What can I say - YCombinator has very smart founders:

[Peter Gibbons]

http://tlb.org/scooter.html

Trevor Blackwell built this scooter all by himself.

The parts, even at small quantity retail prices, cost less than half of a genuine Segway. It also doesn't need complex or high-performance software. The first version was written in Python and used serial ports to talk to the gyroscope and motor controller. The current software, now in C running in an onboard 8-bit microcontroller, is only 500 lines of code.

[The Gorn]

A few weeks ago my brother and I went to see Rise of the Planet of the Apes at the nearby über-yuppie lifestyle shopping village. Security cops were tooling around on Segways.

I am REALLY not used to seeing those things in use. In Ohio!

That is a very, very impressive home project.