A Leslie Wong Blog

Google Maps has a new feature in some large US cities – street level views using photographs that show 360 degree views.

This is the view of Yuet Lee, one of my favorite restaurants in San Francisco at the corner of Broadway and Stockton.

Here’s a picture of where I used to live in New York – the building with the green awning.

I guess pretty soon they’ll be looking inside our rooms.

“Formula One bosses are investigating McLaren for a possible breach of the rules in Sunday’s Monaco Grand Prix” (via the BBC).

The rule in question is team orders affecting competition in the race. The rule stemmed from the Austrian Grand Prix in 2002, when Ferrari was criticized when the team ordered race leader Rubens Barichello to slow down at the finish so his teammate Michael Schumacher could win the race.

I just finished watching the race and it seemed at one point that Hamilton was quickly catching up to Alonso. A quick second pit stop would have allowed Hamilton to come out close to or ahead of Alonso instead of the four of five seconds he came out behind.

At the press conference, Hamilton said, “…It was tough, you know. I tried to get as close as possible and tried to get ahead but, you know, next time, I guess…” as he gave a smile and a shoulder shrug that could have implied that he could have won the race.

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Meez lets you create your own 3D animated avatar (not in the Sanskrit sense, but in the representation of yourself as an Internet user).

This is as close as I could get my “Meez” to look like me.

Note my Fifty jeans (I would have used fiddy but urbandictionary.com says it’s a “…Word used by morons who cant pronounce or for that matter spell fifty), Bentley and the G-Unit background (which urbandictionary.com additionally describes as “Super hardcore ghetto slang for “Gee, you knit?”).

Google Analytics, which helps website owners learn about site traffic and marketing initiatives has a new beta interface.

All the information is more clearly presented in the overviews. You can drill down to details such as time on site, bounce rates, languages, browser capability (e.g., operating system, screen resolutions, Flash versions and Java Support), Network Properties (network location, hostnames, connection speeds), traffic sources and content overview.

In other words, more than I need, since most of my traffic is probably from spammers anyway.

I use a Lodge 7 quart Dutch Oven for my lazy-q smoker. I throw a couple of hunks of Lazzarri Mesquite lump in it and put it over a deep fryer burner with a low flame in the firebox of my smoker.

It’s probably overkill, but I thought it would be better at holding in the heat. I don’t really take care of it – after I use it in the smoker, I just put it on a concrete section of the patio to let it cool off. Then I store it under the smoker on the shelf. The heat from the burner is so intense that the bottom is actually convex – it won’t sit flat on a flat surface anymore.

I haven’t used it for a few months and the surprising thing was that I noticed it had actually developed a crack. It sits outside in whatever the humidity is here – I’ve never had to add water to the humidifier in my humidor – so I haven’t taken care of it. You can see the large flakes of metal that are coming off both the inside and the outside.

Fortunately, my well cared for 5 quart Wagner Dutch Oven that I use for deep frying (it very well seasoned) doesn’t suffer from this problem.

Click on read more and see the size of the Earth compared to other planets, then to the sun, then our sun compared to other stars.

This relates to the recent story of the brightest supernova ever, SN 2006gy.

According to NASA, SN 2006gy is “the brightest and most energetic stellar explosion ever recorded and may be a long-sought new type of explosion.” It’s 240 million light years away, so that happened a long time ago.

Credit: Illustration: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss; X-ray: NASA/CXC/UC Berkeley/N.Smith et al.; IR: Lick/UC Berkeley/J.Bloom & C.Hansen

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The Forza Motorsport 2 Demo for the XBox 360 became available yesterday on Xbox Live. It’s a 691 MB download.

Last month, Forzamotorsport.net published the Forza Motorsport 2 Official Car List – 310 cars. No Alfas.

I’m looking forward to driving the 1969 Ferrari Dino 246 GT and the 1961 Jaguar E-type S1. It looks like I’ll be forced to get an Microsoft Xbox 360 Wireless Racing Wheel by May 29, the release date.

I passed an unlikely sight on my ride today through Pebble Beach on the 17-Mile Drive. A team of cyclists in yellow and azure jerseys passed me going south as I headed north. It’s not uncommon to see pro teams out on the road when the Sea Otter Classic is held, but that was last month.

It was Team Rwanda, Rwanda’s National Cycling Team. They were probably out on a training ride here because it’s close to the home of the Rwandan Team’s organizer (and first American competitor in the Tour de France), Jonathan Boyer. They must have just arrived here from the Tour of the Gila, in New Mexico.

They must be seeing a different world.

(CIA’s World Factbook on Rwanda)

Are these bids for real?