Yes it’s a Segway. Or – to give it it’s full title, a Segway Personal Transporter. A relatively common sight in many US cities and, I am told, European ones as well. Unless you happen to live in England that is, where I doubt very many people have seen one at all.

Probably, like me, you noticed the launch back in 2001, the hype surrounding the first video clips of it in use and, if I recall correctly, pictures of George Bush using one. And then, as far as us Brits go… nothing. I suspect most of us old enough to remember probably placed it in the same category as the Sinclair C5 and promptly forgot about it again. If you still don’t know what I am talking about then wikipedia as always, offers a quick memory refresh.

I have to admit that I had forgotten all about them. But that changed back in October when, encouraged by my son who had tried one, Mrs Swordfish and I booked a Segway tour of Washington DC and for me at least it was an instant ‘poop poop’¹ moment. I was in love with a machine.

With a top speed of around 12 miles an hour and a range of about 24 miles per battery charge, the Segway is truly a remarkable ‘vehicle’, perfect for those quick, short trips where you know you shouldn’t take your car but always do. They are amazingly easy to master and control and are incredibly manoeuvrable. And they are, simply, great fun!

And they are also illegal.

Our beloved government – the ones who promote using public transport over the car, who want us all to be ‘greener’ and care about the environment, who steal more cash from us for driving higher CO2 emission vehicles in the thinly veiled fight against global warming – invoked the Highway Act of 1835 – yes you read that correctly – confining the Segway to private land use only.

The 1835 Highway Act – to put it simply – bans wheeled vehicles from public pavements. In 1835 this meant a horse and cart. The Segway is not allowed on public roads because it is neither a car or a motorbike and therefore can not be taxed or have a license plate. And in a country where the building of cycle pathways has actually been pretty good you can’t use a Segway because it is motorised.

The 1835 Highway Act did not, of course, envisage the rise of the automobile or the motor bike. It did not envisage the bicycle either. Curiously, all three date from about 1885 a full 50 years after the Act arrived on the statute books. Steam powered vehicles might have been a small problem but in 1835 I doubt many people had seen one and Traction Engines were not really developed until around 1850-1860. Invoking such an archaic law in the year 2002 is ludicrous, short-sighted and beyond belief. If I didn’t know better I would suspect the ulterior motive of tax revenue. Nah… couldn’t be.

There is an active but sadly ill-supported campaign to get the humble Segway legalised in the UK – even if only on cycle pathways. This would simply require a small change to legislation such as happened for the ’scooters’ used by the handicapped that are allowed to go just about anywhere their owners want them to go. Well cycle ways, pavements, and minor roads at least.

I implore anyone reading this – whether you like the idea of the Segway or not – to sign the petition at the campaign website. Do it because it is the right thing to do. Do it because we have had enough of stupid, archaic laws being used to strip away our freedoms. Do it because technology like the Segway needs to be championed if we are ever to move beyond petrol driven vehicles.

But most of all – please do it because I want one.

(¹ In case you don’t know, ‘poop poop’ comes from Kenneth Graham’s children’s novel The Wind in the Willows and was the sound made by the first motor car seen by Mr Toad (the horn of course) who was instantly bewitched and sat, on the side of the road in a daze intoning the mantra ‘poop poop’.)

I don’t usually do travel tips but one or two here and there will do no harm.

I do not, generally speaking, like hotels that much. I have spent time in too many and while I have been lucky enough to stay in some really up-market places they are still impersonal and usually without much personality. There have been exceptions here and there but on the whole, I have found that inns or even guest houses suit me best – as long as they are good ones of course.

I have become quite a fan of the town of St. George in the south-western corner of Utah and have spent my visits there at the Seven Wives B&B which is not only a comfortable and friendly place but is also a historic site. To quote shamelessly from their website:

Seven Wives Inn consists of two neighboring homes and a cottage in St. George’s historical district. Edwin G. Woolley, who built the larger house in 1873, hid polygamists in the attic via a secret door, after polygamy was outlawed, by the U.S. government in 1882. One of these polygamists was Benjamin F. Johnson, an ancestor of the innkeepers, who really did have seven wives, hence the name Seven Wives Inn.
The house next door, built by George Whitehead in 1883, is called the President’s House because it hosted some of the early presidents of the LDS (Mormon) Church. Who could blame them for staying there? Esther, George’s wife, was said to be the best cook in town!
Both homes were built out of Adobe in the late 1800’s. The Woolley-Foster home was built in 1873 and is both a historical & federal landmark. The Whitehead home also holds a historical plaque.

It is also a little eccentric. On my last visit in October, I stayed in a different set of rooms than I had seen before that included one containing the Model T Ford shown in the photograph. It is, in fact, a whirlpool bath built into a Model T.

And you don’t get much more eccentric than that.

According to MacUser, two separate Apple centres in the USA have refused to carry out repairs on a Mac because the owner is a smoker. Not because they feel that smoking has contributed to whatever has gone wrong but because their technicians consider the machines ‘contaminated’ and a ‘bio-hazard’.

Due to the computer having been used in a house where there was smoking, that has voided the warranty and they refuse to work on the machine, due to ‘health risks of second hand smoke’.

I agree that nicotine residue can be sticky and unpleasant stuff. But second-hand smoke? So much for Apple Care – the expensive, three year warranty agreement you can take out on a new Mac. I can see I wont be doing that next time around.

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When Internet Service Providers and every other organisation connected to web provision told the governments of Europe – including our own – that their ill-thought out plans for tackling music and video piracy wouldn’t and couldn’t work they were duly ignored by people with the technical understanding of a wardrobe. So it comes as no real surprise that ZDNet reports today of the first result of their idiocy. A pub – currently unidentified – has been fined £8000 for illegally downloading unspecified copyrighted material.

Only, of course, it wasn’t the pub at all. All the pub landlord did was offer a free WiFi hotspot to his customers. A nice gesture, thoughtful and generous and a good way of getting a few more customers through the door. Except that one of them abused the privilege. And the IP address used for the download belongs, of course, to the pub.

And that means that people offering hotspots all over the country will, sooner or later, be wondering if it’s really worth it.

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I’ve lost the link now sadly, but a BBC news item a few days back reported that some researchers have decided that letting your kids get dirty – or good, old-fashioned play – is actually, wait for it, good for them! Helps build up the immune systems. Of course, it’s not that long ago that we all knew this anyway and the extra benefit of a childhood not spent in antiseptic isolation was that we were not only healthy and largely allergy-free, but we had fun and learnt to socialise properly because you can only get seriously dirty outside.

Perhaps it should be a question asked of budding Apple technicians: “did you Mum let you play outside and get dirty when you were a kid?” Although, of course, they will probably regard such individuals as a bio-hazard.

The young man in the local 3 shop said “it will just work”.
“Are you sure about that?” I asked. “That’s what T-Mobile said and that never worked”.
And neither did 3. Well – that’s not strictly true. It didn’t work in Washington DC and it didn’t work in Denver or anywhere else in Colorado. Didn’t work anywhere in Utah either. Or Arizona. Or Nevada.

But it DID work in Delaware.

So – when we arrived in Denver I emailed 3 customer support and said “The young man in the local 3 shop said it will just work. But it doesn’t. Although it DID work in Delaware. I can’t make or receive calls to the UK or to friends in the USA. But I CAN send and receive text messages. So what am I missing” How do I get this to work outside of Delaware?”

Next thing I am woken at around 3:30 in the morning by my phone announcing a text message. It’s from 3 customer support to tell me that they couldn’t get through to me and have left a message on the voice mail. Which, of course, I couldn’t call. Well – not without taking a flight back to Delaware which seemed a bit over the top.

And they did this three nights running! The stupid person at 3 didn’t think to themselves – “There’s no point in leaving voice mail because he CAN’T MAKE CALLS”. Not even “hey – this guy is in Denver which is 6 hours behind us so I wont text him at 9 in the morning in case he’s asleep”.

So – International Roaming. As long as you are in Delaware.

You watch the movies and the English guy get’s off the plane in New York and immediately makes a phone call home on his mobile. How does he do that? James Bond never has this problem. And I bet he’s never even been to Delaware. I use all the right codes. The +44 for the UK. 001 for the States. I connect to the local ‘partner’ network with no problem. Then nothing. Try and make a call and up it comes “Connection Error – Please go to Delaware and Try Again”.

If anyone comes visiting this sad and neglected corner of the web and knows how to make this work then please let me in on the secret. Unless, of course, the only place you ever visit in the USA is Delaware.

(When we got back home I accessed my voice mail to find three calls from 3 asking me to phone them to talk about why I couldn’t make calls. They weren’t laughing either).

This past weekend saw the UK’s first real foray into winter with a little snow here and there, sleet just about everywhere else and sub-zero overnight temperatures. But it is the wind that hurts the most. For most of the time the wind blows from the west off the Atlantic and on a good day is even warmed a little by the Gulf Stream. But then, in a fit of evil playfulness aimed specifically at me, it decides to blow from the north. One look at an Atlas reveals little between us and the Arctic and that north wind is a bone chiller, reducing the already low ambient temperature by several degrees.

On the other hand, San Diego, Southern California was a warm and pleasant 15C in the very early hours of Sunday morning and forecast to be pretty good over the next few days. My problem, of course, is that this is not where I am.

If I were perhaps my dear wife and I would have driven over to La Jolla on Saturday evening for a nice meal. Sunday afternoon may have found us sauntering through the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park and in the evening it would be off to watch the Chargers host the Indianapolis Colts.

And I could have spent the whole weekend in a T-shirt.