Tech Eye: September lamentations
Compared with Septembers of yesteryear, yore or even bygone days, this one hasn't got much going for it. Where are all the new gadget unveilings? Where are the soul-crushingly-garish-yet-captivating new fall television programs? Where are the slow and doleful evenings of summer's close, the softly bleary skies and indecorous lamentations of schoolchildren?
Ok, ok... we're not really fussed about that last part, but the first week of September was indeed stuffed with inauspicious days. On the other hand, at least nothing bowel-looseningly awful happened last week either. No pianos fell on us, none of the country's breweries exploded and we're reasonably certain that no kittens were huffed (at least not in our house) so all-in-all it was a fairly smooth, if bland, seven days.
In any case, we've decided that the rest of the month has to make up for its craptacular start. Thus Techeye has been looking into skydiving, bungee jumping, lawyer wrasslin' and a host of other sports favored by adrenaline junkies. In our thirst for adventure, we even asked around the rest of the clan for their opinions on how to better kick off this autumnal month. We won't go into detail on the responses we got (though we might explore cousin Kletus' spatula-and-school-marm suggestion), but suffice it to say that it was dear old Gran who offered the idea least offensive to nature.
Her suggestion was to try out the Segway x2, one of the two-wheeled oddity's more rugged models, which, in her words, "piques the angina, but soothes the tremors." The x2 is designed with a wider wheel-base than the regular Segway model so that you can go "off-roading" within a 19-km range (what happens at 19.1 km, we're not sure) at a hair-ruffling 20 km/h. Unfortunately, its weight capacity is capped at 118 kg, meaning that Americans, Brits, Bavarians and Samoans may want not want to risk it, but the base price of zł.27,000 should appeal to the middlingly deep-pocketed. Regardless of weight or wallet-size, we're taking Gran's advice and hoping the x2 can chirk up a thus-far grim September.
