I was born a geek. Other little girls of my generation owned Barbies and My Little Ponies -- while I possessed a few, what I coveted were robots.

When I was nine, my grandmother gave me a toy robot. It was a display model, so it came without a manual. Roughly the size of a cantaloupe with wheels, it accepted simple instructions -- drive straight, turn, spin in place, back up, beep. It took me days of experimentation to figure out how to program it. And that's all it did -- it simply drove around in circles. And it made noise.

Nonetheless, I loved it, and I played with it for hours.

When I first heard about Roomba, the robotic vacuum sweeper, the little girl in me started clamoring for her very own vacuuming robot.

But the adult was skeptical. I figured it would be cheaply made, probably wouldn't work very well, and would be, basically, a gimmick. And besides, I had a pretty good vacuum sweeper -- a 25 year old Kirby that I bought for $10 (non-working) at a flea market and fixed up with some duct tape and mail ordered parts.

I love my Kirby, and it works quite well now, but it's heavy, and it's not good for my allergies -- it's got an old-fashioned paper bag and I end up wheezing and sneezing every time I use it. So, I've been mulling over buying a new vacuum for awhile. But I was resistant to the Roomba, at least partly because the idea of a vacuuming robot seemed to good to be true.

So, anyway, I was at the local big-box electronics store, looking over their vacuums. They had all sorts of modern vacuums -- practical, sensible vacuums.

But there was also a display of Roombas.

The little girl in me? Went, "YAY! ROBOT!"

And the adult in me went, "Well, if it doesn't work, I can always return it."

And I walked out of the store with a $299 Roomba 530. My very own robot. It was all I could do to keep from opening the box in my car on the way home. Sensible-adult triumphed over ecstatic inner child, but only barely.

I should explain that I work two jobs. My day job is as a cubicle rat. My night job is this web site, and running Firefox News often takes more time than the day job. So most weeks, I put in eighty hours or better. Plus I have a bad back, aside from having little time for housecleaning.

And I have animals. Four cats, two dogs, a hobby farm with livestock (and mud tracked inside), and The Guy owns a bird -- the bird is very clear on the point that he is not my bird, but I digress.

My house? Needed vacuuming. Just a little. There were lots of seed hulls from the bird, and dirt, and pet hair. It wasn't at the "toxic waste dump" level of filth, but it was getting pretty close. It was definitely time to clean.

I was nice to the Roomba. I did sweep first with the Kirby. Then, just as the cats were reemerging from their hiding places (top of the fridge, under the bed, behind the blinds, and behind the TV) and the bird had stopped screaming about the Kirby, I pushed "Clean" on the Roomba.

The cats stared in horror, and then disappeared. The bird screamed, "Hello! Hello! Hello!" As loud as he could.

(I swear, we're going to have cornish game cockatiel for dinner one of these days.)

And the Roomba? It cheerfully beeped and headed off across my floor. However, it only made about, oh, two feet, before a little blue light lit and it spun a circle. It had found some dirt!

I was rather embarrassed by the number of times it found dirt, even after a thorough sweeping with the Kirby. Dirt! Dirt! More dirt! Each time it found dirt it would spin a circle. It was a wonder the Roomba could drive in a straight line after sweeping my floor for a few minutes. All it was doing was what we dubbed the "dirt dance" ... it made me dizzy, watching.

And after about ten minutes it stopped with an, "Uh-oh!" noise. When I pushed "Clean" it informed me, "Clean Roomba's brushes."

There was lots of pet-hair and people hair that the Kirby had missed. However, cleaning Roomba's brushes only took a minute. They're designed quite well, pop right out, and aren't at all hard to de-hair.

For the first few times I ran the Roomba, I had to clean it two or three times a session. Then, once a session. Finally, the last three or four times, it made it entirely through its cleaning routine without me needing pluck the hair out of the brushes. It's probably swept up enough cat hair to knit another cat, and my rug is spotless.

I was pretty sure that the Roomba was going to be a too good to be true. However, it has proven itself to be an efficient and well-designed little vacuum sweeper. It really, and truly works. It's a functional machine, not just a gimmick.

One of my initial concerns was about navigational abilities. I figured it would just "bump and turn" -- but it seems that it has a fairly sophisticated array of sensors, and good programming to back them up. For example, it will follow a wall -- and then turn sharply when it gets to a corner. If it's under a chair, it will make a turn around each chair leg. It can tell the difference between a "cliff" (for example, stairs) and, at least in my house, a vent register. It will drive over my registers and yet won't let itself fall off a step.

If it gets hung up on something -- say, a steep transition between carpet and linoleum -- it is able to detect that it is stuck, and then it has a routine it goes through. It will attempt to back up, drive forward, and spin until it rocks itself loose. If it can't get loose after trying hard for a few moments, it will shut down with an "Uh-oh!" noise. I had somehow assumed it would simply spin its wheels until the battery ran down.

It did get stuck a few times on a rocking-chair rocker. This was solved by blocking off the rocking chair with one of the two "virtual walls" that cam with my Roomba.

A quick word on the "virtual walls" seems to be in order: they're small (tennis ball sized) gadgets that you use to create an invisible barrier. They run on two "D" cell batteries and need to be turned on before Roomba runs. (I understand in more advanced models, they turn themselves on when Roomba is activated.) They work quite well to restrict Roomba to a particular room or block off Roomba-eating rocking chairs. My Roomba came with two of them. (It also came with an extra filter and a dock for charging.)

One other thing I noted is that Roomba isn't particularly prone to eating cords. While I do make sure there isn't anything that Roomba could chow down on, it is much less likely to eat the power cord to, say, your television than an upright vacuum would be.

When it's done or when its battery is getting low, this particular model will return to its dock, park on it, and charge itself. This means and it will be charged and waiting for the next time you need it. In practice, it finds its dock most of the time -- though I did find it in a bathroom once, apparently having gotten lost. Poor little Roomba. I carried it to its home and pushed "dock" and it seemed quite happy ... wait, wait, I'm anthropomorphizing the robot. Did I mention we named it, "Rosie?"

Besides navigational abilities, Roomba is also very quiet. You can watch TV while it runs in the same room -- it makes a noticeable amount of noise, but it is not deafening. If it's in another room, you can barely hear it at all. My cats, who have never accepted the Kirby's thunderous roar, have more-or-less learned to ignore the Roomba; the sound it makes does not bother them nearly as much. They'll dart out of the way if it heads straight for them, but otherwise, they mostly restrict themselves to glaring from a safe distance rather than panicked flight. If dirty looks from the cats could kill, Rosie would be smoking, melted, slagged hunk 'o plastic. (If dirty looks from the bird could kill, I would be dead. He's much more annoyed by my presence than the vacuum's. But I digress again.)

As noted above, Roomba also does a very good job at actual cleaning. It finds dirt that big vacuums miss. Also, it's very good at cleaning the edges of the room -- its little spinning whisk flicks dirt out from beside the wall and into its path. However, one complaint I have is that its dust bin is very small. It fills up very quickly. You will probably need to dump it with every use, and it's practically impossible to do so without spilling some of the dirt.

Because of the tendency for the sweeper's brushes to get dirty, and the small dustbin, Roomba is best suited for keeping clean floors clean. However, as long as you're willing to dump the dust bin and clean the brushes after every use -- and this takes perhaps five minutes, tops -- you can easily run the Roomba several times a week. I've been turning mine loose just before I head out the door for work. And I now have a spotless floor all the time. I'm in love.

Some models come with a scheduler, so you can program your Roomba to sweep while you're at work, or at night.  I chose one without a scheduler since I prefer to quickly police the floor for, shall we say, issues. With the animals, there's always the chance of accidents, and I'd rather not have to clean biological fluids out of Roomba's brushes. I adore my cats, but they are cats ...

Overall? When I got the Roomba, I was fully prepared for it to be an impractical gadget. However, after using it for a couple of weeks, I've concluded it's worth every penny. The robot-loving little kid in me is in full agreement with the practical adult -- I love my Roomba!