A Leslie Wong Blog

When I lived in New York City, I always found solace in fly fishing for trout in the Catskills, mostly on the Beaverkill River.

A New York bookstore was another place to find solace. My favorites were Scribner’s, Rizzoli, Shakespeare, Strand, Coliseum, Barnes and Noble and McGraw-Hill. I always looked for fishing books. After baseball, fishing seemed to produce the most titles. Over the years, I accumulated many. Here are a couple of them:

Good Fishing Close to New York City: A Guide to the Great Close-To-Home Angling of the Metropolitan Region (Good Fishing to New York Ser.) ● Open Season ● French Fishing Flies ● Fishing Idaho, An Angler’s Guide; Art Flick’s New Streamside Guide; Matching the Hatch: A Practical Guide to Imitation of Insects Found on Eastern and Western Trout Waters (Stoeger Sportsman’s Library) ● Vermont River: The Classic Portrait of a Man and His River ● The River Why ● 21 Great New Zealand Trout Waters (Fly Fishing International) ● Fear of Fly-Fishing ● Neversink: One Angler’s Intense Exploration of a Trout River ● Fishless days, angling nights ● Every Angler’s Guide to Amazing Lures and Flies: Rare and Forgotten Masterpieces of Fishing ● Complete Book of Fly Tying ● Trout Strategies ● Fishing Came First ● Trout on a fly ● Higher Elevations: Stories From The West ● New Zealands Top Trout Fishing Waters

I installed Windows 7 (Build 6801) on my MacBook “Core 2 Duo” 2.0 13″ (Black) with 3GB RAM.

To manage the boot menu for my Vista and Leopard partitions, I use rEFIt instead of Boot Camp. After I made a backup disk image of the Vista partition, I booted the Windows 7 DVD, reformatted the Vista partition and began the installation. It went a lot faster than the Vista install.

The Boot Camp drivers from the Leopard DVD installed without any problems in Windows 7 – the Apple Built-in Bluetooth, the Apple Built-in iSight, the Apple Trackpad Enabler, the Apple Keyboard, the Apple IR Receiver, the Atheros AR5008X Wireless Network Adapter, the Marvell Yukon 88E8053 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller, the SigmaTel High Definition Audio Codec and the Boot Camp Control Panel. Windows 7 installed the Mobile Intel(R) 945 Express Chipset Family (Prerelease WDDM 1.0 Driver) for the display adapter.

I used Randy’s SharpKeys 2.1.1 (a registry hack) to remap the Apple enter key (on the bottom row) to a forward delete key so I don’t have to hold down the fn key and delete for that function. I also mapped F8 to Prtscr – another Windows key that’s missing on the MacBook keyboard.

Thankfully, my two year old MacBook still feels responsive in Windows 7 (and in Vista). I’ve never had any major problems with Vista, and so far, Windows 7 seems to be an improvement.

Somehow over the past 25 years, I’ve gone from riding a modern bicycle to vintage bike.

I bought my current De Rosa in the early 80′s, after I rear ended a Manhattan cab on Third Avenue and 50th Street with my first De Rosa. I must have just left Conrad’s Bike Shop and was a little too cocky following the cab. I went over the handlebars, landed on the trunk and slid off onto the pavement. There’s a small kink in the top tube and I always thought I’d send it to CyclArt for a tube replacement and paint job. That red frame is hanging in the garage.

This week, the rear axle broke in my freewheel Campagnolo Nuovo Record hub. It’s something that happens to me every couple of years, mainly because I weigh 17.8 stones.

The chrome on the quick release was full of rust and I thought it had rusted through the chrome like it has on the drop-outs. I used a fine wire wheel and was able to clean off most of the rust.

My local bike shop didn’t have a Campy axle, but they did have 10×26 141mm axle. I used a Dremel to cut off about 5mm and slotted the axle for the washers. Given the great quality of the Campagnolo components of 25 years ago, maybe the quick release will last another 25 years.

My latest flashlight is the JETBeam Jet-I Pro I.B.S. V1. It uses a single AA size battery to power a Cree XR-E 7090 LED (Q5 bin). The JETBeam Jet-I Pro I.B.S. came with a lanyard, removable clip, spare tail cap, two spare o-rings and a warranty card.

BugOutGearUSA.com, where I purchased my Jet-I Pro I.B.S. for $64.95 USD, now lists a Jet-I Pro I.B.S. 2.0. From what I’ve read, the 2.0 is only cosmetically different.

According to JETBeam specs, the lens is sapphire crystal and the body is T6061 T6 aluminum with a type III hard anodized finish. The dimensions: Bezel diameter – 25mm, Tail diameter – 19mm, Overall length – 100mm, while the weight is 50g.

The push button tail cap switch is a “reverse” click type, i.e., the switch will make or break contact after it clicks. I prefer the “tactical” or forward click switch – a forward click switch will allow a half press of the switch to turn on a flashlight.

I tried fitting two forward click switches – one that I removed from my LumaPower D-Mini Digital and a McClicky switch. Neither fit. Unable to find a forward click switch, I settled for replacing the black tail cap with a glow-in-the-dark silicone tail cap.

Because the Jet-I Pro flashlight will accept an input voltage of up to 4.2V, it can use a rechargeable 3.7V 14500 Lithium battery. The Lithium battery gives a not insignificant 100 more lumens when compared to a 1.5V Alkaline AA battery or a 1.2V rechargeable NiMH.

The main attraction of the Jet-I Pro is the I.B.S. (Infinite Brightness Setting) technology. The I.B.S. circuit allows for three operating modes, A, B and C, each of which can be set at any output of ~2 to 225 lumens. Any mode can also be set to one of five strobe modes including 1Hz to 15Hz, warning signal, standby (flash once every 8 seconds), 100% SOS and 5% SOS.

When reading about programming the flashlight, it seems complicated. In practice, it’s relatively simple. BugOutGearUSA.com has a page with the Jetbeam I.B.S. User Interface Instructions.

Output & Runtime (from JETBeam):

AA Battery
Max Output: 130 Lumens, lasting for one hour;
High Output (Default Mode A): 110 Lumens, lasting for 75 min;
Low Output (Default Mode B): 20 Lumens, lasting for 3.5 hours;
Minimum Output: 2 Lumens, lasting for 45 hours;

Rechargeable lithium Battery
Max output: 225 lumens, lasting for half an hour;
High output (Default Mode A) 180 lumens, lasting for 45 min;
Low output (Default Mode B) 20 lumens, lasting for 8 hours;
Minimum Output: 2 lumens, lasting for 50 hours;

Compared to my modded LumaPower D-Mini Digital (Cree Q5, DX 7612, single RCR123 and McClicky) the Jet-I Pro wasn’t as bright. But the D-Mini’s reflector is smooth, is deeper and 50% larger in diameter. The JETBeam Jet-I Pro I.B.S. is a great flashlight for its size and versatility.