Open sourcing

Posted on 13 May 2010 by SJPONeill

Eighteen or so months ago, I blew up our last computer…well…strictly speaking, it was a stray power surge that snuck in through the phone line – every thing else ran through a surge protector…on replacing it, rather than go through the hassle of getting another MS Office license through my work, I thought that I might dive into the world of open source software…to be totally honest, I’m not that impressed…

The first application I started to use was OpenOffice 3…none of the individual applications particularly impressed me and I can’t wait now to save up to buy a copy of MS Office 2007. The sole redeeming feature of OpenOffice was the built-in PDF creator: everything else about it is clunky and counter-intuitive and I won’t be sad to see it depart my hard drive…the kiss of death was when two important files I was working on in Writer (the Word ‘equivalent) vanished into the ether while I was working on them, leaving me with two very old previous versions…

Next up was Sunbird, a standalone calendar scheduling app – why would you want a calendar app that works independently from the rest of your office tools? Bye…

I persevered with Thunderbird but its clunky interface pretty well did me in and the hassle exporting emails to another email app did me in – one of my real bug bears about many of these open source apps is that they seem to pride themselves on unhelpful help sections and making users work to find how to do the most simple things…bye…

I didn’t try Linux as an OS as I had already kicked that into touch a few years back when Dick Smith was peddling it as a viable alternative to Windows – which it was only if you wanted to spend the rest of your life trying to get your Windows programmes running properly on Linux…

A different story though in the graphics world where GIMP and Inkscape have almost evicted Photopaint and CorelDraw from my hard drive – I have yet to find any task in either app that is less than intuitive..

Scribus is probably the winner IMHO – even though I had a really rocky start with it last year and couldn’t work out how to do anything, I remembered this week that Bing is our friend and manged to hunt down a couple of introductory tutorials that got me over the hump and all of a sudden all those PageMaker memories came flooding back and I was away laughing…

The open source community, I think, is a little sad and pathetic…as a general rule they all seem to be so keen to stick it to Bill Gates and deny him one zillionth of a per cent of his gross income that they fail to see that the product of their little rebellion is essentially crap…as they say, in most cases, you get what you pay for…

Homework almost done

I was using Scribus to compile the lecture I delivered at Vic last Friday which is taking me longer than expected as I come up to speed but have it 2/3 done – then then Josh suggested this morning that it might all be a bit easier for future lectures and consults to break it down into its component parts…doh!! Absolutely right, so once I get the account for the last FY done, I’ll be decompiling it into individual chapters…watch this space…

Should we be worried…

Here’s a site I found today…six tonne robots with x-ray vision slicing up defenceless animals…are we next? Scott Technologies…pretty cool…

Russ and Rid do it again…

Can’t wait to see Robin Hood…

You turn your back for just a second…

Posted on 3 May 2010 by SJPONeill

Exhibit #1 – authorities believe Grasshopper is just an innocent victim, in the wrong place at the wrong time…the usual suspects (both of them) are being lined up…

We had the twins for the weekend – it’s always fun but full-on and this is just a none-too-subtle reminder of how quickly they are growing up (literally)…the jar was only about one-third full when one of them swiped (the evidence is difficult to argue with) it off the kitchen bench after lunch. It was quite a good effort as they managed to keep most of the jam off themselves (something they refuse to do at actual meal times) and were only busted when the penny dropped for me that there was simply way too much jam around the house to have come from the jam on toast we had for lunch (with healthy stuff as well) in the lounge…

It’s a lesson that one can never become too complacent that little hands will not extend their reach, the guy you install as president of Afghanistan will not decide to go his own way, or that the service you dedicate 18 years to will not dump you like a hot and embarrassing potato…I refer here to the case of Royal Marine Sergeant Mark Leader [PDF: Two war-weary Marines with a size 10 wellington boot] who was court martialed and dismissed, after 18 years of top quality military service five times decorated with campaign medals , after throwing a Wellington boot at a Taliban terrorist. The Taliban in question had been found burying an IED just 50 metres from base where Leader had witnessed his best friend and two other mates blown up by an IED just prior to this.

It’d be interesting to see the full facts of this case – perhaps there is way more to it that was has been reported to date – but this certainly seems to be yet another application of the perception that we, the good guys, can fight nice wars. Unfortunately the price of niceness is the blood of US and NATO soldiers…The opposite of ‘nice’ is not ‘brutal’ – it is ‘practical’ and ‘pragmatic’ – and this seems to be totally lost on British leaders who seem think this war (lower case) is simply an over-resourced exercise in flag-waving and a great gesture of unity with the US (which, after all, might be required to sail across the Atlantic and bail out the UK for a fourth time)…

Eon

I’ve just finished a great book, Greg Bear’s Eon, which is one of the main reasons that blog updates have dried up over the last few days. Carmen picked it up for me at the Sally Army shop in Hamilton for a dollar at the same time as she bought me The Star Trek yarn Garth of Izar…I must have read another Bear story in the dim dark past as I have always avoided his books for well over two decades but Eon really gripped me right from the start and I will probably have to go off and ferret out some others once the ‘have-to’ reading list gets a little shorter….

The fractal guy…

Benoit Mandelbrot’s The (Mis)Behaviour of Markets was recommended to me as a fresh look at irregularity and uncertainty, and as such, a possible source for some out of the square illumination on the complex contemporary environment…I haven’t even got to the end of the preface and already I a. love it, b. have dredged out some really good material, and c. taken off on some wild tangential thoughts…once the employment situation becomes a little more stable, I think that this one will be a permanent addition to the library.

Kilcullen again…

The other recent tome that I have decided to add to the physical library is David Kilcullen’s The Accidental Guerrilla. I am speaking on doctrine, COIN and Kilcullen this Friday and have had to wait for the library to reloan me a copy to use as an aid for any parts of my review notes that I can’t, read or remember why I wrote what I did. Dr Kilcullen has secured a place for himself as one of the most influential figures of the last decade and as such is deserving of a place on the shelves in the study here at the Raurimu Centre for Thinking About Stuff (CTAS). He’s just released a new book but I think I’ll test read this from the library first as the abstracts for CounterInsurgency @ Oxford University Press and Small War Journal sounds a little too much like a rehash of previous works…

Ginga Ninja

Andrew Inwald released his 1/33 Yokosuka P1Y Ginga at Paper Models last week…and it surpasses even his Judy and Il-14…those who are into this sort of creative expression might want to download it just to see how it’s done…you can do that here at Paper Modelers although you will need to register and make one post on the forum to get to the downloads…

Yes, it’s paper…!

In other paper news, Ken West of XB-70 Valkyrie and B-58 Hustler fame has announced the start of the design phase of a 1/32 Lockheed SR-71, although the exact model or models is still TBC e.g. A-12, YF-12A, D-21 drone carrier etc…

A little update

Posted on 19 April 2010 by SJPONeill

A month or so, I mentioned catching up with the designer of the FX bike, an ultralight-weight motorcycle that in addition to being a great fun tool, also has considerable potential for military and security work – certainly in any environment where there are obstacles that would defeat a normal size bike like a KLR, and/or where there may be a required for mobility within tight space/weight limits, for example, on small boats or light aircraft.

Since then, I have had a number of chats with Mike @ FX Bikes as he prepares to shift offshore to the more commercially viable US market…it’s not so much the size of the Kiwi market that’s the big issue but the lack of commercial production facilities down here… Mike is also preparing FX Bikes as an investment opportunity and is seeking professional investors to take FX Bikes to the next level. Professional investors are those types you see lined up on Dragon’s Den, grilling potential entrepreneurs til they are well done…

Having seen the FX Bike and as a former rider who struggled to negotiate logs, ditches, fences etc with his Army-issue XL250, I think it is a damn fine example of Kiwi ingenuity and one worthy of further development and investment…

The Renovations

The big job over the last week or so has been walling into the study so that we can secure it over those periods when we lease the Lodge out…really just converting it from a mezzanine to a room proper…it’s a pretty simple job but I’ve just spent most of today removing the first attempt at Gib-stopping as the seam paper has lifted in a number of areas and to guarantee the seam from future cracks, it’s better to do it again. That means tons of sanding and oodles of dust all through the living area; between sanding and cleaning, I’ve not had much time for blogging and am not likely to for most of the week. Updates will be short and sharp until normal services are resumed…

The Pacific

Part Two starts in a few minutes. I like it, although it’s not yet offering Band Of Brothers any competition in this family, and will be interested to see how it develops. My standard for tales of the Marines in the Pacific remains Leon Uris’ Battle Cry and I’m about to lend my latest copy (have worn out at least two previous copies) to #1 daughter to read…

Promises, promises

Posted on 8 April 2010 by SJPONeill

@ Small Wars there is a new article by Wilf Owen rather provocatively proposing that a ‘horde’ of 4WD armed with modern guided weapons could inflict significant damage to an Anglospheric brigade size force i.e. a Stryker Brigade or Armoured Cavalry Squadron. I’m not convinced – we have always been susceptible to myths of uber-weapons from the other side of the fence – remember the Hind super-helicopter killing machine that was going to sweep all before it in the 80s? – and think that we shouldn’t be selling ourselves short…

Wilf’s article is well-written and if the aim was to promote professional discussion, then it is probably successful and more power to anyone prepared to publicly put pen to paper rather than just lip off in the Mess/ O Club (if such things still exist).

If however, the aim was to actually promote a viable capability, then it has a long way to go. What really got my back up was the comment “…if any officer reading this cannot conceive of ways to inflict significant damage to a Stryker Brigade, or Armoured Cavalry Squadron; given 100 SUVs, 100 x ATGM + MANPADS and maybe 500 men; then they probably have no place in their chosen profession…” To me this is an unnecessary and somewhat arrogant (ignorant?) throwaway line that adds no value whatsoever. To turn it around, any officer that would allow such a force to do significant damage to a Anglospheric brigade probably needs to be relieved immediately, as does any unit commander in one of those formations that could wipe the floor with a Toyota horde.

The horde, if successful at all, would be a one hit wonder (anyone remember ‘Promises‘and Baby It’s You from the 70s – not just the lead singer’s ‘attributes’?) that would be easily countered. The terrain necessary for the horde to have any sort of practical mobility would also act against it and unless it could shelter behind the skirts of a large non-combatant population, it would be vulnerable to both ISR and engagement systems. Where the horde might be employable, would be a follow-on force to a more conventional ‘hammer’ to mop small outposts and stay-behind forces.

There is/will most likely be a place for swarming in near/far future conflicts but, at the moment, the concept still awaits some conceptual and technical developments. Ultimately, it could take us a number of steps closer to Heinlein’s Mobile Infantry concept that we aspired to in the mid-90s with the Empty Battlefield et al…

I had a long discussion with a compadre last night and one of the topics we touched on was the paucity of professional papers, other than those extracted by force as part of staff college compliance rituals, on topics of contemporary relevance, from authors down under – certainly there doesn’t seem to be any shortage of serving and former officers prepared to launch themselves into the arena in the Northern Hemisphere and the US Army probably leads in the development and publication of professional discussion, regardless of whether the concepts espoused follow political or doctrinal party lines. Having been privileged enough to have been invited to attend the Chief of Army’s Seminar at Massey University last year and corresponding with some of the speakers and attendees, I wonder, of the 200 or so uniformed attendees, how many have progressed any of the subjects discussed at the Seminar? It probably doesn’t help that the Massey web page for the Seminar exhibits a rather minimalist design philosophy and only links to recordings of the presentations with no transcripts or even speaker bios, let alone forums for further discussion – come on, guys, I think you need to up your game for the contemporary environment and the information age…!!!! It might be an interesting experiment, as I assume planning for the 2010 Seminar looms, to ask all the attendees for their two most enduring memories of the 2009 Seminar…

Oh, what to do…?

It’s all so confusing…I’m looking around for a portable computing device that lets me make notes and sketches away from the desktop PC in the study e.g. when I am away from home, even just popping down to the shop, or watching TV in the lounge so that the notes and sketches can be ported/synced directly back into the main PC. At the moment, I make a lot of my review notes on the good old legal pad and then manually transcribe them which takes more time that I have and eats significantly into productivity. I often forget to take a notebook with me when I leave the house as it always ends up back by the PC for transcription and stays there for my next foray out into the world…

I had thought that perhaps the iPad might be the answer but following up a link from Paper Modelers I’ve found that there are a range of new and impending technologies that might meet my needs…my gut feeling is that I’d be better off with something closer to a tablet than an iPhone so that I can read papers in closer to a traditional page format (am I turning into a fuddy-duddy?) and also so that I can also have a decent-sized work area for graphics…

Mmmmm….

Those from the Wellington IPMS community especially will know that I am a bit of an attention-seeker in my modelling procurements…in 2007, I was allowed to buy the Soar Art 80cm Railway Gun in 1/35 scale. It is very big and impressive – I can only just manhandle the box on my own – and I have been slowly assembling it. Like most people, I built the barrel first…

Yes, folks, the breech block is really the same size as a contemporary tank!! The barrel assembly is now painted and as complete as it needs to be for now and I have psyched myself up to start on the railway trucks that bear this monster but…somewhere in the course of domestic re-orgs that comprehensive instruction manual has gone west – no doubt it has been placed somewhere ‘safe’ – and I went to the Soar Art site to ask for a new manual. While there, I surfed through some of their partnered companies and stumbled into the world of Dust, a “…what-if world, a fictionary world based on our true history and mixed-up with science fiction…” and found this…

KV-152I Fury of Ivan – WOOF!!!!

…and I want one!!! Damn New Year’s resolutions….

The Long Tomorrow

Posted on 16 March 2010 by SJPONeill

Yes, I know…on Thursday, I said I’d start listing the characteristics of the contemporary environment ‘tomorrow‘…but between twins, sick animals and wife being home for the weekend, some things got nudged off to the side…the first instalment will come off the slips tonight…promise…

This is cool

Following through on my resolve to renew old contacts, I rippled off a number of LinkedIn connection requests to LinkedIn members in my email address book. One of them runs a Christchurch-based company, FX Bikes which manufactures and distributes “…the world’s lightest off-road motorcycle, a superlight dirt bike that crosses over between motocross and mountain bike to form a totally new category of ‘mountain motorcycle’…” with an all-up weight of only 57kg – I’ve carried packs weighing that much!! I first came across the Mountain Moto in 2004 when the FX Bike New Zealand marketing tour came through Waiouru…as a former despatch rider on the trusty old XL250, many was the time when a ditch, log, fence or other easily climbable obstacle became a real war-stopper so I saw a real appeal in this new design from the start…unfortunately, I was somewhat alone in those thoughts and FX got a fairly cool reception from capability managers back then “…it’s just a mountain bike with an engine…!” Thus it is quite satisfying, five years on, to see that this is now “…Under evaluation by NZ Special Forces and Police Search and Rescue, under consideration by US Army…”

The California Office

Man dogs

Michael Yon, has (finally) given up on bashing and gotten back into serious writing.

Two days ago, there was a series of coordinated IED attacks in Kandahar City “… Details still sketchy but the “Consolidated SITREP” indicates multiple explosions at 1937hrs. 1) BBIED at al-Jidad Market, vicinity Indian Embassy; 2) VBIED at Sarpoza prison incl SAFIRE/RPG; 3) SVBIED at Red Mosque; 4) VBIED Police HQ approx 20 KIA incl 12 ANP, 8 Unkn; 5) Attack PSS (type attack unkn); Total approx 30 KIA incl approx 20 ANP and 10 LN. 97th MPs responded. No known Coalition Casualties. HWY 1 closed to civilian traffic until further…” The bill to date stands around three dozen civilians and ANP – Afghans killing Afghans…

His latest Dispatch Man Dogs provides an interesting commentary on the technological contrasts of this conflict (with some stunning imagery) and also upon the true nature of suicide bombing…the abuse of fellow Afghans and Muslims by their own…this is not a ‘nice’ war as much as we try to distance ourselves from the realities and create a ‘no eggs broken’ omelette…

One comment on the Facebook page raises some interesting issues regarding metrics and combat indicators “…So sad – lives lived to kill or be killed. I’ve read Afghan women and their young daughters, in case of being raped and they survive, keep rat poison handy to commit suicide rather than endure humiliation…I’m also aware of use of a wide variety of drugs by the insurgents/suicide bombers to perpetuate Man Dog behaviors: epinephrine to embolden the bomber/shooter and squeeze out the last drop of blood in a “hyper”-pumping, dying heart, narcotics to dull the pain, speed, cocaine, etc…
Michael, the troops and you have encountered numerous weapons caches and young human shields on housetops. Any comments regarding drug caches and abuse among insurgents that pose an even more asymmetric aspect of war our honorable, decent troops face?…” While we focus upon the IED trail to the left and right of the BANG, and the obvious components of bomber, bomb components, initiation devices, etc it may be that the dishonour/drug combination can be added to the list…

…and on NATO…

“…Guaranteed that many troops who have served here will have sharp feelings/thoughts about some Coalition partners. Some partners get accolades — others would be better off at home. It’s not one big happy family over here. A lot of partners simply do not pull their weight, and you will see complaints do not always involve U.S. I’ve seen Italians complain about Spanish, and French complain about Italians, for instance. The Dutch say the Germans don’t pull their weight. (But the Dutch are leaving while the Germans are sending more troops.) We are lucky that NATO never faced a serious enemy because, fact is, we have very few credible partners. Most of the partners cannot fight. The Taliban will crush nearly all of them. If we left, and the rest of NATO gave it their very best effort, the Taliban likely would be driving captured NATO vehicles through Kabul within a couple years. The Taliban would blast these bases to smithereens if the U.S. were not defending against the rocket/mortar attacks. (Saw that in Iraq — U.S. bases got hit, but partner bases got pounded like pinatas.) This war has been an eye-opener. Most of our partners are weak. Pitifully weak...”

Portable books

I’ve been an Audible subscriber for almost 10 years and been a believer in portable reading for a long time. One of the problems I have been grappling with for a while is the sheer bulk of information that comes across my desk these days. I find myself continually tempted to print out reports, articles, papers etc for reading away from the PC and so have a growing mountain of paper that can only be searched the old-fashioned way. Dean @ Travels with Shiloh is trying out a ‘nook‘ and so far it seems to be working well. I’d tried this with both iMate and Blackberry and found the experience of reading a PDF on such a small screen somewhat unsatisfying – I’ll be watching Dean’s experiment with interest…

Marines ‘get it’

Hardly any surprises there. Neptunus Lex comments on the Marines’ approach to COIN in Afghanistan where they are apparently creating some ripples in the pond of the ‘nice’ war…”…CENTCOM’s strategy is to protect population centers using the “oil spot” strategy of Baghdad. The Corps, on the other hand, is seeking to minimize the Taliban’s freedom to maneuver through vast swaths of otherwise uncontested battlespace outside the cities as they did in Anbar…” Good to see that at least someone sees the folly of the CENTCOM ‘Cursed Earth‘ strategy…

Local news

Posted on 24 February 2010 by SJPONeill

Paper Modelers is back up again but has lost 2-3 weeks of contributions…

Carmen and I visited the big smoke of Palmerston North on Monday. I had an assessment test as part of a job application at 9AM which made for an early start – and a longish drive as there was quite thick fog along the route, made more interesting in some parts by the various resealing projects along both highways: nothing quite like a grey-out when suddenly you loose your points of reference to the side of the road due to the fog, the road markings have yet to be repainted…and you can’t only hope you are still heading to where you should be going and not the ditch or oncoming traffic…The assessment test was a breeze_ I had hyped myself up about it…can I make a credible effort on 80 questions in 40 minutes? As it turned out, 25 minutes was all it needed, giving 15 for checking and changing my minds on a couple…don’t want to get too cocky yet til I get the debrief though.

Bit the bullet and invested in a proper Freeview decoder to replace the crappy one I got off Trademe before Christmas – it craps out on a regular basis, especially during must-watch programmes like Coro…so after resetting it every couple of minutes during Bones on Sunday night we decided to spend the money for peace of mind – just wish we had UHF coverage here for so we could have the HD option as well…think twice before buying a DS200 satellite TV decoder – that there are no contact details anywhere for the manufacturer should have been a warning for me…

Had a brief catch-up with the lads at Hawkeye UAS and then an interesting chat at the Centre for Defence Studies at Massey University – Carmen is still rubbing it in that I got lost finding the right office on campus whereas she found it first time when she when to look for me after I missed our RV in the car park…didn’t help my case for GPS though…

In November 2009, I along with many others, was less than impressed when it was announced that the NZ Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) had a NZ$12 billion + deficit and planned to increase levies to cover the loss. I am a big believer that if things like this annoy you, then in order to have a right to bitch about it you need to be prepared to say your piece and state your case more broadly than just whining into your latte with your mates. I raised my concerns with Dr Nick Smith, the Minister for ACC, via the Parliamentary email system and was most impressed to find a response in the inbox when we got home on Monday night…and a lot more than ‘thank you for raising your concerns and we will take them in to consideration‘: a two page letter no less, with some additional information. I can only imagine who the Minister’s inwards files must have been like over that period so more power to him for making the effort to acknowledge correspondence on this difficult and contentious issue. Good on you, Nick Smith, and more power to you!!

Stupid?

Posted on 18 February 2010 by SJPONeill

Should I be concerned when WordPress tells me that people are using the search term ‘stupid‘ to find this blog? It is often quite interesting to see what terms that people are using that bring them here…

There is a steady trickle of searches for Interbella which is good as it shows that a few people out there are starting to get the message that we need a new way of thinking to truly grasp complexity and uncertainty.

There is a lot of interest in the UK’s training simulation JCOVE that I mentioned in Microcosms – I never did get around to reviewing this, or even playing it that much – I simply don’t have time at the moment between job-hunting, blogging and doing the work I do have. I am hard-pressed to consider spending too much recreational time in front of the PC. Hopefully I will get over this, possibly when the weather packs up for winter, and I do enjoy sims and have done since my first Sega system in 1988. Sims and training still have a long road to ride together.

At least one person has been feverishly beavering away looking for a paper model of the mighty TSR.2. I can help there as there are four that I know of: the first three are fairly simplistic and should be easy enough to find online. The fourth is a magnificent creation in 1/33 by Waltair at Kartonbau.de – unfortunately there seem to have been some issues with the design and he has put it back on to the back burner til maybe this year…

Note: Waltair’s TSR.2 released a year or so later…it’s a beauty!!!

Papermodeling.com is still down. It’s been four days now and I think that this is the longest that I have ever known a website to be down for technical reasons. Apparently the problem is that the back-up is very large (very graphics-heavy at a guess) and won’t upload properly. Best laid plans of mouse and men etc but I wonder what liability forum and blog hosts actually have when something like this happens. If this site can not be recovered, an incredible amount of knowledge (on a narrow topic) will be lost. We used to laugh when the Army went to an online personal records system in the early 90s and all the clerks had to maintain paper records of all transactions: there was actually more paper produced and stored than under the old paper-based system! Looking back, maybe they weren’t so dumb after all…?

I have done something to my back that kicks in whenever I sit at my desk in the study, especially in the evenings – any more than an hour or so at the keyboard and it becomes quite uncomfortable. The upside is that it goes away if I keep moving about so in the day I guess it is a good motivator to do some work outside…so today’s rehab has seen part of the vege garden dug up and replanted with beans, the goats and sheep set to work cleaning up the edge of the front lawns, and a start made on a Colditz fence so they can level all the crap that has grown at the top of the back garden without breaking out and obliterating the garden.

I have a few less options after dark but stretching out on a couch seems to help so I’m off to finish watching The Wild Geese, a favourite from wayback – should I feel old when I remember seeing this when it was first released in 1978…?

wild geese

Eye in the Sky

Posted on 5 February 2010 by SJPONeill

Over the last few months, I have been keeping reporting developments in a local company gearing up to conduct commercial UAV/UAS operations (depending which school you went to) domestically and offshore. Just a quick note to report that all is still on track, and that the website has been further developed. Of particular interest to ISR types may be the two publications now available that offer more information on both operations and capability.

On the modelling front, a tres way cool find last night, reported via Paper Modelers, and available for download from the designer’s site in Russia…you do have to register to download but even with a dial-up download of the two 43Mb files, the wait is well worth it – can’t see Revell or Trumpeter knocking out something as cool as this any time soon…

That’s the update for today – it’s been a long day as we shot over to Turangi to catch up with the twins while Carmen had a job interview; after we got home and survived the heat of the day (is this summer finally?), we decided to attack the jungle that had erupted around the spa deck – very stiff back now – had a late dinner of corn on the cob and rezapped lasagne before watching Will Smith in Seven Pounds: very heavy duty but highly recommended…

Uh-oh

Posted on 3 February 2010 by SJPONeill

HMHUB654830

Oh the horror…the phone dinged once at 7:20 last night and that was the end of our connection with the outside world til midday today…I was quite surprised to find how much I missed having the means to communicate with the outside and to appreciate that sometimes it’s nice to have neighbours even if we don’t normally miss them…

The faulty line has disrupted normal services as I had quite a lot of online research planned for last night so am a bit behind the 8 ball today and playing catch up…also still waiting to find out what the problem was as 16 hour drop-offs are way not cool…and, yes, Telecom (of recent XT notoriety) is our telco and ISP…

I really must protest…

Posted on 2 February 2010 by SJPONeill

This was a comment on Scale Modeling Nostalgia after the link to the Matchbox model fan site was posted…the stated reasons for the lack of fond memories was “…their heavy use of “trench” control and panel lines, and those multi-color parts…” This statement is sacrilege for so many of us who grew up with Matchbox and Corgi diecast cars – couldn’t afford the cooler Dinky range – and whom began to transfer our allegiances to the like of Airfix, Revell and Frog – Monogram and Tamiya also being well beyond the budget…

Then, 1973 Matchbox catalogue announced models, beginning the long wait until the first kits appeared in the window of Victor Nelson’s shop in Oamaru (still going strong as at Christmas 2009!). I think the Huey Cobra was the first one I built, followed in close succession by many others and somewhere in the garage I still have a Heyford awaiting its turn on the production line, slow as it is…

Far from being discouraged by the ‘trench‘ lines, that was detail!; and ‘those multi-color parts‘? You could be finished and ready to fly the same day you bought the kit without having to wait for paint to dry. The Matchbox range expanded to a range of aircraft from trainers (with authentic RNZAF markings) to four-engined bombers like the mighty Victor; then kicked off a range of military models, followed by ships and larger scale aircraft…which only really became accessible for many of us when we returned to the fold in middle age…

The attraction of the Matchbox range, besides the low cost and multiple colours, was that it opted for less usual subjects and marking options…sure there was the normal spread of Mustangs, Spitfires and Bf-109s but like the Huey Cobra, so many of it’s releases were unique…many like the 1/32 Lysander, Puma and Sea Vixen still are, thirty plus years later…it’s unfortunate that things didn’t quite work out as planned for the Lesney company and it folded in the early 80s. Revell has since picked up the torch and so most, if not all of these classics are still available under the Revell flag…

The fan site also mentions the Matchbox Tribute Book that “…in July/August 2007, members of the Unofficial Airfix Modellers Forum collaborated in a Group Build of Matchbox kits, specifically to celebrate the work of Mr. Maurice Landi. There were no rules, other than to try and recapture the joy of modelling that, for many, began with building Matchbox kits many years ago. This book is a record of the project….” I’ve seen this book and can only describe it as 48 pages of nostalgia and memories which is available from on-demand publisher Lulu. There’s also a link on the sidebar to the right of this page to the Unofficial Airfix Modellers Forum which is a great and very unpretentious site for modellers to show off their builds, especially of the classics without being picked over like some of THE modelling sites…

Enjoy…