About SJPONeill

Retired(ish) and living on the side of a mountain. I love reading and writing, pottering around with DIY in the garden and the kitchen, watching movies and building models from plastic and paper...I have two awesome daughters, two awesome grand-daughters and two awesome big dogs...lots of awesomeness around me...

Five Question Friday! 7/6/12

Posted on 8 July 2012 by SJPONeill

Is love at 1st sight possible?

Hmmm…attraction, yes, lust, most definitely…but love? Nope, I think that has to develop over time once two people get better acquainted and get to know each other before making any big commitments like ‘luff”…

How did you choose your pet’s name?

First time around, Mum told us kids we had a new pet coming and we should pick a name for it – it was all a big mystery and previous pets had been four-legged and woolly so us kids didn’t really put too much effort into it and selected the most foolish name we could think of (in the early 80s) which is our our spaniel got the grand monicker of Claudia.

Some two decades later, I made a casual comment that the new spaniel pup were selected looked a lot like the cartoon character Pepe LePew. Kirk, our current big dog, got his name because Carmen’s brother had a big Rottweiler named Khan and I passed the comment once that Kirk kicks Khan’s butt any day (Trekkies will get it). Lulu our rescue dog was Lulu when we got her, and Deeta the Rottweiler pup that we are fostering at the moment is Deeta although I see that someone is getting all googoo eyes over her so I suspect that she might be adopted by the time I gte home next week and be up for a name change…she’s less common Rottweiler with a tail which is good because we’ve never been fans of tail docking for it’s one sake but even as a puppy, that tail is already a lethal weapon that can clear a coffee table of everything in second when she gets excited…

Deeta who’s still just little…

What are you considering giving up (cable, home phone)?

Nothing at the moment…we cut back on a lot of things when I left the Army went for more of a freelance employment path and a lot of that was really just stuff that we didn’t use that much or really miss now…things like SkyTV and keeping the spa on year-round (we hardly use it any way once the novelty of having one wore off unless the twins are here or we have guests). I don’t have a personal mobile phone any more because I hardly used it when I had one and we’ve trimmed back on magazine subscriptions too mainly because it was getting to a read once then file away forever scenario…Google is your friend for most things…

I gave up drinking for a long time, initially because I was riding big fast bikes and didn’t need the distraction – I found that once I broke the habit of drinking, it was easy peasy to not drink at all…of course, Pepsi profits took a big dive when I gave up giving up about a decade ago…When I was posted to Wellington in the mid-90s, coming from an environment that ran on hot black coffee, I cold-turkeyed off coffee for a good three years…the imediate effects I noticed were sleeping better and thinking clearer and I became a real tea connoisseur but over time it crept back into my diet, partly driven by increasing difficulty finding good tea blends….

How much do you pay your babysitter?

We’re on the flip side of this now and starting to wonder if we should be charging for our baby-sitting services!! No, not really…it’s always a joy to look after them and they are better entertainment than anything on TV. On this one, I don’t think that the minimum wage is a bad start point for determining babysitter pay; then again, you might opt for the good old babysitting pool where a bunch of people share mutual babysitting services…

How “young” is old enough to babysit?

Or maybe…when is too old…? Young enough here is governed by the law which prevents any children under 14 being left home alone so obviously a babysitter would need to be older than this… personally, I’d be looking at at least 16-17 so that you can be fairly confident that they could cope with likely emergencies…

Weekly Photo Challenge: Movement

Posted on 7 July 2012 by SJPONeill

Anatomy of a shake

Well! That really wasn’t the sort of movement that I was thinking of when I saw the topic for this week’s photo challenge but this little sucker cooked off about an hour ago and the earth sure was moving!! Not the hard nasty jolts that happen down south but just a gentle rolling movement (imagine your house being placed on a waterbed) that lasted a good 10-15 seconds, although you can see from the table above that the event actually went on for the better part of quarter of an hour.

Like the big one centred off Taranaki on Tuesday night (I remember that because it was right after Hawaii 5-O) which was bigger at 7+ but way deeper (about 230+ km) this started slow, almost like a feeling of dizziness before you realise that it is actually the room moving and not you and started to build up to a point where heading for doorway or table seems like a good idea, then it just fades away to series of distant waves over the succeeding minutes…

I can also again comment with some authority on the old wives tale that animal have some sort of prescient warning of phenomena like earthquakes: it’s bollocks!! Kirk and Lulu were doing their standard floor mat impressions and did not so much as move let alone whimper or bark during the whole thing. And it’s not like it’s just these two…twenty-two years ago, a series of what were then thought quite nasty quakes (well, actually they were quite nasty – just not on the same scale and Christchurch) shook Palmerston North and the Manawatu/Horowhenua areas over a period of a fortnight or so. The last decent one was on a sunny Sunday and I distinctly remember my flatmates two dogs, dead to the world on the deck as power poles and light standards visibly pitched and rolled as the ground rocked…

Huh? Whassgoin’ on?

…and the final figures have just come in…after scientific review, this one has been confirmed as a 5.2 on the Richter scale and 91 km deep…and just to the side of our active volcano…

Weekly Photo Challenge: Fleeting Moment

Posted on 30 June 2012 by SJPONeill

I’m more of a deliberate photographer – that fleeting moment where I just happen to have my camera out and ready when an opportunity presents itself rarely, if ever, happens to me…fleeting moments in the street is even more of a challenge because we’re not big on streets where we live…the odd road and lots of tracks of varying descriptions and capabilities but not many streets…so my search today focussed more on fleeting moments than streets…

I got back as far as 1988 before I found this one which happily conbined both…two children playing in flood water in downtown Kota Bahru around September 1988 as we staged for the Great Thailand-Singapore Amphibious Cycle Ride – the amphibious bit being unplanned but necessary: next time we probably wouldn’t plan such an event to sync with the first week of the monsoon…

This is a picture that I scanned using my newly acquired negative scanner in 2010 – in going through these phtos I have noticed that there was a hair in the scanner the whole time I was scanning these negatives so I will have to go back and redo the lot. It’s not hard, just tedious and, once I replace the netbook that melted down on my way home from Vancouver, it’s a job that can be whittled away at in front of TV….

Five Question Friday!! 6/29/12

Posted on 30 June 2012 by SJPONeill

What’s your favorite childhood snack that you still eat as an adult?

Probably pikelets loaded with strawberry jam and fresh whipped cream…I will post some pictures next time we make some with the girls…and then, while looking up the URL for HFG, I saw it had a recipe for cinnamon and banana pikelets so for you foreigners and colonials and rebels who aren’t quite sure what a pikelet actually is, have a look, have a go and enjoy…it is a summery one too for those sweltering in the Northern hemisphere heat…

What food will you not eat the low fat version of?

Can’t think of any really…we normally opt for the healthier version where there is a choice…SWMBO won’t touch the ‘diet’ versions of Sodastream syrup whereas I don’t really care…I guess milk maybe where we tend to avoid the full cream dark blue top stuff but won’t go as far as the green top trim milk because it tastes like white water.

What’s your favorite way to cool off during the summer?

Sitting in the pool with a cool drink and a good book, possibly an Audible version as the hard copy ones get a bit grumpy around the water.

What’s your favorite summer read?

Don’t really have seasonal reads…sometimes we don’t even have clearly discernible seasons! I’m more likely to experiment with food in summer so possibly my summer reads are more culinary in nature, Healthy Food Guides etc…

What are you doing to stay cool in this awful heat?

Hmmm…not really a problem here at the moment…just pulled up the blinds in the study and can see that we have had a bit of a frost but no as extreme as I expected last night…clear blue skies as the sun come up over Mt Ruapehu so it will be sunny today, warm INSIDE, and a few degrees above zero outside

Intelliroofing

Posted on 29 June 2012 by SJPONeill

Just saw a great item on Close-Up about a couple building their new house with the clear and achievable objective of having a ZERO power bill…great stuff and so very easy when you building a house from new because you can incorporate this very cool stuff into the design itself. The two things that I liked about this design are the extra thick wall that allows an extra 45mm of insulation to be added simply by adding an extra batten to the outside of the framing; and the ever so cool Intelliroof where solar panels replace traditional roofing surfaces, saving cost and weight…this couple claim that they will never need a heater in this house and while I think that is a little optimistic – and no cheating by wearing 17 layers of clothing in winter! – it will be a very warm house.

It’ll probably be quite cost-effective too as they are structuring it so that any surplus will be fed back into the national grid. This begs two important questions: the first, of course is why didn’t we know about this when we replaced the Lodge roof in January! Shifty Just like when we laid the big concrete drive – which still looks awesome – only to learn only a week later about the geothermal heat exchange technology (aka ground source heating) for which we could have laid the hoses under the driveway concrete Baring teeth smile – if we had known – even if we had waited a while before installing the actual heat exchangers and radiators…

And secondly, why is the Government not subsidising these sort of initiatives to promote the generation of clean electricity? Yeah sure, they do subsidise insulating your house and made it mandatory to have specced insulation and double-glazing in new houses BUT nothing that might really chip into powerco profits like a broader generation base. For us, I think we’d probably use most of the power generated while we are at home but for those periods when we are away, a good 70-80% of our power generation capacity could be directed back to the national grid. Even if every new house only generated 10% of its actual needs, that still 10% that doesn’t need to be generated elsewhere, especially in dirty stinky oil and coal burning power stations, and a potential surplus to be fed back into the grid. And if it helps stick it to greedy monopolies like The Lines Company, the better – although they are serious provocation to just cut the cable and jack out…

Intelliroof is marketed in New Zealand by SolarCity – I hooked over to their website as soon as the Close-Up item was finished and it looks pretty slick – definitely worth a look but be aware that they have been a bit lazy and all their brochures are UK ones so not directly relevant or correct for the NZ environment . Little things like that may me wonder just how secure they are so hopefully they will get that sorted quickly and will be able to establish themselves successfully in this market…

Good on Close-Up just for once for running a useful story that isn’t focussed on more whining cry-babies or more irrelevant pseudo-celebrity antics…ironically, having said that, the Intelliroof story is the only one not specially featured on their FB page tonight…

So, there you go, just a quick item on some cool technology with some real potential…give SolarCity a call and show some interest in what they are doing, encourage them to update those brochures with Kiwi ones and let’s go GREEN!

Weekly Photo Challenge: Create

Posted on 23 June 2012 by SJPONeill

Create is this week’s theme…it’s no secret that in my 2.3 seconds of spare time each week, I like to build models, especially models of unusual subjects…one of the more unusual projects on a slow burn is this build (creation) of a 1/72 model of the Soviet pre-WW2 river monitor, Udarnyj…she saw the opening days of Russia’s entry into the Great Patriotic War but was sunk by German air power in the early phases of Barbarossa…

Udarnyj is a paper model produced by a publisher in Poland, Modelik, in 1/100 scale in a A4 booklet….in 2009 they adopted a practice of including low-res images of their model parts on their website. Although the quality is less than that in the book (these models are not legally available for electronic download – i.e. they are only available in the printed book form), and not all the sheets are shown, there was enough of the Udarnyj shown to be able to construct a fairly close waterline model over her. This is what I started to build before my conscience kicked in and I ordered the book from Poland with some other similar models…

To go with other 1/72 vessels I have, I enlarged the parts from 1/100 to 1/72 using an A3 copier (increase by 139%) and printed the parts onto 110gsm paper.

This was followed by a number of nights laminating structural parts to heavier card and then carefully cutting out the pieces – care is required because the more accurate the cutting the better the fit – also because the knife is damn sharp!

Here the structure slowly develops….

I use a double-skin approach, laying down an initial skin layer…

and filling any gaps or depressions…this prevents the rib-cage effect when applying the actual hull sheets…

…so that it looks a lot smoother…

The hull sides were then added…the stripes around the foredeck are a real pain as you have to join the sheets edge to edge and there is not a lot of room for error due to the very narrow glueing surfaces.

And this is as far as I have got so far…a more detailed description of the build is here at Paper Modelers – you’ll see from the dates that this is a long term build; and since that last photo was taken, she sustained some damage in the car when I took her down to ‘show and tell’ at Scale Models Wellington in February and I haven’t had time since to repair or progress her… I have acquired some detail parts for her like plastic quad Maxims for the anti-aircraft positions and two Airfix 5.5″ guns in case I have problems rolling the main armament barrels from paper…we’ll get there eventually – our target is Scale Model Expo 2014…

Six Bad Meeting Habits and How to Change Them

Posted on 23 June 2012 by SJPONeill

Through LinkedIn I am subscribed to a bunch of forums and other groups, one of which is the Best Practice Transfer Group. Normally a digest pops up in my inbox, I have a quick scan and if nothing really really grabs me it goes straight in the bin…this morning, as the work intranet is a little slow, I took a bit more time and those that this item for Connor Jordan’s Competitive Solutions was pretty apt and relates to something that bugs us all…meetings…there are some good idea here that might, just might, make life a little easier whether its for the PTA, darts club or megacorp conspiring the take over the world (don’t both – I have the insider running on world takeovers and Doc Karma is going to do it Tuesday the week after next)…

1) Poor Attendance / Late Arrivals – Nothing screams “waste of time” more than the actions of your supposed participants. When people habitually arrive late (or not at all) then you should take this as a sign that your meeting isn’t of much value to those who should be attending. A person’s actions (not their excuses) show their priorities. If you often have empty seats, this indicates misalignment of priorities between you and your co-workers. Talk with the prospective participants about the importance (or lack thereof) to determine if the meeting is even necessary.

Another way of looking at this is that if people are avoiding your meeting or playing down its importance or relevance, then you are possibly on to something…nothing shirks meetings more than the status quo’s urge for survival.

2) Straying from the Point – It’s easy to get into a lengthy discussion about a topic that somehow just “pops up” during the meeting. If that topic is unrelated to the meeting’s purpose, then table it and have that topic discussed outside the meeting. Two tools can help you keep your meetings on track. First, never ever hold a meeting without a predefined agenda outlining the expected outcomes. Second, use a parking lot list. Any off-topic discussion can be halted, placed on the parking lot list and then dealt with once the scheduled meeting concludes.

An agenda is a must as is a clearly stated expectation that everyone will come to the meeting not just having read the agenda (and not just in the lift on the way up) but also having actually prepared for the items listed on it – silly, I know! The parking lot list is a good idea and you might want to take it another step further and see what items regularly get parked 0 are they ongoing red herrings or actually things you might want to be having a look at? We shouldn’t forget though that we need to be flexible in such things and occasionally, that off-topic issue will actually be a key issue that you need to bring to the fore and address.

3) Allowing Annoying Distractions – Candy, chewing gum, snacks and drinks are bad enough. You should also eliminate productivity-busting interruptions. Make, and enforce, rules about using laptops, cell phones, and blackberries. If the temptation is too great for some participants, then place a 5-gallon bucket in the corner of the room. Toss all such annoyances in it and close the lid. Assign a technology gatekeeper to handle and screen any interruptions. If there’s a real emergency, then the technology gatekeeper can attend the call and involve the appropriate person, instead of interrupting the entire team.

Anyone who really really needs to be contactable should be on to it enough to always have a back up contact plan…it’s interesting watching the dynamics hosting meetings in locations where cells etc are not allowed at all, especially over a period of time, when you see the dawning realisation that the sky actually won’t fall in if someone is offline for a while. Normally those that stress the most are simply micromanagers that never learned to trust and delegate.

4) Back-to-Back-to-Back Meetings – Ever get caught on a Meetings Treadmill? Get off it! Don’t accept or participate in multiple, back-to-back meetings. You have to give yourself break in between meetings and schedule time for yourself to get your own work accomplished.

Yeah….maybe…equally, a day dedicated to (well-structured and -conducted) meetings is a great way of getting a bunch of work down (one assumes that you’re not going to meeting that aren’t actually anything to do with your job?) by allowing one ‘disrupted’ day as an enabler for more days of ‘undisrupted’ application.

5) Conversation Domination – Everyone has a different style when it comes to conversation and interaction in a group setting. Most teams have at least one person who gets on a roll and takes over the conversation. Be sure to include every participant in each agenda item discussion. Make an effort to keep the meeting flowing, but allow your soft-spoken coworkers an opportunity to contribute as well.

Legal in most countries, dart guns are useful meeting tools….

6) Status Quo – So, your weekly meeting is terrible. However, you’ve begrudgingly resigned yourself into believing that “that’s the way it is.” Nonsense! Invite an Outside Facilitator to audit and adjust how you hold your meetings. There’s no excuse for accepting failure in your meetings. It’s too costly and time consuming not to take action and make some changes.

…and ask yourself if you are a meeting inflictor – do you call meetings because it makes you feel good about yourself or to drag everyone else’s productivity down to your level while looking like an achiever yourself…yes, everybody else probably does hate you but mindless meetings aren’t going to help that…

…and two more from me…

7) Take minutes. Useful minutes that will mean something to someone else when you get moved on, minutes that actually record not just the fact of decisions and actions but the ‘why’ of them as well. If you don’t make any effort to enshrine the ‘why’ you can not cry or bleat when nothing ever seems to change and you feel like Bill Murray’s shorts in Groundhog Day….

8) Think outside the square. Consider whether an anomaly in the space-time continuum is affecting the conduct of your meetings…let me now handover to Dean from TWShiloh to discuss this point further in (drum roll) Homeland Disfunction – The true and astounding adventures of Peter Wesley part 2…enjoy…I did!

Edit: I think I am already committed 25 July (there are those that think I should be committed on a more permanent basis) but the webinar on scorecards might be interesting…I’m not a big scorecard fan as they alwasy seem to devolve into some arcane spreadsheet hell but am always interested in other people’s takes on how they might be done better…

It’s dorky, it’s ugly and…

Posted on 21 June 2012 by SJPONeill

…and it serves no useful purpose…

A solution in search of a problem

OK, so, yeah whatever, it’s technically very cool and it’s not REALLY an aircraft so you can let a couple of NCOs operate it – and of course save a bundle on what you would actually have to pay a proper crew…

I’m clearly a big fan of unmanned systems – in entirely the wrong job if I wasn’t – but it’s like they used to teach in the good old days at the Tactics School ‘..task with a purpose…’ that is, you don’t just do stuff simply because you can…

So what are my issues with the unmanned cargo aerial vehicle:

Even the acronym is dodgy as UCAV also represents unmanned combat aerial vehicle and I’m not sure we want to be getting to two confused. Maybe a good rule of thumb could be that if you have two acronyms that can be applied interchangeably but mean totally different things, then one of them has to change. Litmus test: would anyone be upset if the US announced it was deploying ‘UCAVs’ to Libya? (Let’s not go near the whole Syrian debacle…

It’s optionally manned i.e. the cockpit is still there and functional so that if required a pilot (one only as it is a single seater) can operate it. Sounds like someone is hedging their bets but who’d want to be flying a single seat unarmoured helicopter at low level in the badlands…possibly keeping it sellable so keep an eye out for some slightly used optionally manned K-Maxs on eBay.

It’s meant to save lives. How is not exactly clear. The greater numbers of casualties in a helicopter crash come from the passengers – this thing isn’t carrying passengers and it’s only doing ash and trash tasks which are not noted as being amongst the more dangerous helicopter missions unless all of a sudden boredom is actually a hazard.

Oh, I see, it’s meant to save lives by reducing the amount of ground traffic that needs to be exposed to the IED threat. But haven’t we been doing the airborne resupply thing for years now? What has K/Max really brought to the party except another aircraft type to maintain and operate?

This whole thing of we’ll only travel by air because of the IEDs gives the lie to ‘war amongst the people’: having come in and screwed up your country, we happy for us to have the luxury of free air travel…whoa, you locals step away from the aircraft – you still get to travel by land and risk the threat aimed at us. Yeah right, much as we don’t want our people to go in harm’s way, this is simply ceding the ground to the bad guys which bad. What’s worse is that validates IEDs as valid and effective tools to employ against ground forces. Expect to see (LOTS) more of them until they go the way of the Zeppelin and and made untenable as weapon systems. That means putting more resource into countering IEDs to the left, well to the left of the BANG. the K-Max UCAV isn’t going to help you there.

The K-Max might actually add to the problems created by ceding the land environment (great for air forces though!!) because every boring mundane MANNED ash and trash mission puts eyes on the ground, and the more that they cover the same area on a routine basis, the greater the familiarity they build up and the more likely they are to be able to detect and identify some form of anomaly or indicator that might need to be followed up.

Every manned helicopter currently doing the ash and trash mission can be reroled on the fly for emergency dust-off of casualties or to provide airborne ISR for troops in contact…can’t really do that with the K-Max UCAV. You also can’t use it to provide quick fires with its door guns because it doesn’t have doors let alone guns…can’t toss an airborne sniper up in it either…

There are hidden costs. This thing is not fitted with any form of self-protection system so its only really any good where there no air threat to helicopters. One also wonders how good the flight control system is once the aircraft has been damaged in flight – will it be able to autonomously divert to an alternate LZ or even opt to make an emergency landing in the field?

So sorry, close but no cigar…UAVs are useful but they are not a universal panacea for all ills and they certainly do make the IED issue ‘go away’…but everything has to actually contribute meaningfully to the war effort and, as writ to date, the K-Max UCAV simply doesn’t…

Weekly Photo Challenge: Close

Posted on 16 June 2012 by SJPONeill

One of the neat things about my job is that I get to travel regularly and often that travel takes me to places with great aviation-themed museums…as a result I can get up close and personal with some aircraft that here, I could only ever enjoy vicariously from afar…

This is the ‘Great White Hope’ of the British aircraft industry in the mid-60s…in never got a name other than the TSR.2…only one ever flew and only two survive in the world after the ~~Communist~~ British Government decided that manned aircraft had little future in modern combat…whether all the new technologies incorporated into the TSR.2 would have come to fruition and it would have been the much-lamented Mosquito of the Cold War is debatable (and that debate still rages!) but it is very cool that museums such as the RAF Museum at Cosford let you get as close as this to such an icon.

Still on a Cold War kick, the Vulcan bomber was one of the three ‘V’ bombers developed in the wake of WW2 and the early days of the (then) not-so Cold War that were technological and conceptual leaps ahead from the Lancasters and Lincolns that they replaced. The Vulcan was a massive delta wing that soldiered on until retirement in the 1980s – it was only in the twilight of its RAF service that it was ever employed in anger, being the mainstay of the Black Buck missions flown against the Argetine-occupied Falkland Islands in 1982. Very cool being able to get so close to the one in the Imperial War Musuem at Hendon that I could stand up in the bomb bay…even cooler that one last Vulcan, privately-operated, still flies in the UK air show circuit…

I was really happy to be able to get this close to a Vulcan here and at Cosford as I (VERY) slowly wrestle with the pig that is the Heritage Aviation Vulcan in 1/32…

And finally…close up and personal with an oddity like the C-125 Raider…designed as a short take-off and landing utility aircraft after WW2 in case that whole ricketty shakey helicopter thing didn’t pan out…this one is parked outside at the USAF Museum near Dayton, Ohio – hopefully it will be moved inside once the new annex is built…

So there’s my non-schmaltzy (possibly unless you’re a fellow plane-spotter) take on ‘close‘…hit the link to see some more…

Weekly Photo Challenge – Friendship

Posted on 11 June 2012 by SJPONeill

Friendship is this week’s photo challenge…Ruby wasn’t too sure about the new kid on the block but once he indicated that he understood who really was boss, everything was rosy…during the Great Pig Invasion of ’07, it was little Kirk who stood his ground when one of them barrelled over Ruby. Ruby’s not with us any more, passing away soon after this picture was taken, but if she was, the proportions shown here would pretty well be reversed as Kirk is now a very healthy 55+ kilograms…

The Great Pig Invasion

Not ‘friendship’…they came in low under the fence one afternoon, accompanied by a semi-wild mama pigess who was well into a major sense of funny failure…the RDC animal control officer took one look and decided ‘not my problem’…in the end, armed Police had to come down – if our last attempt to corrall them hadn’t been successful, it would have been pork and bacon all around for a year…!