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During our recent trip to southern California Justin took up a new hobby: photography. On the first day of the trip, at a rest stop overlooking the ocean between Orange County and San Diego, he got hold of my camera and against my better judgment I did not immediately take it away from him. Inexplicably I even pointed out the shutter release button and soon he was happily shooting away.

The problem is that the camera is a bulky SLR that’s both too heavy and too big for his little toddler hands so he struggles to hold it up high enough to point at his subject. The result is lots of pictures of people’s midsections, if he even manages to get a person in the frame at all. More likely the photos are of concrete or carpet or grass or bushes or sky. And one if his favorite subjects is his own feet, often accompanied by the camera strap hanging down between them.

If he’s taking a picture of you the only way your head will actually be in the photo is if you follow where he’s aiming the lens and try to keep in front of it until the moment he manages to press the button. It’s quite a comical exercise. And since focusing is out of the question any photos that do end up focused are only so because the subject was at the same distance as the last photo that I took with the camera.

But of course none of this matters to those who appreciate true art. Justin clearly has an eye for the abstract and through his work masterfully depicts the human condition in all its frailty and wonder while eschewing outdated photographic conventions like framing and focus. But seriously, Justin loved playing with the camera. When I was a kid my parents got me a cheap 110 camera from Kmart and for years I took loads of terrible equally out-of-focus photos, most of which I still have. The difference of course is that my parents had to pay for film and developing while we can let Justin play around with the digital camera at no cost, right? That would be true except for the fact that the camera coincidentally broke five days into the trip. The autofocus stopped working so the pictures from the second half of the trip were pretty bad and most of them had to be deleted. A few days after we got home the problem got worse: it takes photos that are 80% black with just a small strip of the image across the top. The camera is now officially worthless. We never actually saw Justin drop the camera but I’d be pretty surprised if our little Ansel Adams didn’t have at least something to do with the premature demise of my trusty Rebel. But it will all be worth it when we collect the proceeds from his first gallery opening.

I have since figured out exactly what part broke but don’t think I have the skill or patience to attempt the repair. In the meantime I have already ordered a replacement camera – I was planning to upgrade at some point anyway but now this makes two very expensive camera replacements in a span of four months. But with two kids growing like weeds a couple of weeks without a camera means a huge of chunk of their lives un-photographed, disqualifying them from membership in the “most-photographed generation” and we simply can’t have that!

Here’s a funny story. Five years ago, just prior to our month-long vacation in Europe, I bought a fairly high-end Canon DV camcorder at the now-defunct electronics store The Good Guys. It was a great camcorder and though we didn’t use it terribly often we did capture many vacations and many hours of footage of Justin’s first two years. Then about five months ago it died during a trip to Maui. When I turned it on a warning bell sounded, the tape icon flashed on the screen, and when I tried to take the tape out it had been “eaten.” I tried some brand-new tapes and cleaned out the tape mechanism but the problem persisted. So the rest of the Hawaii trip had no video and I resigned myself to having to buy a new camcorder if I wanted to get any video of Chelsea as a newborn and Justin’s peak toddler years.

After the trip I put the camera aside and for four months I wasn’t able to find the time to research and buy a new camcorder. (Anyone who knows me well knows that I can’t make any significant electronics purchase without countless hours of online research and price comparisons.) Even as Chelsea’s due date neared and Justin’s antics got progressively more video-worthy, I still put it off. And then about two months ago I got a card in the mail from GE warranty services telling me that the extended warranty on my Canon camcorder was due to expire in June and offering me the chance to renew it! Wouldn’t you know it, I had purchased a five year warranty from Good Guys back in 2002 and completely forgotten about it, probably because I never buy extended warranties. I don’t know what I was thinking back then, especially in light of the fact that the warranty was $280 (!) which I discovered once I dug up the original receipt from my files.

So I promptly called the warranty company who directed me to package up the camcorder and ship it to Massachusetts to be repaired. I told them my daughter was due in a few weeks and they assured me I’d have it back in time. About ten days later I got the camera back (in the same box that I shipped it in) and when I fired it up several days later it ate my tape just as before! Furious, I called the repair company back and was informed that the camera was not repaired because it would cost $900! There was no paperwork or anything in the box to inform me of this. Then I was told that they were “awaiting authorization” from Canon to “buy out” the warranty at the current replacement value, which they do when the repair cost is prohibitive.

So I was very happy to be getting cash to put toward a modern camcorder… right up until they called me back a few days later to say that a) Canon had approved the payout and b) the replacement cost would be… $296! They arrived at that figure by finding an “equivalent” camera at Circuit City and setting the payout based on that. Well of course a camera with five-year-old technology is only going to cost $300, but I paid $1200 for my camera, and $280 for the warranty! I would have MUCH rather had them repair my old camera, which still recorded perfect video.

So if you’re keeping score, after subtracting the warranty cost and the cost to ship the camera to the repair center, I ended up with $7 and no camcorder. On the other hand, the $280 for the warranty was a sunk cost so I moved on and excitedly turned my attention to researching a new (HD!) camcorder. After several days and lots of Googling I settled on the Canon HV20 HD camcorder with a 3 mp still camera and 10x optical zoom and image stabilization. The hardest decision was whether to stick with a tape-based camera or go with one of the new hard disk-based ones. After what happened with the tape mechanism on my old camera I was really leaning towards a disk-based one but then I read some reviews online that made a good point: once you fill up the hard disk you have to download the video to your computer before you can shoot any more. If you’re at home this is a non-issue but if you’re traveling you have to have a laptop with you at all times, which just isn’t feasible. It would suck to be filming some special event and fill up the disk with no way to clear space on the drive. With tapes you can carry as many as you like and reload whenever you fill one up. And once you transfer the video to your computer you’ll always have the raw footage archived on the tape in case of a disk crash. And let’s not forget the possiblity of a disk crash on the camera itself. And the final reason I went with tape is that I still have dozens of DV tapes that I have yet to transfer to my PC. So the ideal solution would be a hot-swappable modular disk system so you could carry an extra disk or two, and then eventually NAND flash cards once the capacity gets big enough for the massive HD video files. But for now tape makes sense for me, though I’m sure my next camera will be disk (or flash) based. Let’s hope this one lasts longer than five years though.

Anyway, I ended up ordering the camera from Dell since their bottom line price was the best, but as it is a brand-new model it was backordered for weeks and it only just arrived today, exactly a month after Chelsea was born. So we have no video of her birth or her first month. But now I’ve got a new toy to play with and I’m looking forward to filming the kids this weekend. Then I’ll have to figure out how to post some short clips here on Colevault. Let’s just hope that my four-year-old Dell PC can handle editing and converting HD video, otherwise I might just have to pick up one of those schweeeet new iMacs! Too many gadgets, not enough time, and definitely not enough money!

Like most people, I really like having a clean and tidy house but I can’t stand doing housework. And now that we have started putting in light-colored hardwood floors throughout the house it is much easier to see the dust and hair build-up than it was with carpet. And Justin brings home his fair share of dirt, Pigpen-style, from day care, although less so now that he mostly walks rather than crawls. So our nice new clean bedroom had started looking very lived-in very quickly.

Enter Ike. Ike is our new Roomba. A Roomba is a robotic vacuum cleaner developed by a company call iRobot, after the Isaac Asimov novel, hence the name Ike. (And there was much groaning.) Roombas are like Tivos: until you own one you just can’t appreciate what a paradigm shift they represent, whether in TV watching or vacuuming. You are an ideal Tivo customer if you have limited free time and you enjoy watching TV. You are an ideal Roomba customer if you have limited free time and you’d rather be watching TV than vacuuming. If this is you, I highly recommend that you buy one. Full disclosure: Colevault.com does not own any shares of iRobot … but my Dad does.

Rewind to last Christmas. The three of us visited my Dad and his family in San Antonio. My Dad has a very big house, 2 Welsh Corgis, and 2 teenagers. Their floors used to be coated with a fine layer of dog hair and the detritus of teenaged boys, but then they got Robby. Robby is also a Roomba, possibly Ike’s 2nd cousin. They liked it so much that they bought another one for the upstairs. (The iRobot guys are pretty good but they haven’t yet perfected the jet-powered levitating Roomba.)

My Dad is an interesting character. When he discovers a product that he really likes he invariably buys stock in that company, and then supports that company unequivocally for as long as he is a shareholder, which is usually forever. (And he’ll go out of his way to avoid products made by competing companies.) For example, he invested heavily in Gillette, probably back in the Carter administration, and has bought nothing but Gillette razors and Duracell batteries ever since. So once he discovered iRobot it was inevitable that he would buy some stock, and though it doesn’t look like it’s done much in the last few quarters I think that the concept can and should catch on.

The model we got is the Roomba Scheduler, which we got for $264 at Bed Bath and Beyond ($330 - $66 with a 20% coupon), and there’s also a $50 rebate from BBB right now. If you’re going to get one of these, getting one without the scheduling option doesn’t make much sense. With this you are able to program the Roomba to run on a set schedule so you can come home to a clean room or area of your house. We’ve got ours set to run every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 3:00 in the afternoon. It’s nice to come home from work to find the bedroom and bathroom floors freshly vacuumed.

Now, you do have to do one thing before you can let Roomba loose in a room, and that’s coil up or somehow conceal power cords, speaker cables, extension cords, phone cables, etc., so that the Roomba doesn’t get tangled up. If that’s not possible Roomba comes with two “virtual walls” which transmit infrared beams that will prevent Roomba from crossing into areas with cables, or falling down stairs. We elected to use this as impetus to force us to keep the floors tidy, clothes and shoes in the closet, and cords nicely organized, otherwise we might come home to a find Ike buried in pile of dirty laundry, spinning its wheels, with an overheated radiator. The biggest change that needed to be made was for Susan to stop using the area under her side of the bed as a file cabinet, so if Ike can accomplish that then the vacuuming is gravy.

So on his first run Ike sucked up a pretty scary amount of dust and hair. Now, the room hadn’t exactly been swept regularly prior to that, so we expected the next run to yield a lot less dirt. Well, 48 hours later, after his next run, the dust chamber was nearly full again - just as much dirt as the first time. Each cleaning cycle takes an hour, though there’s a “Max” setting that goes longer. It covers every inch of the room, gently working around furniture guided by its front bumper/sensor. And it gets to places you’d never get to with a normal vacuum: all the way under the bed, under the nightstands, and under the dresser. It goes on and off rugs with ease and crosses the threshold onto the tile floor in the bathroom, though we had to pick up the rugs in there. When it’s done it finds its way back to its “garage”, the charging station which we’ve installed out of sight under the dresser. The entire concept, design, and execution of this thing is flawless, and they’ve even copied Apple’s slick packaging. Last but not least, I was also able to hack it, install Linux, and program it to fetch the newspaper, bring me beers, and babysit Justin. There’s isn’t much not to like about Ike.