In Douglas Coupland’s latest Financial Times column, he ruminates on the meaning of Silicon Valley, a part of California state as well as a state of mind, including his surprisingly positive feelings for the Segway, which has thus far been only nominally more popular than G.R. Gooch’s 1842 walking machine, the Aeripidis. The opening:

“I’ve found that if you ask most anyone to locate Silicon Valley on a globe, they pause for about 15 seconds, say umm, and then hesitantly put their finger down somewhere a little bit north of Los Angeles. They then apologise for being clueless and ask where it really is – and are often surprised it’s up near San Francisco. I think it’s because for most people Silicon Valley is largely a state of mind more than it is a real place… a strip-malled Klondike of billionaires with proprioception issues, clad in khakis, in groups of three, awkwardly lumbering across a six-lane traffic artery with a grass median berm, all to get in on the two-for-one Mexi-burrito special at Chili’s before the promotion ends next Tuesday.

I’ve many happy memories of the Valley. One afternoon, in a long-ago world called Before-Nine-Eleven, I’d park my car just in Menlo Park, on the other side of Interstate 280, just west of the Sand Hill Road exit, the Valley’s venture capital capital. Walking through what seemed to be a Christmas tree farm, I’d arrive at a chain-link fence with a Department of Energy warning sign, walk through its many breaches, and sit beside the Stanford Linear Accelerator, two miles long and operational since 1966. I don’t know what I was expecting to see but it was nice to lie in the grass like Tom Sawyer and imagine positrons committing suicide while a Cooper’s hawk soared high above, scoping out the freeway for roadkill.

I remember the month the Segway came out and an annoyingly rich Palo Alto friend (who lived in a massive apartment furnished only with a folding lawn chair, a card table and a $500,000 flight simulator) bought a fleet of 10. That night a group of us rode up Page Mill Road to the parking lot of the now-closed Wall Street Journal printing plant and then we started going overground, over the endless roadside berms that define the Valley’s aesthetic. Talk about a dorkfest, but it was fun and I still think the Segway is the transportation of the future. How did they blow it? These things are great.”