Because I am a dork, and have an unhealthy techno-gadget fetish, I now have two vacuum cleaners battling for dust bunnies and cat hair – an iRobot Roomba 550 and a Dyson DC21 stowaway.

In the six years that I have lived in the US, I’ve never owned a vacuum. All the vacuum cleaners I had were hand-me-downs from people returning to their home countries. My experience with them can be summarized as: piece-o’-crap.

About 10 days ago I went and got the iRobot Roomba 550, which is currently on sale for $279 at the local Costco. That thing is awesome – my apartment has never been this clean. Every day at 11 am, the Roomba automatically leaves its docking station and proceeds to cleaning my apartment. Upon finishing it munching-duties, it returns to its charging base station and awaits its next cleaning duty. And when I come home from work, there is no gunk on the carpet or in the kitchen. Yay.

The Roomba is smart enough not to fall down stairs, but so far it has not yet mastered to jump up on my sofa and lounge chairs to clean off the cat hair there. Dammit.

That’s were the Dyson comes in. An equally awesome piece of engineering, the Dyson really cleans. Actually, the Dyson sort-of made me appreciate the Roomba even more. Touted as “Never Loses Suction”, the Dyson got stuff out of the carpet after Roomba was done, but not to the extent that I would have been miffed about the Roomba’s performance. Definitely, the Roomba is up to cleaning your house/apartment/condo/RV/tent on a daily basis. And the cats don’t really care either.

So, since I am lazy, I can appreciate the ease of having the Roomba robo-vacuum my apartment every day.

The Dyson is sort-of a collective item. It has already travelled to Beth and she is using it to clean out her shitloads of cat hair. Beth, an avid reader of this blog (hehe!), followed my product evangelizing and bought a Roomba yesterday evening. I’m gonna go and set it up for her later today. My Roomba has already visited Barbara’s house and cleaned there a bit. I’m expecting the Dyson to be shared by several people, it’s too expensive to just sit at my apartment. So, Jason, Beth, Barbara, Mishal, Natalie – help yourself. Shipping not included.

So, if you’re in the market for one (or two) vacuum cleaners, I give my thumbs-up to these two.

To learn more about the Dyson, click here.
To learn more about the Roomba, click here.
If you want to see some retarded Home Shopping Network videos of the two vacuums, click here for the Dyson, and here for the Roomba (not my model, though).

And here are some pictures:

Oh, and if you think this is funny, then you’re a dork too. If you have no idea what the hell you just read, don’t worry, not everyone can be as cool as Russ and I.

Oh, and who is Russ? Well, he’s the university’s most important computer technician (or database-guy) and also a Ph.D. student in the program. His wife took this picture:

He’s the dude next to me.