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Today I got to try out something I’ve been wanting to try. A Segway. For those of you who have been living in a mayonnaise jar for the last few years, the Segway is a ‘personal transporter’ that has two wheels, and lets you drive around at walking/jogging speeds. It looks much like a two wheeled push-style lawn mower, except futuristic. You stand on top of it, with a wheel next to each foot, and a handle that comes up and branches into a handlebar for you to hold on to. In order to maintain balance, the Segway uses a sophisticated set of sensors and computers to control the wheels. As you begin to tip forward, the motors adjust the wheel positions, keeping you upright. As you continue to lean forward, the motors in the wheels compensate by moving you forward. To stop, you lean backward. Continue leaning backward, and the Segway drives backwards. There is a twist grip on the handle that controls steering. As you turn the grip, one wheel drives faster than the other, and you turn gracefully. If you are stationary, one wheel will move backward, allowing you to rotate in place. The system requires only one control, the single twist grip for steering, to allow you a full range of motion. The system is very agile as well, and one feels quite stable atop it.

For some reason, the museum I work at has one. I don’t know why. No one does. It has been in a box sitting in a back cabinet for quite a while. The other day Drew got permission to unpack it and give it a whirl. After charging overnight, he found me today and said, “Sam, you have to come try this with me.” We read the manual, wheeled it outside, and gave it a go. The first thing you do is turn it on with a little electronic ‘key’. The key is basically just a button that you push against a little pad. It comes with three keys, a beginner key, a sidewalk key, and an open range key. Each key increases the speed and agility just a bit. Naturally, you start your practice on the beginner key, which limits top speed to about 6mph.

When you turn the Segway on, a little orange face appears on the tiny screen. You press the mode button, and the Segway goes into balance mode. In balance mode, it holds itself up, but you should not let go of it, or it will begin to drift away, and will turn itself off. The hardest part at first is getting on. You just step up, keeping the platform level. The first thing is that you will have a tendency to rock back and forth. If you aren’t perfectly upright, the Segway will begin to drive forward or backward, which causes your body to rock, making the Segway change direction. You just rock wildly back and forth, which is quite scary. Once you’ve gotten the hang of getting on, things go fast. You just lean forward to drive, and lean backward to stop. The sensors are incredibly sensitive, and the motors very precise. The vehicle behaves very intuitively, and before long, you can drive it like it’s connected to your brain. I suppose this is the biggest attraction of the Segway.

The Segway is also a kick in the pants, and quite hilariously fun. After upgrading the keys, we moved into a full power mode, which brings the top speed up to about 12mph. You can really whip the thing around, and make some amazingly sharp turns and maneuvers. People also love to watch. As we were driving around outside, visitors walking by stopped to watch, and kids shouted encouragement. We had a great time taking advantage of the fairly nice weather.

The Segway, for all its coolness, is not going to revolutionize transportation. Its limited range (8 to 10 miles), and limited speed make it little more effective than walking. Of course, if you need to be fit enough to stand up straight while using it, and you have to have good balance, meaning people with disabilities or who are elderly will get no use from the Segway. Hence, the only people who need it are people who just don’t feel like walking. You can’t go farther than a walk, and it can’t take you much faster than walking can. I could easily outrange and outrun it on a simple bicycle. $4,000 is a little pricey for something that does nothing that I can’t already do with my own body.

The biggest killer for the Segway is going to be its cost. Sure it is expensive now because it is new, but I don’t think it will get too much cheaper, because of the sheer complexity of the system. Despite the simple and easy to use exterior, you can’t get away from the fact that you need expensive batteries, sensitive sensors, complex control systems, precision servos and flawless gearboxes in order to make the Segway work. I think that even if you gave the patents and blueprints to some Taiwanese engineering company, they wouldn’t be able to manufacture it for sale at less than $1000. And that is just too expensive to be useful. At that price, it will never be anything but a luxury. If it cost less than $200, I could see that being different. I’d buy one at that price, and I think a lot of people would. But until then, it’s just a fun little geek-mobile. I’m glad I got to try one.

I like the taste of Bigelow.

10 points to whoever figures out who/what I’m referring to.

Update: Ah ha! Coyote has it right! Of course, they may benefit because I don’t think I know them yet (if I do, correct me! All these screen names makes my head spin). However, some people know I have a friend who’s last name is Bigelow, and I frequently jest about doing unseemly things to him, such as cooking him up and eating him, so anyone who knows both Bigelow and myself would be misled into believing that this was yet another cheerful jape! But now, it is the tea I was enjoying. Bigelow brand “Sweet Dreams” herbal tea. It contains such goodness as chamomile and hibiscus.

The reason I was drinking said tea is because I am quite sick. I’ve spent the last few days in what amounts to a ‘stupor’ due to a quite impressive illness. It isn’t the flu, and it isn’t a cold. My mucus is a bit yellow, and I’ve been coughing up quite a bit of it, so I’m inclined to believe it is bacterial. I’m hoping I can conquer it on my own, so I don’t have to deal with expensive doctors. But thankfully, things seem to be clearing up, and I’ll probably be back at work tomorrow.

Barb brought the tea over the other evening, along with makings for soup. Madalene and Barb made me drink tea, and prepared soup for me, and then chuckled to each other as I sat bleary eyed at the table, dripping snot from all orifices, with a blanket wrapped around my body, and a cup of tea clutched in my shaking hands. All the commentary I could muster was, “I like the taste of Bigelow,” which they both thought was quite humorous. So big kudos to the ladies who fed me soup and Bigelow.

BTW, as to the ‘points’ system, I haven’t decided what to do with them yet. In fact, I’m not really keeping track yet. However, all I have to do is search for ‘points’ on the main page, and I find all the entries where I have awarded them. I’ve been thinking of writing a script that would let me keep track of the points I’ve awarded, and easily enter new data. Dustin, if I write such a script, I’ll hook you up with it so you can keep track of ‘nub points’. Then, after I keep track of the points, I’ll think up something you can do with them, like exchange them for some sort of prize. 2 points for each good idea for prizes. 15 points if anyone has a script that will keep track of scores like this without me having to write one.

Two tiny updates:

On the About page, there is now a tiny bit of additional info, namely, the total number of posts, total number of comments, and overall comments per entry (currently 1.9), in addition to the month-to-month data. You don’t care, but I do! It is like a running log of how interesting I am.

Second, there is a little Towers of Hanoi solver running. Thanks to Amit Singh’s Hanoimania I have been tweaking some PHP code to solve the classic puzzle. His code is great, and deserves all the credit, however, I’ve made a few tweaks to improve the interface, and add additional information such as the number of moves required to solve the puzzle.

For anyone who isn’t familiar, the Towers of Hanoi is a classic puzzle consisting of three posts with a tower of disks placed on one of the posts. The disks are stacked according to size, with the smallest disk on top, descending to the largest disk on the bottom. To solve the puzzle you must move the entire tower from the starting post to a different post. You can only move one disk at a time, and no disk may be placed upon a disk smaller than itself, IE, disks can only move to empty posts, or on top of larger disks. It turns out that the puzzle has a very simple algorithmic solution, which Amit implements in 108 different programming languages, a truly heroic effort. I’m playing with the PHP one for the heck of it.

There is a little legend associated with the puzzle, whereupon a monastery deep under the mountains contains a version of this puzzle with diamond posts and golden disks. There are monks there who are solving the puzzle. The puzzle began with 64 disks, and they started solving the puzzle, one movement per second, at the beginning of the universe. When they finish the puzzle, the universe will end. Solving a 5 disk puzzle is fairly easy, and once you figure out the system, the movements come quickly. However, with a little calculation you can see that the number of moves needed to solve the puzzle goes up very quickly. It turns out that it will take the monks somewhere around 580 billion years to finish the puzzle with only 64 disks.

Bonus points to anyone who can figure out the equation to calculate the optimal number of moves required to solve the puzzle with a given number of disks (N). Hint, check out the solution for 1 disk, 2 disks, 3 disks, and 4 disks. Seeing a pattern yet? Try to predict the number of moves required for 5 disks, and see if you can formulate an equation based on that pattern.

Fortunately, it wasn’t mine this time. Dennis called earlier this evening with a problem, his computer wouldn’t boot! It was tossing out all sorts of disk read errors and giving him lots of guff. So he brought the computer over to my place to be cleaned up. We rescued some of his data thankfully, and then began the process of wiping the drive clean and reinstalling the OS. Unfortunately, his bios didn’t want to accept the drive, and it took reflashing the bios and a low level format on the hard drive to get the two to play nice. Dennis stayed for several hours, but ended up needing to go home. He left the computer here, and I’ve been tinkering with it, and making general progress, in between drinking wine and watching Sealab 2021. Not too bad a way to spend an evening.

Hopefully I’ll get it purring nicely tonight, and then I’ll finish it up tomorrow so that Dennis can finish his papers up.

Update: Finally, at 5:20am, the computer lives again! Now I’ll just leave it to install the gadzillion security fixes that Microsoft has queued up for it, and tomorrow it shall receive a hot program injection as I reinstall all of Dennis’s crapola. He sure owes me for this one… I’m thinking sensual massage.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of participating in a beer tasting with the St. Louis members of the Beer Advocate forum. We all gathered at one of the member’s house, each bearing some sort of unique beer. We hid the beers, so that no one else knew what we had brought. Then two people snuck them into the kitchen and concealed the bottles for a blind tasting. They would bring out glasses of each beer, and everyone would taste them, and write little notes on paper. Then the next round would appear, and more sniffing, swirling, and subsequent drinking occurred. We had bottled water and some delicious bread to cleanse our palate between rounds.

For this event we were specifically tasting stouts. There were some excellent offerings, and a few surprises. Among my favorites were the Bell’s Stout, and the Stone Imperial Stout. There was an Alaskan Smoked Stout that tasted far too much like bacon for its own good (though it doesn’t actually contain bacon), and a fairly bland oatmeal stout.

After the blind tasting, we tried to guess which beer went with which bottle, with limited success. However, the process was quite educational. The results were interesting too, and it was good to compare results. We had one man who had never really enjoyed beer before (simply because he hadn’t had beer since college, and it was cheap crappy beer), but was very into wine tasting. He wanted to participate so he could get a good start at finding some good beers. We enjoyed his impressions, and he enjoyed the entire event, feeling like he got a good reentry to the world of beer. We also had some members who are extremely accomplished beer tasters, who produced some very detailed notes.

After the stouts, we had dinner. Our hosts had prepared a fabulous vegetarian chili that was quite surprising. Normally I don’t like chili, even vegetarian chili, but this was very good. I’m going to pester him for the recipe.

More beer was tasted after dinner, with the style limitation removed. We sampled Stone’s Ruination and the Hop Rod Rye, both of which are fairly ‘extreme’ beers in terms of hoppiness. The Ruination was more like crazy hop tea, but the Hop Rod Rye was excellent and well balanced, despite being very hoppy.

All in all, the evening was quite entertaining and informative, and the other beer geeks are all fun and interesting people. We’ll be having another tasting in February sometime (no date set yet). Oh, and in case you are curious, my favorite stout was the Stone Imperial Stout. Yummy.

I’m just not used to posting. I’m a creature of habit, and when the site goes down and I don’t post, I get into the habit of not posting. Bad Sam. Bad.

This evening I supped upon Belgian beer with Dennis and Dan. Barb, Caroline and Madalene were also over, but they supped upon no beer. They did however eat the fried potatoes we made. I’m fond of making ‘Bavarian Chips’, and so here is my little recipe.

Ingredients

• A few russet potatoes
• Vegetable oil, lots of it
• Salt
• Malt vinegar (optional)
• Ketchup

• Red Hot Cock Sauce (optional)

  Procedure

  Put the oil in a pot. Heat it up. If you have a cool deep frying appliance, use that. You want maybe an inch or two of oil in there. Aim for about 375 degrees F.

  Cut up the potatoes into thin slices. The thinness is up to you. I like to cut them in about 3mm slices, but you can do a little thinner or thicker if you like. Experiment! Oh yeah, leave the skins on. You don’t even have to wash them if you don’t want. You are frying it in searing hot oil after all. But even if you wash them, leave the skins on. Peelers are for suckers.

  Put the potatoes in the oil. Be careful because they will spatter, and they’ll try to stick together. Don’t put too many in at once, you want only enough so that the oil completely covers them all, you don’t want any sticking up. Now just stir and poke them for a few minutes until they start to look a bit golden brown. You can tell, they’ll look done. Then strain them out, either with a slotted spoon, or a handy wire grid, or something. Try to get most of the oil to drip back into the pot. Then put the chips on a plate with a paper towel on it. While they are nice and hot, shake some salt on there. Be careful, because they are fuck all hot, and will burn the crap out of you if you try to eat one now. Wait a minute, for the sake of your tongue.

  After you’ve made some chips, put some ketchup in a little bowl. I like to add some Red Hot Cock Sauce to the ketchup to make it a bit spicy, but that is up to you. I also like to shake some malt vinegar over the chips, because that is delicious. But once again, your choice. That is the nice thing about making your own food, its all your choice!

  Take the chips, dip them in the ketchup, and put them in your mouth. Chew and enjoy. I recommend pairing them with a hearty stout, like Guinness or Murphy’s.

I hate having a downed server. In this case, my host’s name server went down, and stayed down for several days, which is why you couldn’t read this site, or send me (or any other cowboy) mail. Now you can! So go nuts.

There are a lot of interesting things that happened over the week, but I’m afraid that you won’t be hearing about them, because I’m no longer in the mood to write about them. Maybe I’ll get in the mood, but maybe not. I suppose we’ll just count this as a week lost to the void. Bye bye, week.

Anyway, I’ve got some correspondence to catch up with, now that I have email again. More interesting posts will follow, I promise.