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Spent a day and a night in Bruges recently – a wonderful city. We stayed in a small hotel by a canal – here’s where we had breakfast:

More pictures from that trip in due course.

Have just come back from a wonderful four-day trip with friends through Amsterdam, Delft, Bruges & Dunkirk. At one point we stopped at a beach on the Dutch coast not far from Rotterdam amidst tumultuous weather, and I took some pictures of grass on the sand dunes.

I was intrigued by how different it looked in different lights. These shots are of the same type of grass, within a few metres of each other and within two minutes of each other:

Just in case anyone thinks that I went to Seattle and spent all my time in a kitchen typing at my Powerbook, here are some photos from a wonderful hike in the Mt Baker Wilderness.

I’m in Seattle, staying with my very good friends Hap & C.D. Happel. You might be forgiven for thinking we were Apple enthusiasts, after this view of their kitchen this evening!

Just back from a wonderful week in Tuscany. Not long enough.

My Nokia 6600 takes pretty poor photos. But you can have fun if you
take several and stitch them together. This was done with my Nokia and
the rather good ‘PhotoStitch’ program that shipped with a friend’s
Canon camera:

While I’ve now seen several Segways, I still don’t own one. This may mean that I’m gaining a certain amount of sanity in my old age, because there’s no doubt that I’d like one. This is partly because I love toys, but mostly because I think it a beautiful bit of engineering. Three years ago, I met Dean Kamen at a conference where he was demonstrating his balancing ‘iBot‘ wheelchair – the predecessor to the Segway – and I thought it one of the most inspiring examples of engineering I’ve ever seen.

It can balance on two wheels and is incredibly stable. The idea is that people in wheelchairs shouldn’t have to be lower than everybody else. It can go up stairs, too. iBots are expensive, though – at $29,000 they cost more than a nice car – and I’ve heard that it was partly the desire to reduce the cost of the technology that made Dean think of a mass-market product like the Segway.

My brother Simon, who’s a doctor in Southampton, took this photo of a rather nice sign there:

If there’s one word I would use to describe Las Vegas after my first visit, it’s ‘fake’. From the Venetian bridges to the voluptuous breasts, this is a town built primarily to pretend to be something it isn’t. That’s not to say that some of the fakes aren’t very well done – the half-size Eiffel tower at the Paris, the small section of the Grand Canal on the second floor of the Venetian, and, indeed, many of the breasts. (These, in contrast, tend to be larger than the real thing).

The hotels are vast, and include sufficient restaurants, shops, streets that you hardly need to leave them at all, which is, no doubt, the idea. Some of them, such as the Bellagio, would be quite superb if they weren’t spoiled by acres of garish and sometimes noisy slot machines, which deprive them of all dignity. Interestingly, most of these seemed not to be much used, which may mean they’ve gone out of fashion, but is probably an indication that during the week of the Consumer Electronics Show, most people aren’t primarily there to gamble. Or that the ridiculously high prices of hotel rooms that week are not appealing to those who only gamble at the slot-machine level.

Las Vegas is a place that everyone should visit once, if only to see how low we can fall, but that nobody should be made to visit twice. The thing that keeps the whole thing in proportion is the fact that from the main ‘strip’ you can sometimes get glimpses of the spectacular mountains in the distance, the beginning of some of the most dramatic and beautiful scenery on earth, which reminded me that in the overall scale of things, the city is a comparatively small blot on the landscape.

Zion National park, a few hours’ drive from Vegas

The long dry summer here has brought out some of the best autumn colours I can remember seeing in Britain. So I can’t help posting a few photos from last weekend in Derbyshire.

I like this place.