Roomba the Grand Pooba

My need to reclaim free time and avoid the drudgery of housework continued after the Litter Robot and the Mint joined my household. While the mint helped to keep my tile and wood fresh, I'm not a huge fan of the vacuum. The house has a very good unit - a Dyson DC41 Animal Bagless Vacuum Cleaner. It's a great unit for sucking up all the animal hair and stuff. The canister is easy to empty and so forth. But, you still have to run it and I feel like there is better stuff to do with my time.

Enter the Roomba
Roomba is probably one of the better known automatic vacuums on the market. It certainly has been around the longest as it goes back to about 2002. They've evolved over several generations and now represent some of the most effective units on the market.

The unit I chose was the iRobot Roomba 770 Vacuum Cleaning Robot for Pets and Allergies and picked it up from Amazon. The first thing you need to be aware of is that these things are NOT cheap. If you aren't the type of person to consider a Dyson (also at the top of the market in terms of prices) just stop reading. It's probably a waste of your time. Luckily, I had a sizable credit at Amazon since I had traded in a pile of old text books. That managed to take a lot of the sting out of the purchase.

Psychopathy in Leadership

I've been finding LinkedIn to be more and more helpful to my business career over the past few months. The email updates and articles they put in front of me via email as well on the web site have been consistently topical, insightful and in some cases quite actionable.

I have also joined a series of groups, many of which have their own forums. While my backlog of business books grows, I do manage to find time to intake these snippets of information. Just yesterday, I stumbled across the Harvard Business Review forum which had an interesting discussion on how to handle a "bad boss." While the discussion was started months ago, these types of discussions aren't particularly time sensitive - they are still worth a read. Clearly, there are many detail-oriented folks in the forums as the discussion was quite rich with many "It depends" type answers (which tend to be the most insightful and helpful.)

The most interesting contributions probably came from Dr. Brian Monger.