to have its dirt bin emptied three times during that stretch). Being that this was the first time I had tried the Roomba, I was unclear what would happen when the "Power" indicator went from Green to Yellow. I assumed that the unit would start looking for the Home Base to dock itself to, but the unit was busy cleaning an area of the house that was nowhere within sight of the Home Base. On this occasion, I used the remote control to steer the Roomba back into the living room. To my surprise, as soon as it detected the InfraRed beam from the Home Base, the Roomba went into survival mode - totally ignoring my remote commands, and instead finding, then mating with, the Home Base.

The next time I clean, I'll be more patient and see whether the Roomba can actually maintain enough juice to find its Home Base regardless of where it is within the house.

By the way, it did a decent cleaning job, though I wouldn't have been too upset if it hadn't!

I found a video on YouTube that pretty much shows the vacuum in action. While our environment is much more challenging (more furniture, and nothing to stop the Roomba from wandering room-to-room) this video still is interesting. Enjoy.

Windsor, Ontario on review

Yes, I'm from Windsor. It's a small-ish large city (ranked 20th in population in Canada) best known for its strip clubs and its ties to the automotive industry. While the auto industry is in a tailspin, thankfully, the strip clubs have seen their business increasing!

Windsor occasionally makes the national and even international spotlight. Last year, we were featured as the "Sin City" of the north during the Superbowl XL festivities in neighboring Detroit, Michigan. Most recently, Windsor was mentioned on a popular alternative news program. Click on the video below to see what I mean.

I hate computers

OK, it's not computers I hate. It's MICROSOFT. This has been a particularly unhappy week for me thusfar, and it's only Monday! I could have let things pass, but I just suffered a browser crash of monumental proportions, and that was the last straw. Earlier this week (yesterday to be exact), I found that Microsoft's TZEDIT utility is useless. I had used it to update several clients' machines for the Daylight Saving Time situation. It seemed to work as advertised. When I edited the timezone files on various computers ranging from Windows 98 to Windows Me and Windows 2000, the rules seemed to change, and I had confidence that all systems would click over with no issues.

Well, that didn't happen, and I heard from every one of the people whose systems I had "fixed". This made me look incompetent, and I don't like it when someone else makes me look that way.

I also happen to be a dues-paying member of IMDB, and take great pride in contributing many of the episode/cast/crew/plot details for the shows on their website. Today, I was entering information about the episode of Cold Case that was on last night. There were lots of guest appearances on that particular episode, and I was busily entering information for more than 30 individual items. For those not familiar with IMDB, when you submit information, there is a validation process performed by the website. When you enter an actor's name, for example, and there is more than one actor with that name, you are prompted to select which one is the "right" one.

In order to do this, and to ensure that I could quickly alternate between the input screen and a secondary screen used for my internal validation searches, I had two copies of a browser open simultaneously (as opposed to using tabs within a single instance of the browser). During validation, I was informed that one of the names I had submitted as a cast member was not already in the actor database. Rather than saying "Yes, add this person to the database", I decided to do some research to see if this was indeed a brand new actor with no previous credits - as opposed to simply a typographical error on my part.

It was during this search process that Windows decided to crash the browser (whether it was the browser, or Windows task manager that caused the problem is really moot - the bottom line is that the browser window just closed and a system error was displayed). That wouldn't have been so bad, since it was not my data entry browser that suffered the error. But when the browser closed down, BOTH INSTANCES (both independent windows) were terminated. All my work - already completed and saved but just in final verification - was lost. Because this was a web session, and the session was terminated, there was no way for me to resurrect the session cookies that may have been used to control the editing process. My work is out there, somewhere, floating like an orphan in space, but there was no way to get it back. The experience left me so frustrated, I decided not to redo the work. Someone else will have to be the one to record the details of that episode.

And I'm left with a real urge to murder anyone I can find that is somehow responsible for this intolerable piece of shit called Windows.

Congratulations Lancers

The University of Windsor Lancers Men's Basketball team captured it's first OUA (Ontario University Association) championship in nearly 30 years last night. After spending much of the past ten years firmly at the bottom of the pack, a newly hired head coach vowed two years ago to have the Lancers back in the hunt for a championship in only five years. He's three years early on that promise.

Going into last night's game, the Lancers had already made the improbable run to the finals by beating the best ranked teams in its division, including the defending OUA champion in last weekend's semi-final game. Their opponent last night was the Carleton Ravens, ranked #2 in the country, and defending national champions.

Like the March Madness tournament in the U.S., eight teams meet in Halifax to play for the Canadian national championship. Windsor had already been guaranteed a spot in that tournament with its victory last weekend. Last night's game was to determine seeding in the tournament. Even after Windsor's impressive rise to the Ontario finals, they had only been ranked #8 prior to last night's game. It will be interesting how they are seeded in the Halifax tournament.

Happy almost-Daylight-Saving-Time

No, you're not hallucinating. DST comes early this year. Next weekend, in fact. If you're still using an old version of Windows (anything before Windows XP with Service Pack 2 - i.e. Windows XP-SP2) then you will need to tell your computer about the new DST rules. For users of up-to-date operating system versions, the Microsoft Update site takes care of this on its own.

For those of you who are net-savvy, you can find instructions or even utilities to help you update your older operating system without my help. For those of you who don't know how, or want my help anyway, just send an email to DST[at]safe-and-secure-computing.com and I'll send you a return email with a small utility and detailed instructions.