It's always especially disturbing when something bad happens someplace
you've been, like the World Trade Center or
Ben Yehuda Street. I walked down Ben Yehuda Street
on a balmy summer evening in 1995 -- two suicide bombings ago by now --
and enjoyed it very much.
It was a very pedestrian-oriented street with lots of restaurants and
cafes and shops (I think I bought a present for a family member
there) which I guess might be comparable to Newbury Street in Boston
or to the pedestrian malls in Burlington, Vermont.
I wanted to mention Olvera Street in Los Angeles, where I was
earlier this week; that was very lovely but had a bit more of the
theme-park feeling in a way that the other streets I mention
didn't seem to. The problem must be that the rest of L.A. has
grown up around Olvera Street in a way which makes the preservation
or restoration of Olvera Street look artificial.
Isn't that weird? It's "artificial" in the same way that a huge
tree growing inside someone's home would be "artificial" -- you
have to go and put it there after the fact, or take elaborate
precautions to leave it alone.
Apparently
Dean
Kamen's mysterious invention is a sort of electric
scooter which can go fast and which it's impossible to
fall off of. (Segway's home
page is up now.)
It sounds useful enough to me; my only problem
with the Zappy was that
it didn't go far or fast enough and it was easy to fall off.
(Also, it doesn't do much for physical fitness. Maybe these
things ought to be charged up by riding a stationary bicycle
connected to a generator.)
The really funny thing is that the Zappy people
are selling a
personal hoverboard; many people speculated that Kamen was
going to market a hoverboard. He's not, yet one is already on
the market! It could be yours for only $9,500 (about three
times the initial cost of the Segway).
One last really funny thing about the Zappy: I'm almost positive
that I know one of the people who gave a testimonial on their
web site. I think he was my co-worker at Linuxcare.
We had a nice BBC meeting at my apartment on Sunday with about seven
people present, and I think we made a lot of progress. We're aiming
for a release of a new version in late January, which means we ought
to hurry up a lot.
I
don't like this approach any more now than I did eight years ago.
I had lunch with Ren and Gwen and was headed to Berkeley at last
report in the evening.
Continuing on the "it's great to work somewhere where" theme: it's
great to work somewhere where you can use
"Environmental
Key Generation Toward Clueless Agents" in your work!
