Acts of Desperation

Posted on 23 January 2010 by SJPONeill

The WordPress Blog Stats page has a web part that displays what search terms have brought visitors to your blog. I couldn’t help but notice this one yesterday: “leadership lessons from chicken run movie“. This can only be an act of true desperation, I thought…the whole idea of gleaning lessons on leadership or much else from movies, especially these over-rated voice-starred animations, is a bit dodgy from the start…even dodgier is the fact that some people think that cartoons like this help develop a sense of reality amongst their children…

Mr Birmingham gets angry

“It’s not often I’d pull on my angry pants and launch a giant boot into the arse of the ABC. I’d be a bit like going an old lady who’d wandered into a cage wrestling death match at an ultimate fighting tournament by accident. But sometimes even old ladies need to feel the pain. And Aunty? I’M BRINGIN’ THE PAIN!“

Over at The Geek JB goes ABC for trying to enslave book reviewing bloggers for free – he lists all the reasons why young bloggers should receive some form of incentive to review books online, and none, understandably in support of ABC. Like Havock in the comments, I also have some minor issues with the age discrimination issue raised although I think this may be a not so subtle attempt by ABC to tap a more naive (in their perception) segment of the blogspace…

If you haven’t tried it, book reviewing is bloody hard work: for me to review a book properly, keep notes and come up with a review more substantial than ‘it’s crap – burn it’, I’m looking at 3-5 days work – and I am a pretty fast reader. While I believe that the power of the Information Militia rests mainly in the unpaid intellectual horsepower that constitutes most of the current blogspace and forumville, I think that it is only right that commercial organisations that wish to tap this resource for their own gain, front up with at least a little of the crinkly stuff. JB also makes a very good point that even if the ‘pay’ is half a pittance, it then constitutes works and opens up a range of other benefits in terms of tax losses and claimable costs…perhaps…ABC, it probably doesn’t pay to aggravate the Information Militia lest they a. turn their attention to you and/or b. transform into that other form of militia – you know the one with guns, pitchforks and torches…

And in the Birmoverse

Battles still rage on Cheeseburger Gothic over the why and how of an Uptimer President in 1952…feel free to climb into the fight…

And now the weather…

While the forecast today is for scattered showers with outbreaks of sun, a storm of another sort approaches…yep, the Twins are back for the weekend so hatch battening begin…

First Tui of the year

Posted on 12 January 2010 by SJPONeill

A poll has found New Zealanders rate watching online porn as more morally acceptable than illegal downloads.

Downloading music and videos is considered less acceptable than watching online porn.
A UMR Research poll shows three times more New Zealanders think it is morally okay for a single person to view pornography on the Internet, than those who agree with downloading copyrighted videos.
Thirteen percent of those surveyed see downloading copyrighted video as acceptable, while 18 percent consider downloading copyrighted music acceptable. However many who believe illegal downloading is morally wrong still admitted doing so.
Although 69 percent think that it is acceptable for someone who is single to flirt with another Internet user, just six percent think it is fine for a married person to flirt without their spouse’s knowledge.
The survey shows up substantial gender differences, with more men than women accepting online porn.
It is based upon questions asked of 1,000 New Zealanders from November 20 to 26.

These 1000 New Zealanders must have been asked at the 2009 Music and Film Industry awards because the 4,348,851 (as at Tuesday, 12 Jan 2010 at 01:30:00 pm) are busy downloading everything that they can – and without too much knashing of teeth, conscience wresting or tearing of hair. I note that the ‘many who believe illegal downloading is morally wrong’ but who still do it, were unable to be quantified into a percentage…

Fortunately these aren’t stats upon which any great and momentous decisions are likely to be based…

The View From My Window

Posted on 10 January 2010 by SJPONeill

Saw this idea pop up on Travels with Shiloh and wondered ‘who the hell is Sully?‘ After a bit of Bing-ing, I found Davos Newbies, and from there got to the source at The Daily Dish. I thought it was quite a cool idea and so here’s my view…above is as it is now and below is as it will be once the current study gets converted back to a bedroom and I get relocated to the shady (how appropriate!) side of the house.

Be interesting to see how many others pick up on this idea in the next few days…

So this is 2010…

Posted on 5 January 2010 by SJPONeill

Well, at least the sun is shining…

Just back at the desk after two weeks of enforced freedom from desks, emails and blogs, computers and COINs other than those that rattle around in ones pockets…had a great break away and am now commencing the big catch-up on what’s been happening in the world since December 21…stay tuned for updates…

The mist and rain…

Posted on 29 November 2009 by SJPONeill

…disappeared this morning and it has been that glorious day the Mountain is famous for. Last week I cleared away a lot of the self-seeded bush that was shading the vege garden and got all that mulched up today so that it can further contribute to future vege gardens. It’s been a while since I’ve mowed the lawns, leading to Carmen’s comment last weekend “Growing hay again, are we?” so that was the other project this afternoon, although I did use the scrub bar instead of the mower so as to do exactly that: make some hay for the chicken run and the coop for the chickens when they hatch. I was just about done and just finishing off around the water tank when I bumped the storm water pipe and cracked the damn thing – to add insult to injury, the forecast for tomorrow afternoon is crappy so it really needs to get fixed first thing tomorrow…just goes to show that nothing is simple…

Those two brave little sparrows from the other day have decided that they are in luff with any and all shiny things inside the house and will exploit any door, window or other opening left unguarded to get inside and rattattatat against the stainless kettle, rubbish bin, and benchtop, mirrors and windows. It might be OK except they aren’t really house trained and, of course, my two big helpers get all angsty and excited when there are birds inside…

It’s been interesting listening to all the squawking from the Brits about how poorly the Americans treated them in Iraq. Of course, when you are making stunning statements like ‘..the top British commander in the country, Major General Andrew Stewart, told how he spent “a significant amount of my time” “evading” and “refusing” orders from his US superiors...’, and you cut and run from the theatre of war before the job is done, you can hardly wonder that your national credibility is questioned…Yes, the American military are different; yes, they are less than receptive sometimes to other ways of doing things; yes, they do tend to focus on their way of doing things BUT…BUT maybe that is because they are so damn good at what they do in the application of combat power. What other nation in Iraq not only admitted that it had got it wrong in the post-transition phase of OIF, but implemented a complete cultural shift to address the issues, restructuring its development and acquisitions programmes (killing some sacred cows along the way), AND aligning its doctrine for the complex environment not just across the DoD, but also across and into the rest of government too. What other nation sat on its moral high horse, resting on its withered old laurels and former glories, and sniped at those who were doing the business?

Feral takes a tumble

Posted on 12 November 2009 by SJPONeill

Feral's Domain

This is Feral’s studio, where she hangs out, especially when the dogs are inside. Typical female: has more phones than she can talk into at once, clearly has a bit of a drinking problem, dishes are left out, and it wouldn’t hurt her to have a tidy up in the bathroom.

I’m not sure what she was doing but there was just a great crash and a squawk as her climbing frame thing toppled over, catapulting a tortoiseshell blur over the edge – they really do land on their feet! As you can tell by the stairs and the top of the front door her little eyrie is a couple of metres of the floor so it’s was probably all a bit exciting for her for a while. She’s OK but when I found her tucked away under one of the grandfather clocks, she was clearly less than impressed and has decided to spend the night on the ground floor…

While on the topic of pets, the Creature Comforts newsletter popped into the inbox this morning. I can not speak highly enough of this establishment between Sanson and Bulls – we have been homing the dogs and Feral there for a couple of years whenever we go away. Sonja and Irene are a couple of top ladies and really care for the animals, even giving them a bath whether they want one or not, and offering a great range of services including a new Doggie Daycare facility in addition to the normal overnight stays…Kirk and Lulu both love it here (Feral is not so impressed but then she’s a picky bitch) so if you’re looking for a quality kennel in or around the Manawatu, this is it.

Ratbags

Posted on 10 November 2009 by SJPONeill

Well the ratbags award for this week must go to those two spannerhead MPs who’ve been caught abusing their Parliamentary privileges. While these two clowns go swanning around the planet with their significant others, their cronies back in NZ are plotting to wind back benefits because they were incapable of appointing competent senior staff into ACC…

Personally, I don’t have a problem with Hone Harawira taking a day off during an official visit IF he had already completed the business planned for that day – I do have a mega-problem with the tone and content of the email he send to his mate, Buddy, to justify his jaunt to Paris. Then again, ‘good mate’ Buddy probably isn’t clear of the firing line either – the email he was sent was a personal one and I think he has some nerve trying cling to the moral high ground after releasing his mate’s inopportune email to the media…should Hone Harawira be fired as an MP? Nah, only if you want to make rank dumbness an offence in which case you would probably have to get rid of the lot of them and start over…

Rodney Hide, on the other hand, should seriously consider handing in his ministerial platinum card and returning to Dancing with the Stars (except it just got axed) – clearly he is a better tapdancer than he is an minister…for someone who has made his name as a perk-buster to be perk-busted himself and then to whine about not being a martyr when everyone else is doing it, clearly invalidates any credibility he might once have had. But as has already come out, so long as he can at least keep the (easily-led) people of Epsom happy, he is pretty safe…

Not a ratbag…

Well not this time anyway, porn king, Steve Crow was fronted on Close Up over his apparent bullying of some defenceless veterans at the New Plymouth RSA – interesting what comes out when the ‘bully’ has a chance to rebut the allegations – he’s actually the guy putting the money INTO the RSA and dragging it out of debt – but with that comes change, and a couple of grumpy old buggers don’t want to. Mark Sainsbury would have had a bit more credibility himself tonight if he had admitted he might have got it wrong and focused a little more on the FACTs. Mark, maybe YOU should be on this week’s ratbag list for not getting your FACTS right…

Many of these RSA’s and similar clubs are run like little fiefdoms instead of the businesses that they really are and need to be in order to sustain themselves…yes, I mourned as well when the Invercargill Garrison Club had to increase its prices from a dollar a jug but some things have to be done in order to survive. I’m a strong supporter of RSAs and the role they play although I’m not sure whether we are better or worse off in that they are not the powerful political beast that Aussie’s RSL is…

The Week In Review

It’s been quite a week or so hence the lack of daily posts…I spent a couple of great days in Wellington last week and caught up with some people I hadn’t seen for a awhile and gained some valuable insights into how things in this system do or do not work; got introduced to an interesting business plan that I think has some real potential; and got to spend an unproductive but very satisfying half an hour at Modelcrafts and Hobbies – one of the things that I do really miss not being in Wellington. Mr Regan was unable to tempt me with the inbound Airfix 1/24 Mosquito but if he had had the Trumpeter Swordfish on the shelf I would probably been in trouble when I got home. I did invest in yet another jar of German Grey for Dora and some Vallejo Russian Green for the B-4…

Arrived home to find we had the twins for the weekend – always lots of fun and enjoyment but it means that nothing else is going to happen while they are here…took them to the Taumarunui Guy Fawkes display on Saturday night which was all lots of fun until the fireworks started and then we had to beat a hasty retreat because all the noise was just a little too much…dropped them back at home just as their Dad was coming back from a quick excursion down the river with a couple of trout. I took a pic to send to the US CALL guys so they have something to look forward to if they get down to Australia and NZ next year…the twin’s dad made it his mission in life to show fishermen from the Northern Hemisphere (where he believes there are no ‘real’ trout), what a real trout is, so I think they’ll have a guaranteed guide when they come down under…

Trout 002 And last but definitely not least, the vege garden has passed its first milestone and various heads and shoots are starting to come out of the ground. We were a bit worried as it has been pretty dry for the last week or so and when you rely on tank water, you sometimes tends to get a bit stingy with the watering at this time of years – 20,000 litres sounds like heaps but…

Planning for summer projects is already under way and the vege garden is already down for a lift so that when we put in the front deck, the height above the ground from any point along the edges will be less than a metre. If we get that done this summer, coupled with more tidying up and new gardens it will have been a good summer…

A long day…

Posted on 9 November 2009 by SJPONeill

…and probably one thing I won’t miss…a quick day trip dash to Wellington for the Lessons Steering Group today. The LSG went very well, showing the continuous improvement in discussion and results since we kicked them off again in September last year. It’s great to get the international participation that we’ve had at all the LSGs this year and this adds a while extra layer of richness to the discussion…it would be nice, one day, to get the Canadians and Brits along as well, just to get the set…Certainly now it seems we have the buy-in and consensus from around the table for the 2010 Action Plan and can now really hook into the detail of actioning that plan…but, as above, from here to Wellington and back in a day, + LSG engagement and LMS discussion in between and , makes for a long day so it’s off to nigh-nighs now…

Microcosms

Posted on 1 November 2009 by SJPONeill

Chalet in Springtime 002

This was the Chalet on Thursday morning, not much short of idyllic, blue skies, birds singing…what more could you want. On Friday morning, the Chalet was much the same, albeit slightly overcast. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Mountain, it was:

Waiouru in Springtime

This got me thinking about micros…cosms, ecosystems, stuff…it’s about 70km from home to Waiouru. In that distance it’s not unusual to experience three, maybe even four, distinct microclimates ranging from blue skies through rain and sleet to a foot of snow on the ground – I almost drove Little Red on Friday, without the hard top – which, as it turned out, would have been interesting with the broken zip on the back window of the soft top…

Once upon a time, we knew when it was Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn – it was all quite logical and simple – you couldn’t set your watch by the seasons but not far off it – nowadays…who knows? How many of us had to repopulate our vege gardens these year after a false spring disappeared in a flurry of hail and snow not so long ago? What sort of mitigating mechanisms do we develop to get around this growing uncertainty?

My point in this is that we should be getting used to complexity and uncertainty whether it’s the weather, ACC levies, mortgage rates, etc, etc; if we go back far enough (and it probably won’t be that long a trip) in talking with our parents and grandparents, we’ll probably find that this is nothing new – complexity and uncertainty are more likely constants than new phenomena. Could it be that until we got back into actual warfighting (“You’re not in peace support anymore, Dr Ropata!!”again on a large scale, the decades of the Cold War since Vietnam had lulled us all into a nice safe Fulda Gap sense of complacency?

If that is the case, surely the draft Capstone Concept for the US Army needs to be leading far further forward than where we are today? I’m still so disappointed in the draft – if I had the time, I would give it a crack myself – if 20-25 pages is the aim, if 2016-2028 is the game, and Interbella is the tool, then where might we be in 2028? What then will be causing us to lose sleep

The Small Wars Council is linked into my Facebook page and this article from the New York Times this morning’s post really got me going – this opinion and the subsequent comment are setting the scene for a withdrawal from Afghanistan. While I have my own concerns regarding the benefits of any troop surge (the situation is totally different from that addressed by the surge into Iraq) and the lack of detailed campaign strategy, I don’t believe that apathy is a good enough reason to just bail.

Ultimately, if ‘the people’ of Afghanistan are not interested in buying into this war and/or democracy – and there’s not much to suggest that they are – then we are not going to achieve much in tactical-level combat with the Taliban. Maybe we would be better off leaving the ‘government’ of Afghanistan to muddle through on its own and to direct our support to anti-Taliban (or should our focus really be on anti-AQ) elements in Afghanistan, probably at the tribal level…?

Subscribers will have noticed the lack over updates over the past two days. Partly this is due to actually having to do some work but also because I got handed a review copy of the UK’s new Joint Combat Operations Virtual Environment (JCOVE – a bit of an odd name although I have known some Joint coves in my time!)
JCOVE Lynx HMA

I’ve still only scratched the surface of it but was impressed right from the outset at the standard of presentation and development of the package, especially in comparison with the ADF version I got to review a few months ago (which lost me in the first ten minutes with a clumsy interface and lack of situational awareness. JCOVE (it is only the Lite version) is very slick with a comprehensive range of training, single player and multi-player missions plus a decent mission editor. It replicates just about every bit of equipment that the UK might currently bring to a land battle and the only significant omissions so far are any maritime platforms (ships for the uninitiated!) although the promo videos included on the DVD imply a maritime capability, as does the presence of the Lynx HMA.8 above…

I’m very keen to see VBS2 (the underlying game engine) go fully joint as that will add a richness and depth to training that we only dreamed of back in the late 90s when we first started to experiment with off the shelf games to support training…possibly more to follow in a few days when I drill into it in more depth…

View from a roof

Posted on 25 October 2009 by SJPONeill

…we have guests in the Chalet at the moment, indirectly the cause of my drenching on Thursday morning; being the top host that I am, I had gone to set the fire prior to their arrival so it would be cosy inside. I couldn’t get the damn thing to burn not even after half a pack of Lucifers and bringing some guaranteed dry wood over from the Lodge – the air would have turned blue if the room hadn’t been full of smoke already. We’d only had the chimney swept a couple of months ago so I was not impressed and with the crap weather there was no way I was going up to check out the flue in any detail.

With the return of decent weather (finally) over the weekend, I made myself the ACC poster boy yesterday and hopped up to see what the story was and discovered some enterprising sparrow had managed to cram 8 inches thick of pine needles down the flue – and it was crammed: I had to chip it all out with a screwdriver…

View from a roof 009 This is not a journey I intend making too frequently so I made the most of taking a few pics from this vantage point…it’s always difficult to get good shots of the Lodge due to the bush and this isn’t one of the better ones…not until Lotto Day when we can go fully down the Alternate energy path and tell the Lines Company to get their crappy lines and poles off our property!!

View from a roof 001

Once that happens it will be a major improvement all the way round. The TV aerial on the far side needs to go as well – it has been years since it has done anything but rattle in the wind – the only reason that it is still there is that it is a long way up (and down) on that side of the Lodge…the spa area on the far right is about to get a major ‘tough love’ pruning effort as it is just a little too encroached by scenic beauty at the moment. The two windows are the spare room on the right and the bunkroom on the left. In the next round of renovations, the bunkroom will become the study/library, and the current study/library will become another bedroom on the sunny side. The mega-renovations planned for some time will lift the roof from a point around the top right corner of the spare room window to enable the installation of en suites and walk-in areas – the extra head room will also allow a proper rear staircase with a mid-level landing…

Fish for Dinner again…

Dinner last night was a bit of a mixed bag….fish again because Carmen had the same ‘let’s have fish‘ flash as I on Friday and had picked up some snapper on her way back from Te Kuiti…I found a recipe in the Healthy Food Guide book and semi-modified that to suit. I say ‘semi’ because I didn’t actually adjust it as much as I should have; in fact, apart from halving the quantity of fish and pan-baking instead of oven baking it, I kept all the quantities of spices etc the same. As the twins would say ‘uh-oh’…I served it up with a good serving of tabouli but, man oh man, it was hot!! Too hot for the taste of the fish to really come through. I have some issues with the recipe and wonder if the HFG team actually made it before they published it as the picture in the book just looked like normal baked fish (clean and white) when the marinade is actually very dark. I wondering perhaps if they have skipped out a key ingredient like some form of cream to take the marinade from a paste to something that will actually be enough to cover the fillets AND be poured over the fillets – even using twice the quantities there was barely enough to paste over each fillet…

In Other News

I was checking the blogstats with morning and noticed an incoming link from an unfamiliar site – thinking perhaps I had made a break-through in the blogspace I clicked on it. While it was beyond me to find any connection between it and The World…, M|O|N|G|K|O|L was a fascinating and diverse read; Memoirs of Saigon brought back many memories of my brief time in Vietnam a decade ago, in particular the bubbling friendliness and hospitality of the people of south Vietnam – I don’t think the writers of the Lonely Planet on Vietnam had ever visited the place, or certainly gone any further than the bars of downtown Saigon. My deepest regret is that I did not purchase the painting I saw in a gallery in Saigon: using just four colours, the brown of the rivers, the orange of the dust, the bright green of the foliage and the blue of the sky, it encapsulated my first image of Vietnam as we made our approach into Tan Son Nhut. I was saddened by Cambodia: A Country For Sale – at the time I was in Vietnam, it was still relatively untouched by the depredations of the big corporates and multinationals. One of the reasons that I am not sure I want to return is that in ten years all this may have changed and I don’t want my memories tainted by sights of such a beautiful nation going the same way as so many others…Coming Anarchy this morning has a graphic image of that way….

The Strategist has also picked up on the ‘Always Blow on the Pie‘ story – if you haven’t had a look already, please do…Peter’s latest post regards ‘modern slavery‘: I am less than sympathetic…these people choose to have these lifestyles and it reads to me that greed (in the form of £200k bonuses) is the primary motivator. If you can’t stand the heat…but before jumping out of the pan and emigrating to New Zealand…(to be continued)…

Cheeseburger Gothic has the next of JB’s insights into the perils and pitfalls of being a writer: anyone with aspirations of writing even casually should track both these posts and the ones on a similar theme by Steven Pressfield. Having collected a lot of DIY writing material of varying standards and usefulness over the years, I can recommend both as key resources for budding or even experienced writers…

B-4

I have been fairly consistent in my stated aim of doing some minor work on the B-4 each night. It has turning out to be a rewarding and fun build: although relatively simple in construction, each sub-assembly looks delightfully complex. I’m working on the assumption that it should be able to be assembled almost fully before painting so except for some minor fiddly bits I will put on last – to save me refixing them last after snapping them off with careless handling – I am building it pretty much out of the box…progress so far:

B-4 203mm build 001