A few months ago, my trusty Roomba stopped working. It would start and just stop after a few seconds of flailing. I thoroughly cleaned all the cat hair out of it, but still no dice. I thought the battery was not holding a charge anymore, so I borrowed a spare one from Tony. That didn’t help either.
I discovered that there’s a cool diagnostic mode for the Roomba. While interesting, that didn’t show anything wrong. It was time to dig in deeper.

I pulled out an arsenal of screwdrivers and started pulling things apart, targeting the right wheel which seemed to be the troublesome one. Screw after screw came out until I got to the bottom of it. I cleared out a bit more fur, but not much else. Getting it back together was a challenge. Worse, it turned even less. I gave up, leaving my Roomba half-assembled and dead in the garage.

I hoped to get a replacement someday. That day came sooner than expected when Dealnews alerted me to refurbished Discovery on Amazon. With a $25 discount, my A9 discount and Associates referral, I got it for about $125. That’s a great deal over the $279 for a new one.
On Saturday I set it up. Apart from a small scratch, it looked new. Even better, it was a DiscoverySE, not just a Discovery! (Other than a sleeker design, the only difference though is a charging wall mount, which I probably won’t use.)

They have improved the design quite a bit over my Roomba Pro. The bin is a lot bigger and opens much more easily. It does a better job of covering the area, though it seems to have more trouble crossing the threshold between the dining room and living room. One of the best features is the home base, which it is supposed to “find” when it’s done cleaning or out of juice. Tony said it didn’t really work, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised to find it charging itself after I left it to do its thing for a while.

I’m still strangely fascinated with way it bumbles around and I’m apt to watch it for a while when it starts off. Go little roomba, go! Get in that corner! No, don’t get stuck in over there! Yeah, you escaped!

Supposedly having these robots allows you to be more productive by making the robots do the menial labor. That probably doesn’t work if you spend your time cheering on your robots.

Now, all I need is a silly MOOBA costume for my Roomba. Err, maybe I shouldn’t say that considering what happened with the supermagnet.

When we got back from vacation, I noticed one of our cats was sneezing quite a bit. He had a cold. What was more amusing is that the other cat is deathly afraid of sneezing and runs like hell whenever someone lets one out. He was quite annoyed that the other cat was doing it constantly.

A few days later I started to feel crappy. I spent much of the weekend on the couch recovering. I went to work all last week, but feeling quite snifflely and sneezy, which I doubt my coworkers appreciated. I was finally better by Saturday, but by then another member had caught it – the sneezing adverse cat. Now he was sneezing every few minutes, often a few times in succession. Perhaps this will cure him. Heh.

It seems that all I do on over holidays is watch movies. Perhaps it’s the only time of year that I have hours on end to do absolutely nothing. It felt good.

Anyway, here’s the movies I saw and a 6-word or less review:

The Hulk – That ending made no sense
Robots – Someone get Robin Williams a sedative
Four Brothers – New Kid goes bad
American Pie: Band Camp – Should have gone straight to DVD
Coach Carter – Bummer of an ending
The Dukes of Hazzard – Missed the end, don’t care.
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – Hello, Christian imagery!
Fantastic Four – Please don’t make a sequel
The Incredibles – Similar heroes as Fantastic Four
Mr. & Mrs. Smith – Entertaining
Spanglish – Needed bilingual subtitles

I would have watched more if I could get the frickin’ DVD player to work in my laptop on the flight out. I got video, just no audio. I spent a lot of time on the plane out trying to figure out what was wrong, then a few hours more once I got to my parents’ house. After reinstalling every possible driver and rebooting 50 times, I figured out that playing audio requires an AC3 decoder. One is built into the lame WinDVD program that came with my laptop which I had uninstalled. I swore that Windows Media Player played them just fine before. I reinstalled WinDVD then figured out that I could just install AC3Filter and now any DVD player worked. Grrr.

A few weeks ago, I ran across a cool product – a supermagnet. I joked on my blog that I wanted one for Christmas. Let that be a lesson to me: be careful what you ask for, you might just get it.

The day before I left for Christmas break, my team approached my desk (led by Glen) and declared that they had bought me a Christmas gift. I was pretty sure they were kidding when they told me they got me a supermagnet. They weren’t kidding.

It hadn’t arrived yet though so I would have to wait until I got back to play with it. Given the warnings in the description, I was worried about it damaging things, erasing my hard drive and breaking my fingers. I actually dreamt last night that all these things happened.

When I arrived at work this morning, it was there. Glen placed it on a chair in the row between our cubes. It was in a small box, but you could still feel the power of the magnet inside when you put the box next to something metal. Scary.

Since it was my first day back, the morning was busy, but I found some time this afternoon to open it up. I opened up a the small box with the magnetic sticker warnings on the outside. It was mostly full of styrofoam. In the middle was a small object wrapped in foam wrap. I took it out and stuck it to a metal pole. It held securely. Inside was a box with another magnetic sticker on it. Inside there was a block of wood. Underneath was the magnet on top of another block of wood. It was hockey-puck sized and shiny. It was time for the fun to begin.

First I stuck it to some scissors. I held the scissor handles and it stuck to the bottom of the blades. I threw some random metal objects to it and it held. I affixed it to the metal frame of my cube and it connected with a loud clang, pinching my fingers. Ow. I stuck a large steel i-beam to it. It was hard to remove.

Soon word got out that it the supermagnet was here and a bunch of people showed up to play with it. We looked around for large metal objects to see if it would hold them. We attached a bunch of small things, then a filing cabinet drawer, then an entire chair! Everyone was impressed.

I’m going to have to keep this a few feet away from any hard drives, but it seems to be mostly safe. Having two of these would definitely be dangerous though.

Thanks, guys! This is the coolest useless toy I got this year!

I’m just completely amazed at the amount of cool stuff that Yahoo! cranked out this year. It’s truly been the year of the product. While I was only personally involved in a few of the released, it’s great to be at a company where so much exciting stuff is happening.

Here’s a list of significant acquisitions and product launches in 2005. I’ve highlighted the ones I think were the most important.

Jan 10 Desktop Search released
Jan 20 My Yahoo Ticker released
Feb 2 Y!Q released
Feb 9 Yahoo Toolbar for Firefox released
Feb 28 Yahoo! Developer Network launched with Yahoo! Search Web Services
March 10 Mobile RSS launched
March 21 Flickr acquired
Mar 23 Creative Commons Search released
Mar 28 Yahoo! 360 released
Apr 4 Farechase Hotel Search released
Apr 18 Yahoo! Shopping RSS feeds
Apr 26 My Web 1.0 released
Apr 27 News Redesign released
May 4 Video Search released
May 10 Yahoo! Music Engine and Yahoo! Music Unlimited released
May 18 Yahoo! Messenger Beta released
May 25 Yahoo! Movies Recommendations launches
May 26 PhotoMail launches
Jun 6 Yahoo! Auctions becomes free
Jun 14 Blo.gs acquired
Jun 15 Dialpad acquired
Jun 16 Subscriptions Search launches
Jun 28 My Web 2.0 released
Jun 30 Maps API released
July 6 Mobile SMS services released
July 15 Yahoo! Finance RSS feeds released
July 25 Konfabulator acquired
Aug 2 Yahoo! Publisher Network released
Aug 2 Shopping API released
Aug 3 Audio Search Beta released
Aug 12 Yahoo! Video Games redesign released
Aug 13 40% of Alibaba acquired
Aug 15 Health Blogs released
Aug 16 Yahoo! Local redesign released
Aug 23 Verizon Yahoo! DSL released
Aug 29 Yahoo! Mail Search Improvements
Aug 30 RSS feeds from Yahoo! Weather released
Sep 12 Kevin Sites in the Hotzone released
Sep 13 Mobile Shopping Search released
Sep 15 Yahoo! Mail Beta released (based on Oddpost)
Sep 26 Yahoo! Finance columnists
Oct 5 Upcoming.org acquired
Oct 9 Yahoo! Podcasts released
Oct 10 Blog Search released
Oct 18 Whereonearth acquired
Oct 24 Richard Bangs Adventures released
Oct 26 Travel Trip Planner released
Oct 31 Yahoo! Autos Custom released
Nov 2 Yahoo! Maps Beta released
Nov 7 Yahoo! Photos, Weather and Traffic available on TiVo
Dec 7 Yahoo! Answers released
Dec 9 Del.icio.us acquired
Nov 14 Shoposphere released
Nov 29 RSS Reader in Yahoo! Mail Beta released
Dec 1 Blog Alerts released
Dec 12 Konfabulator upgraded and relaunched as Yahoo! Widgets

There’s two trends I see here – making Yahoo! a platform for developers and building community into products.

I’m looking forward to 2006!

I want a Supermagnet!

Check out this description:

OK, I have no idea what I’d do with one of these and would probably injure myself somehow, but this description is awesome.

After Thanksgiving’s gluttony, I decided that I’ve been in better shape in my life. While I’m prone to hike 10-15 miles in a weekend, I don’t do much else unless you consider running between meetings exercise. I switched to diet soda and generally tried to cut back on eating when I was full or simply bored, but neither of those seemed to do anything. So I decided to start running again.

I’ve run off and on since high school, but I eventually stopped because I got lazy, bored, or the weather got bad. A couple years ago we bought a treadmill that sits about 20 feet from my bedroom, so weather is never an excuse anymore. I thought about my other excuses though and how I could prevent from falling into them again.

The first problem was consistency. In the past I would say I would run 2 or 3 times a week. It became way too easy to skip a day and convince myself to make it up later in the week. Solution to that problem: run every day, Monday through Friday. No decision to make each morning.

The second problem was that I would often set goals that were too aggressive. I would try to run too fast and too far and I would start to dread running. In response, I set an easy workout schedule. I used one of the treadmill’s set programs that went just over 2 miles in 30 minutes. That’s practically walking, but it’s better than nothing and it’s still 10 miles a week. As that starts to feel TOO easy (it has once already), I increase the difficulty. The goal is not to make it hard, but to make sure I do it regularly.

The third problem was just getting bored. I can actually watch the TiVo from the living room in the room with the treadmill in it, so that’s not bad. I’ve been using the time to catch up on Family Guy and South Park. It’s really hard to get bored watching those.

So far it seems to have worked. I’ve been running for 2 weeks. I’ve only missed one day it was because I simply woke up too late. I’m taking the time I used to spend contemplating my existence in bed or checking email/web surfing on the couch and exercising instead.

Now how do I watch TiVo from the treadmill? It’s kinda wacky. There’s a coaxial cable that runs from the back of the TiVo, underneath the house and back up to a terminal next to the treadmill. From there, it connects to the back of an old PowerMac 7600/120 with an ixTV video input card. The driver software is hopelessly old, so the Mac runs OS 8.6. Other than serving as the only Mac we have left that can read floppies, this is all this computer does. The internal speaker on the Mac isn’t nearly loud enough to hear over the treadmill noise, so I hooked up the audio output to a wireless speaker transmitter. I originally bought the speakers as surround speakers for the living room, but they’re 900mhz and have way too much static. The wireless speakers sit on a bookshelf behind the treadmill.

Controlling the TiVo involves more wireless magic. I use a Leapfrog Remote Control Extender to transmit signals from the TiVo remote back to the living room. Amazingly, it all works.

My more recent problem was watching DVDs. The old Mac obviously doesn’t have a DVD drive, and is probably too slow to play them anyway. My more modern G4 Mac is in the same room, but it has a CD burner with no DVD drive. So to watch DVDs, I have to rip them on my laptop, then copy them over to the G4. Inconvenient, but perhaps I’ll replace the CD burner with a SuperDrive someday. In the meantime, I’m well-entertained when I’m out of breath.

Last night at dinner I was devouring some blue Jell-o and thinking there aren’t many blue foods. In fact, we could think of only one naturally occuring blue food – blueberries. Blue cheese is kinda blue, but that’s the mold not the cheese. Are there any more? Why does food come naturally in every color except blue? Clearly there must be a government conspiracy in here somewhere.

Although my last gadget purchase was a new alarm clock, I don’t use the alarm. I naturally wake up between 7 and 7:30 each morning, Well, except when I don’t.

Fortunately I have a backup system. It requires no batteries and is sufficiently annoying to wake me from any slumber.

This morning I rolled over upon hearing my backup alarm system. I was going to ignore it, but was surprised to see it was actually 8:19. I turned back to see my backup alarm meowing loudly, repeatedly and directedly at me. How do they know what time it is and when I’m late?

My PackageAlert service made LifeHacker today. Nifty. This will be a good test of how many packages it can handle at once!