A Leslie Wong Blog

oboy, over at Digg writes, “FiOS, you ain’t got nothing on this: Alcatel-Lucent researchers in France have successfully transmitted optical data at an absolutely blazing speed of 16.4 Tbps over a distance of over 1,500 miles.“

read more | digg story

(Fiber optic photo courtesy of [luis]’s)

I just got an email from Google about their new offering from Google Apps: Google Sites. It seems to be a collaborative kind of thing. There are three editions.

Maybe I’ll try it with lesliewong.net or lesliewong.org, which I now have just redirecting to this site.

There’s going to be a lunar eclipse, Wednesday, February 20, 2008. The full eclipse will begin about 19:00 PST (03:00 UTC) and last for 50 minutes. It’ll probably be cloudy at my 20.

Sky and Telescope has a good article about it.

I took some pitures of the last lunar eclipse in August. The next full lunar eclipse after Wednesday won’t be until 2010.

I went to Save Mart yesterday and in the meat section, I saw something I’d never seen before, New York Cut pork.

I googled “New York cut” and found Barry Popik’s excellent etymological discourse. After living 25 years in New York City, I knew that “New York cut” steaks don’t exist in New York (at least the last time I was there) – they’re called sirloin steaks. New York steak is their moniker everywhere else.

I guess Save Mart just decided to call a pork sirloin (cutlet) a New York Pork Cutlet.

(Photo courtesy of Chris Watson, The Pug Father)

Turner Classic Movies is currently airing its 31 Days of Oscar, a run of Oscar nominated movies.

I turned on the TV to see Hawaii, and while looking at the cast, I saw that Richard Harris plays a character named Rafer Hoxworth. I remembered Richard Harris also played another Rafer in The Wild Geese.

That got me to googling rafer, which lead me to Scott Rafer’s Twitter page. Scott twittered that he “was pointed at Freerice.com last night over dinner,” so I went over there. (I don’t Twitter that much, because I don’t really talk to anybody)

FreeRice.com is vocabulary game. You are given a word and pick the correct definition from four choices. “For each word that you get right, we donate 20 grains of rice through the United Nations to help world hunger.” The rice is paid for by sponsor’s advertisements. I got up to level 45, then realized that I inhale 1200 grains of rice in one mouthful.