I also ride bikes, thanks. I'm not good at getting into that whole exercise mode in the morning, though, I'm not a morning person.

Also, the Segway is a totally different mode of locomotion. It is like Wii Fit on steroids. On smooth roads you don't do much, but on the uneven sidewalks were I live you constantly have to shift your weight around. It some ways it feels like skiing.

Finally, I'm not sure why people always call out Segway users for being lazy. At least they are standing up for a while, people in cars don't even do that.

1. I'm not about to give up walking. I work five miles from home, so I'm not about to start walking that.

2. I always yield for and go slow around pedestrians. I consider pedestrians highest on the chart of locomotion. It goes pedestrians, bicyclists, public transit, Segway, cars.

Segway! (Pictured here in my breakfast nook)

For the last year and a half I've ridden the bus to work. It was great when I worked above a major bus station, but I switched buildings and now I'm in a more remote area not well served by transit. They do run a company shuttle from my old office to the new, but having a transfer twice a day is annoying.

Anyway, I've wanted a Segway since the day they were announced. However, only now that I'm employed full time am I able to afford one. The office move combined with some bus issues recently (breakdowns and such) have made me seriously consider a Segway. In fact, yesterday I rented one from the local dealer. They are letting me keep it until Wednesday, so I'll be able to try it for a couple of commutes. In the two days I've used it, I've come to realize just how awful my city's sidewalks are. It doesn't help when people park in front of the wheelchair ramps. If I decide to buy this thing, I'll probably end up becoming a pedestrian advocate.

Amazon MP3 is available in the UK now.

And if you are annoyed by how US-centric many big companies are, then maybe you should move here and reap the benefits :)

Fine, you can accept $1.29 for the latest hits from Apple, but I'll stick with Amazon, where the top 100 tracks are 79 cents.

Well, the storage cost per gigabyte-month is $0.15 and the storage cost for transferring a gigabyte outbound is $0.17, so if you download the stored data once per month then transfer is the dominant cost.(1)

Someone is always paying for the cost of storage and transfer. Before the person who owns the bucket would pay for both, but now they can make the accessor pay for the transfer. Amazon isn't offering either for free, so as long as they are making a marginal profit on storage and transfer, they aren't eating any loss.

(1) Both numbers are for the base tier.

I posted this as a comment on the blog post, but I'm copying it here as well:

http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2008/06/03/skynet-lives-aka-ec2-smugmug/

Outside of one instance where it launched 250 XL nodes, it seems to be performing pretty well. Their software takes into account a large number of data points (30-50) when deciding to scale up or down. It also takes into account the average launch time of instances, so it can be ahead of the curve, while at the same time not launching more than it needs.