11 December 2001

Dave Winer on a Segway Dean Kamen's breakthrough new invention, the Segway, a two wheeled personal transport device that you stand on, tried out by Dave Winer: "I spent ten minutes on it, then it was time to let someone else play. I didn't want to stop. Getting off is like taking your ski boots off after a day on the mountain. You have to learn how to walk again. It's the first time I've learned a new way of moving in a personal way, in a very long time. It's as different as riding a bike is from walking, as skiing is from driving a car." Dave can write. This review conveys more immediately how it really feels (I imagine!) to ride this thing than any other review I've read. Being Dave, he takes a provocative position on how Kamen personally is reacting to the hype, and how he's going about marketing this thing, but what he says rings true. Hell he might be right. The Segway surely is sufficiently expensive at over three grand a pop, that it cannot sell in huge numbers to the mass market as Kamen hopes. There's a longer write up on the Time magazine site - Reinventing the Wheel. Later I missed this - of course there's a weblog devoted to the Segway. Paul Nakada's doing a great job of catching lots of Segway sightings on the web. The 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter My daughter is more than a decade away from dating. I hope. She is, after all, just one year old. However, I can already relate very closely to Bruce Cameron's 8 rules: "Rule Five: In order for us to get to know each other, we should talk about sports, politics, and other issues of the day. Please do not do this. The only information I require from you is an indication of when you expect to have my daughter safely back at my house, and the only word I need from you on this subject is "early."" 7:28:50 AM