Weekly Photo Challenge: Merge

Posted on 4 September 2012 by SJPONeill

Merge had me stumped for weeks – all I could think of was traffic lanes merging and my particular hate for the nanny-state merge lights on motorway on-ramps – are people really too dumb to figure it out for themselves? – but this challenge came through only a couple of days AFTER I got home from a recent work visit to Auckland where such silliness abounds…

Then…when we were exploring our property with the dogs over the weekend – been here eight years and still not even close to exploring it all – we stumbled a native tree (a couple of metres thick) that had collapsed over a small stream, creating this massive bridge a dozen or so feet above the trickle of water. We were amazed at how well it merged into the surrounding bush until we were right on top of it – didn’t have a camera with us, then it started to rain…

Finally I came back to this image, my first instinct, the Shuttle Enterprise where science fiction met science fact – only nine years after NCC-1701 first flashed across grainy black and white TV screens we were naming our first true spaceship after her…

Footnote: I first heard of the Star Trek: New Voyages project in early 2007. Carmen and I had stopped at Bosco’s Cafe in Te Kuiti (northern end opposite the Teak shop and before the Shell station and New World heading north) after another weekend working on Hell’s Holiday Home at Te Waitere on the West Coast, on the southern edge of Kawhia Harbour. The December 2006 issue of Wired carried an article on a group of Trek fans who had accumulated a few props and started to film their own Original Series episodes (kicking off their own Season 4) in a barn. Bit by bit, they garnered more support and more cash including a bunch of unofficial support and assistance from Paramount Pictures. Working in the US later in 2007, I managed to download the two or three episode then available (couldn’t download at home – over the dial-up connection we had then, I’d still be waiting on it now) but never quite got round to getting them onto DVD and watching them.

It was only when reading a thread on developing Star Trek paper models that I stumbled across the link again and downloaded the seven available episodes – I think that the production team is aiming on one a year which is pretty good for a backyard effort – and worked out how to use MS Movie Maker to stitch the 4-5 files for each episode together and then convert this WMV file to an MK4 for the WD TV player in the lounge using Handbrake.

So last night – finally – I got to dim the lights and watch the first couple of episodes: Kirk is still going through his B-grade scifi stage so he sat up the front by the TV and watched as well. In Harm’s Way, episode 2, was, we thought, pretty damn good and at least to the standard of the original series. I understand that production and acting values get better as the series progresses so we’re off to check out another couple of episodes now…

Weekly Photo Challenge: Wrong

Posted on 19 August 2012 by SJPONeill

Old Oamaru Hospital 1998

Some things are just wrong…the demise of the regional public health system…in 1998, I was home on leave…I may have been recovering from an injury as I remember doing an awful lot of walking in that period but not much, if any, running…

Oamaru is a small coastal town on the east coast of the South Island of New Zealand – it once was a thriving rural support centre with a railhead linking inland with main trunk rail services – we used to be able to look across the breakfast table and see the plume of smoke from the train servicing the Oamaru Stone quarry at Weston – and a small port supporting coastal shipping services – when such still existed. Both the rail and shipping are gone now: there are no passenger rail services south of Christchurch and the harbour is slowly silting up…

A view from the grounds of St Lukes, facing north-east, overlooking some of the restored Oamaru Stone Buildings

In the late 80s, Oamaru began to tidy itself up and started a programme to re-invent itself by revitalising the old Victorian port quarter – an industrial scunge hole as long as I have known it – as the new centre of town, It is now a thriving area of re-enactors, cafes and other businesses that, among other things hosts annual penny farthing races. As part of this programme, a lot of other areas in town were tidied up including restoring all the buildings in Oamaru Stone to the original blinding white of the raw stone, and developing a series of walking/running tracks all through the hills on which most of the town sits.

Oamaru’s main street, Thames Street, looking north.

In 1998, these tracks were all quite new to me and I spent the better part of a fortnight exploring them all in daily walks. One of then follows the line of Hospital Hill (so named for obvious reasons) and gives the walker the option of dropping off south towards the Gardens or heading north on a leg that runs along the hills that parallel the coast. The latter course takes one through the old hospital complex and it was here that I snapped the image above. Regardless of the rights or wrongs of the re-organisation of the public health system a couple of decades ago, I still think that abandoning the detritus of this programme to rust outside the former hospital buildings was just wrong…

The walkway from the Gardens follows the Oamaru Creek east towards the sea; the building at top right is the northern edge of the restored Victorian quarter.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Growth

Posted on 11 August 2012 by SJPONeill

This is my big dog, Kirk, before he became my BIG dog – we’ve had him since he was an itty puppy and have watched his growth over the past five years into a big dog that loves to watch animal shows on TV….

I posted an item under the Mundane to Meaningful writing challenge last week about my thoughts when I spotted the Avenger being rolled out at RNZAF Ohakea last week. Although it kinda reflects my thoughts at the time, it’s a bit maudlin and, IMHO, not that effective as a piece of writing…

So without taking anything away from the young men and women that launch themselves into the air each day from Ohakea in Hueys and Air trainers and now NH-90s and A-109s, here’s what my first instinct to write about for that challenge really was…

Saryrday afternoon and I’d finished work – I normally work a Tuesday-Saturday weekend to align with Carmen’s week and also to align with the US working day as a large portion of my work is engaging with overseas partners – and I’d just relocated downstairs from the study where I work, often eight hours in a single (literally) sitting, to the lounge where I can stretch out on the couch by the fire, watch some TV and surf the net.

Surfing the net outside off the study is a relatively new experience for us as we have always been somewhat bandwidth-limited in our scenic rural location and thus never really felt the need or had the driver of cable broadband to invest in an internal wifi router, aggravated by the fact that straight routers independent of a built-in ADSL modem haven’t been that common. Just after Christmas last year, we finally replaced our standard phone and internet services with a satellite connection – complete with big ugly dish on the west-facing side of the house – from Farmside. It’s still quite a novelty being free of the study to surf anywhere in the house, even – wow – in bed!

I don’t remember the weather but it must have been cold as the fire had been on all day – whatever the weather, it’s almost always warm inside as the house has been designed as a real heat trap in winter – but opens right up to keep us cool in summer (next time we actually have one) – so it’s not like we need to huddle around the fireplace to keep cosy. It just happens to be that it is right by the couch that faces directly onto the TV.

So getting back to Kirk…as I said we’ve had him since he was a little little puppy but he’s probably closer to me because he used to come to work with me when he was little rather than be left outside with the other dogs on a large and (then) unfenced section. I had my own office and it’s not like there was a mass stream of people queuing up to visit anyone in the doctrine/lessons learned world. So Kirkie’s kinda bonded more with me than anyone else…what that means is that every once in a while, he’s gets a bit angsty and follows me around like a shadow. If I shuffle so much as a foot along the couch, he’ll get up walk a whole half-step and then thunks (it’s like he just switches his legs off and drops) down on the floor at my feet again.

So when I’m on the couch and the fire’s on, Kirk will usually be crashed out on the floor right by the fire. You may have noticed that Kirk is a large black dog and you’ve probably already joined the dots with his heat-absorption abilities. He’ll lie there for an hour or so, slowly baking before having enough of that and lumbering over to the water bowl in the kitchen where being hot, he slobbers down a couple of litres before resuming his position with his head on my foot. So what this has to with Mundane to Meaningful, WordPress Challenges and the like?

Well…just as that inaugural Weekly Writing Challenge email chirped into my inbox – I was watching JAG by the fire – big Kirk sicked up over my feet….no surprise really after he’d just slurped up a litre or so of water from the bowl in the kitchen. I let him outside, just in case there was more to follow, and mopped up his mess – mostly water so not too bad. When I let him back in, he loped over to the ‘scene of the crime’ , sniffing all a round it, almost like he wanted to make sure it was all cleaned up…and was really quite embarrassed by his little whoopsy…

Sometimes Kirk and his offsider, Lulu, appear so human…you really wonder what is going on in those big heads; why these massive carnivores dote on us so much…what did someone say recently? That we should aspire to be the people our dogs think we are…? So when Kirk trails me around the house, squeezes into tiny space under my desk or between the coffee table and the couch, just to be closer to me, I can cut him some slack because he’s my mate…

He makes me sound like a doofus sometimes…

Weekly Photo Challenge: Purple

Posted on 28 July 2012 by SJPONeill

I think this is Hers because its mouth is always open….

We love our home but the entire interior is brown…wood grain, chipboard of one form or another, for a little variety, maybe varnished woodgrain or chipboard of one form or another…boringly, depressingly brown…

It was designed to be functional as a ski lodge, not as a home, and everything is very hardy, pretty much (but not always) practical, and functional. It didn’t have bedrooms when we bought it, just cubicles for bunk beds – lots of them – and they were the first to go in the first month of our occupation.

The interior doors were all white…boringly, depressingly white and functional…a few years back we used to spend the better part of two hours a day driving to and from work (back in the good old days when we both worked in the same place) and, in winter, that used to be a whole new source of depression as it’d be dark when we left and dark when we got home: we’d turn on the lights to be confront with brooown, and more broooown…and the brooownest most depressing part of the house is the back hallway which doesn’t get much light to brighten it up….

This one night, on the way home, we decided to add a splash of colour to the booooring brooooown back hallway (well, actually, it’s just THE hallway as it’s the only one we’ve got). We stopped at the ‘Kune Bunnings (when such still existed) and bought a litre (quart for those less enlightened) of nice purple paint; had a quick snack as soon as we got in the door, and set to de-hanging doors…there were nine doors coming off the hallway (got that down to eight now with the absorption of the spare shower into a larger bathroom – yes, it actually has a bath in it now; before it was just a ‘basin’ room – one day the bath might actually get hooked up to some utilities…) and over the next two night we removed cleaned, sanded and painted four of the them (His, Hers, laundry and #1 shower).

In a previous episode of Raurimu Renovation, we had scored some wooden heads from the Teak import shop in Te Kuiti and, after much intellectual discussion on which was His and which was Hers, mounted them to respective doors….

This might also give you a teeny taste of broooown…..

Weekly Photo Challenge: Dreaming

Posted on 22 July 2012 by SJPONeill

Dreaming was the theme in last week’s photo challenge but the accompanying spiel didn’t really seem to align with that theme…

“We chose this week’s photo challenge subject because it utilizes one technique we love to play around with: long exposures. Sometimes we use a neutral density filter; other times, we go organic and get the aperture, ISO and shutter speed to align perfectly in an effort to give our shots an otherworldly sense of escapism. (Using a long exposure is also a great way to blur people and other unwanted “noise” out of your photo.) “

So this one here, you could argue is a time exposure or simply just dreaming….

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….

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…!

Weekly Photo Challenge: Today

Posted on 4 June 2012 by SJPONeill

This morning I have been wandering around Vancouver taking care of some final errands before checking out of the hotel and heading for the airport. In the back of my mind for the last couple of days has been this weeks’ photo challenge ‘today‘: the requirement is simply for any photo so long as it has been freshly snapped on the day of posting…

Near the end of my travels, I stumbled (almost literally) across this sign and while it strike me as very ‘today’ – a meal here and you might not have any tomorrows…! I wonder sometimes about teh seafood industry and whether it needs to seriously start thinking about creating a body to oversee restaurant naming conventions…? This is from when we were in Crystal City a couple oif months back…