A Leslie Wong Blog

The marine layer was drifting overhead, obscuring my view of the eclipse. Once in a while it was clear enough, I could make a photograph:

Camera: Nikon D70
Lens: Nikkor 300mm f4.5
Exposure: ISO 1600, 2 sec. @ f4.5

Don’t forget to go outside tonight at 1:51 AM PDT (07:51 GMT), to see the beginning of the eclipse of the moon. Totality is about an hour later. The best viewing is west of the Rockies and the Pacific Rim, so start moving in that direction now.

If you’re not awake, it’s overcast or you can’t see it for some other reason, use Stellarium, and see it on your computer. That’s how I see most stuff anyway.

Stan Sinberg over at Salon, laments about the demise of the Weekly World News. Another great journal buys the farm.

When we were at the cottage, Liz read the stories to us and nothing was funnier.

The body shop removed the insulation from the inside of the hood when we got the BMW painted. I didn’t think about how hot the hood got until I was covering the car the other night and put my hand on the hood.

Jim Stansfield at Mesa Performance sent me up some insulation that wasn’t too hard to put on. I made a paper template from the cutouts in the hood and traced that onto the insulation.

I cut the insulation with household scissors and used 3M Super Trim Adhesive (for garnitures). The glue is a contact cement that is applied to both surfaces then joined.

I finished the edges with silver foil aluminum tape. It’s all kind of shiny.

I read about color coding your tools on Sheldon Brown’s web site years ago. Anybody who looks like Sheldon and recommends adjusting your bicycle frame’s hub spacing with a 2×4 must know what he’s doing.

I have his chart on the back of the bathroom door, so I can try to remember it. I wish I could find my 8mm 1/4″drive socket.

Hackers have been working on unlocking the iPhone since its release. Today Engadget is showing a video using iphonesimfree.com’s software to unlock the iPhone.

What’s this mean? You’re no longer locked into a $1,389 first year cost (phone+minimum service plan) for an iPhone in the US. You can choose the provider you want and use any SIM card from any network provider in any country.

Justine Ezarik, who like Justin, has her life streaming live on the internets, like a boring Truman Show, has posted this youtube video of her itemized everything iPhone AT&T bill.

You may have heard about the Skype outage last week. I guess as a gesture of good will, and because I pay Skype $US 29.95 per year for unlimited calls in the US and Canada, Skype sent me an email saying they would be “adding an additional seven days to your current subscription, free of charge.”

We don’t have a long distance service using POTS – Plain old telephone service, or more accurately the Public Switched Telephone Network - PSTN. Our only “home” long distance calling (except for our cell phone) uses Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) – Skype. We even bought Cisco’s iPhone. The Linksys (Cisco) CIT400 has the ability to use a landline connection or Skype, without being connected to a computer.

I found out about the Skype outage because I was trying to call Godaddy, my web host. This blog, which is hosted on a shared server (who reads this anyway?), was taking minutes to load a page. But I couldn’t get through to them on Skype. By the time I figured out Skype had gone south, my web site was running normally…

We drove up to McAfee Coliseum in Oakland yesterday to see the A’s play Kansas City and to celebrate Rose Luey’s birthday. Lenny DiNardo allowed only five hits in eight innings.