Roomba glitches

In all my days as a techno-geek, I've never seen anything like this before. The Roomba I recently purchased has begun acting very strangely.

In the beginning, the new AI Roomba seemed like the answer to my dreams. It cleaned the house like a dream, provided I removed anything it could get tangled on (such as cords, pencils, random strings on the floor, etc.).

But lately, I've been noticing some very odd things about the Roomba. When I get up in the middle of the night for late-night snackage, the Roomba is missing from it's docking station. I later find it sitting dormant in another room, usually the dining room. What it's doing there, or why it left it's docking station, I don't know. Perhaps there is a glitch that iRobot hasn't fixed yet, after all, this is brand new software. Maybe the AI Roomba is the next Microsoft Vista, with all it's bugs and glitches.

Also, the Roomba doesn't always return directly to it's docking station. Sometimes I walk through the house, putting up laundry and whatnot, and see the Roomba "exploring" a room I most definitely did not leave it in. I'm not sure why the Roomba isn't going back to it's station, but I do know that it is really quite disconcerting. I don't like it one bit.

If you can put up with this weird behaviour, though, the Roomba is really quite the efficient little cleaner. I have no complaints with it's cleaning capabilities...although I may be writing Colin Angle sometime soon to discuss what the little bugger is doing acting so strangely.

Political Nonsense and all that Jazz

The one topic that has taken over all available advertising space has been the November 4th election. Everyone (or at least everyone in America) seems to be obsessed with this day, and for good reason! This election will decide the fate of America for the next four years. Personally, I'm supporting John McCain. Why? Because I (mostly) agree with him on social issues, and I think he is the lesser of two evils. Anyway, I don't want to talk about who I'm voting for.

Instead, I want to bring to light a topic which I just now found out about. A Facebook group is advocating the stance that presidential candidate Barack Obama is not eligible for the presidency. There are several links on their page listed as evidence for their claim that Obama is not a natural-born citizen of the United States. They quote the Constitution as part of their evidence, along with some shady-looking court papers and a Youtube video.

Apparently, Obama gave up his citizenship when he lived in Indonesia, because Indonesia didn't allow dual-citizenship when he lived there. According to this group, the only way he could be a US citizen now is if he became a naturalized citizen.

Now, I just found out about this group today. Why haven't I heard of this before? Well, to be honest, I'm not the most informed person out there. However, I am connected to some fairly plugged in people, who follow the candidates quite closely. And still, I've heard nothing. Honestly? I'm not convinced this argument is legit. Basically everyone is looking for dirt on candidates these days, and this may be just another attempt to blacken an innocent person's name.

Even if this isn't the case, and there is a legitimate issue here, I don't think that it will be resolved by election day. Courts take a while to resolve such issues, especially when the defendant is supposedly "not cooperating." Thereby, I am not going to worry myself over it. If Obama gets disqualified from being President, well then that's worth a laugh. But I doubt it'll happen.

Regardless of what happens, I will be perfectly happy with fulfilling my role of trundling off to the voting booths and casting my vote for McCain. :-)