A Leslie Wong Blog

Gizmodo is running a computer rig contest. Some pretty amazing multi-monitor rigs in the gallery (and some quite cheesy too.) The contest will be open for new entries until the end of Sunday.

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I don’t really listen to rock music anymore. My tastes in rock were formed by listening to KSAN and KYA in San Francisco during the late 60’s. When I moved to New York in 1975, I started listening to jazz.

The last rock LP (vinyl to you punk kids) I bought was Thriller, when it came out in 1982. The New York Times’ John Rockwell praised the album in his review, so I went to King Karol on 42nd Street and bought it. It seems you can still get the Thriller LP at Amazon.com (vinyl, I think).

So that brings me, 25 years later, to Halo 3. Still affected by the mass media, I read Ars Technica’s Halo 3 review and I pre-ordered it from Amazon.

DHL delivered it today. It’s my 4.11176471 x 10^-8 contribution to Microsoft. That’s my $59.99 part of the $170M first day sales of Halo 3.

From Blue Note Records: “Wynton Marsalis’ moving new album From the Plantation to the Penitentiary, offers a clear-eyed and uncompromising look at the cracks in America’s facade of prosperity and happiness.”

I just downloaded Doin’ (Y)Our Thing, the third track on this album, from Amazon’s new MP3 store. It is very compelling music.

The file format is 256kbps VBR MP3, but I guess because it’s a long track (8:36), it cost $1.94. This track was not offered singly on iTunes, so I’m happy there’s more competition and another source for DRM-free music.

As senior vice-president of design at Apple, Jonathan Ive is the man behind the design of the iMac, the iPod, and the iPhone.

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Photoshop has a convert to grayscale function that will turn your color image into a black and white one. On DL.TV, Photoshop expert Alex Lindsay shows you a better way to convert color pictures to black and white .

Analysts predict a record quarter for Mac sales, meanwhile a featured article in the NY Times says Apple could do better.

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Avast! Wednesday, September 19, 2007 is Talk Like A Pirate Day.

Shortly after the Bavaria came back from the paint shop, the hood ornament – the Roundel – in BMW speak, broke off. I get the feeling they used the wrong size grommets.

I called up Jim Stansfield at Mesa Performance and was surpised that the new roundel that he sent me was the not the plastic one that had broken off, but a metal cloisonne style one.

On our way home from Oakland, we stopped for dinner in Milpitas, at South Legend Sichuan Restaurant on North Milpitas Blvd. Everyone in the restaurant was of Chinese descent, always a good sign when you desire good Chinese food.

When I asked the waiter for pot stickers, he said, “We don’t have that kind of tourist food” – another good sign.

One thing they did have were pork ribs that had been cut into single ribs and then fried in a wok. Usually I cook ribs in our smoker, but how can you pass up deep frying something? So I bought a rack of baby back ribs, removed the membrane, dusted them with some corn starch, five spice, salt and sichuan peppercorns and tossed them into a wok full of hot oil.