Roomba Rumba Grumble

I bought an older 400-series Roomba robot vacuum off Craigslist around Christmas and it ran wonderfully the first time I plugged it in. It cleaned the bedroom...

... and then "doooop dodoop dooop!" It died.

For the past 5 weeks I've been researching online in my spare time, trying to find information on how to save my poor little Arthur.

This is a list of my currently available options:

1) RoboticVacuums.net suggests trying to reset the unit. (Inspiringly not helpful.)

2) RobotReviews.com instructs you on how mod your own battery pack with new NiMHs. (Cost and work involved is not necessarily worth it.)

3) Buy a new battery from Amazon.com, though many of the vendors won't ship to my Canadian address. (This one does, and it's only $23?)

4) Junk the unit. Not cool.

5) Get a refund. Also not cool. (Probably not possible.)

Knowing my limited options, it makes it much easier to choose a path. That being said, I've been looping around #1 for the past few weeks with little or no improvement. I keep thinking: well what if I do it this way this time?

"Dooooop dodooop dooop."
I'd better move into Phase 3 soon, I'm missing out on some prime robotic cleaning time. (Plus that song is driving me nuts.)

Display Tactics

Just set up our office with a prominent LCD PowerPoint messaging loop...


It's funny, paying attention to colour schemes and text choice and timing loops and animated arrows.

Nobody will every really read it except my boss. It's all on the internet.

But they will probably glance at it, so it's got to be right. That's cool.

"Welcome to our office -- You have arrived! Hurray!"

Harr-assed

Sacked today. Financial difficulty for the company expected, not based on performance. Still a bit of a blow. Didn't even get to say thank you to my boss -- he was gone before noon too.

On a plus note, I have the rest of the summer to work out, plan for the wedding, and catch up on stuff before going back to school in September.

It really couldn't have happened at a better time.

Stewing Ashes

Forgive me Blogger, it's been three months since my last notation.

Long or short, it happened just as it is. Three months of softball games and tournaments, three months of typing up emails and filling out job applications, three months of waiting and watching. Sickness, health, and wealth and stealth. News and no news. Top in Canada with the bottom of the barrel.

And after all that time, now it looks like everything else is about to happen in just one short week...

I like the Toronto Airshow, Labour Day weekend every year. The Hornet never fails to impress me, get my blood running -- zipping overhead as if it owned gravity. I'm a big fan of engineering at it's finest.

Quit It

Don't yell at me for not having a job... I'm working on it, all right?

Cutbacks At Work

I find it ironically amusing that, on my last day of work of my first real job, the coffee cup I bought this morning from Country Style says "freedom" on the side.

Freedom.

Freedom from what, from work? From usefulness? From salary??

So here is one of those new chapters in life that has another elusive title. Gosh, what the heck will I do next if I'm not testing smoke alarms?? Go back to school? Find a job that's within, like, a hundred kilometres of where I live? Move to a different city? Move to another country??! Travel? Change fields??

Crazy to imagine, exciting to anticipate, scary to follow through... Yay freedom!

Professional Practice Exam

Yep, tomorrow is the big day: I'm writing my Law & Ethics exam at 2pm over at good ol' U of T.

500 people, three hours, two courses, and zero open books = one PPE sitting.

Add to that the 48 months of engineering experience, 48 months of university nightmares, and three good character references, and you can get yourself a P.Eng. application...

Should be fun. :)

Project: Voice-Stress Analyzer

Now is the perfect time for me to gather materials to build a portable lie-detector.

A device that is non-contact, time-independent, and works for male or female voices, this gadget sounds much too good to be true -- and it just may be at that.

I found an article in my files that I had copied a long time ago from the March 1996 issue of Popular Electronics. It is still amazing to me: well-written, concise as necessary, and very inspiring for any electronics enthusiast.

What's also amazing (but not so surprising) is the enormous brouhaha brewing over this contentious issue. The technology of analyzing voices for lies is subjective at best -- and wrongfully incriminating at worst.

Why did the U.S. military and police departments buy hundreds of these machines, each one worth well over $10,000? Why do officials swear by these machines, citing 100% effectiveness? (Oh come on, is ANYTHING 100% effective??)

Who are we more likely to believe, the media or the government??

I'm on a mission to find out what's what.

My little project will cost less than $30, runs on a battery, fits in my pocket, and I get the fun of learning what all the components do, putting it all together and testing it out!

Anticipation is the key to fun in any DIY project.

As for other methods of lie detection, and I suggest reading about them because they are quite interesting, I found this article index citing a dozen articles from 1969 to 1997 specifically telling you how to build your own lie detector. Many involve contacting skin to monitor moisture levels and such. Why are there no DIY projects written after the year 2000?


Well, perhaps these may shed some light on the issue... I found a smattering of articles, papers, and websites on the Internet that particularly stress the untrustworthy qualities of this hoaky technology:

Article, "Innocent Until Proved Guilty?"
30-MAR-2006

Article, "Arguments rage over voice-stress lie detector"
(10-OCT-2005)

Article, "Research casts doubt on voice-stress lie detection technology"
(10-FEB-2004)

Study, "Psychophysiological and vocal measures in the detection of guilty knowledge"
(28-DEC-2004)

Website "The Truth About Voice Stress Technologies"

Website "The Anti-Conspiracy Symbol"

You would think that with all of these resources available to me that perhaps I'd be swayed to think poorly overall of lie detection devices. I don't know what I think at this point, but I do know that my regard quality information from Popular Electronics far outweighs the same fr omthe Internet, so I shall continue in my quest to find out for myself what the heck is going on with this technology.

My new project shall be dubbed "Operation: Ana-LIES" and I will commence construction shortly. If I find anything interesting, I will let you know...

You know what the best part is, though? Reading the schematic and explanation will improve my knowledge of how circuits and electronics work. Win win!

Monitor Switcheroo

Mr. CoWorker kindly drove me up the road to our local NerdMart yesterday at lunch so I could trip me a new TFT. Man, this LCD's got mad inches, a diggin' input and it's wided out, all for a sweet song. I was chillin'.

Old Anti-Glare CRT at home has been rubbing off on me for some years so it was high time I sought a new not-for-work monitor.

sigh. Yeah, so it turns out that Not-For-Work these days is fast becoming Much-Too-Fun... and Project-Dream-Time is not really considered Billable-Hour-Time by my employers, unfortunately. (Probably something I don't need to confirm with them.)

Sis says everyone does it. Maybe they just don't normally admit it.

Oh well, maybe the bossgods will take Old CRT in lieu and we can start afresh. That'd be a fun project, right? Uhh... guys...?

Pistachio Nut Case

You know those hard-to-open shells you get sometimes in a bag of nuts? Well, here I am at work thinking, Great, how am I supposed to open this little guy? Gosh it's hard to open. (I'm paraphrasing.) Now, my desk may be strewn with electronics and papers everywhere but somehow I managed to find the perfect substitution for those absent nutcrackers: handy-dandy needle-nosed pliers. Crack!

Speaking of Nuts: en route to the gym yesterday, I stopped to photograph a store sign boasting it was the "Uptown Nut House" -- and in the window, they also said they gave away free foccacia. Now that's nutty.

Adventures in Moving Apartments

The scenario was such that the two new occupants were both eyeing the Blue-East Bedroom over the Red-West Bedroom as her own personal sleeping abode.

The choice was clear: Blue-East perfectly frames the CN Tower between two other buildings, whereas poor Red-West does not even see the tower (nor does any other window in the apartment, unhappily). Other than this, the Apartment was a perfect choice: Shaden Manor.

But How were we to win Blue-East in a Fair and Enginerdly fashion?

Most people would flip a coin, or choose a number between 1 and 10, or roll a die for odd or even, or pick a card any card any card any card. Enginerds, on the other hand, count the number of resistors in the new apartment's smoke alarm.

The newly engineered Shaden Protocol proclaimed using the "Even-East-Karoo Rule" in such decisions, and since I was the resident expert on such a siren, the task was given to me to count away... And you know, I would have won too had I not bothered to look under the PCB -- for what else did I find there but one extra little resistor smiling back up at me? So close!

Two years later, we find ourselves with a newly replaced alarm (now evenly-numbered) and the blinds seem to be closed more often than not. Funny how little things turn out.