throwdownyourguns - blog

Obscured Image in Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers Video?

2010-05-13T08:57:53Z

I was flicking through Mr Grubber’s fine RSS feed this morning (as you do) and found my way to the new song by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers -

I Should Have Known It.

I agree with the DF, it’s a great tune. It’s slick, pop-rock and I like it. It could be a shocker in less competent hands but Tom has such cred’ in his delivery that it works for me. There are some contrived edits of the band interacting with each other but that’s just a bit of fun.

Art aside, something in the background of one shot caught my eye. There’s a poster on the wall that has been obscured about two thirds of the way through the video. Something legal didn’t like I guess. Perhaps someone wanted payment.

I wonder what it is?

Broken Lance

2009-12-15T10:45:37Z

Saint George, later in life, meets another dragon and things don’t go as well as they did last time.

George has had a good life but when he gets older and a bit wiser he begins to question things he would have taken for granted previously.

Where is my beautiful lance? What is my beautiful lance? Why is that dragon looking at me that way?

The lance, a symbol of sexual and spiritual virility is broken, it’s more of a snapped blind-persons cane. It’s a symbol of beliefs, of a faith that’s broken.

These Lance paintings are about my father, poor bugger, he wasted a large part of his life fooling around with a seriously fucked-up religion, only to find later in life that he didn’t have the resources to get past what he saw as a loss of faith.

I said “What does it matter? So there’s no God, move on to something else, open a bookshop or something”.

more…

Global Nuclear Disarmament Would be Nice

2009-12-03T12:30:56Z

Global nuclear disarmament would be nice, I'd be happy about that, but what can you do?

Regan and Gorby in Iceland, 1986

Various people have had a crack at it over the years but they all seem to loose traction after time.

In 1986 Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan came close to taking an unprecedented step. During the Reykjavik Summit in Iceland, they almost agreed to get rid of all their nuclear weapons - but that fizzled out.

Closer to home, in 1995, then Prime Minister of Australia, Paul Keating established The Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons. It had an opening statement declaring it was...

...persuaded that immediate and determined efforts need to be made to rid the world of nuclear weapons and the threat they pose to it.

Later on in 1989, in reference to the Canberra Commission, Keating said, "I wanted to put the authority of a sovereign government behind the push to rid the world of nuclear weapons" - I like that.

The current Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd seems to have re-branded Keating's idea, and in collaboration with the Japanese government, has launched the International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament (ICNND). It's a mouthful of a title but a worthy move, with the aim of reducing the number of nuclear weapons over time. It has a long term goal of eliminating them beyond 2025 - too long for my liking.

I much prefer Keating's "Elimination" to Rudd's "Non-Proliferation" but perhaps stopping the growth is a pragmatic place to start, what with the May 2010 deadline approaching for the review of The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).

Of course the United Nations were on the case from day one. The first resolution ever passed by the UN General Assembly, on 24 January 1946, was for the "Establishment of a Commission to Deal With the Problem Raised by the Discovery of Atomic Energy." They were to "...proceed with the utmost dispatch" to make proposals "for the elimination from national armaments of atomic weapons and of all other major weapons adaptable to mass destruction" - nice try UN.

There is one crowd who have actually had some success. The Nunn-Lugar project claims to have helped in the decommissioning of over 7000 nuclear weapons. Seven thousand! They also claim to be chronically underfunded, or in fact criminally underfunded. Just imagine what they could get done if we threw just a fraction of the Bush-Blair-Howard-Iraq-invasion-cash at them. Nunn-Lugar state a goal...

...to lessen the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction, to deactivate and to destroy these weapons, and to help the scientists formerly engaged in production of such weapons start working for peace.

UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe
Barack Obama Chairs the UN Security
Council Summit on 24 September 2009

That's the practical stuff that needs to be happening. Nunn is also involved with the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) who seem to be doing some good work.

Revisiting Reykjavik would be a more dramatic place to start but perhaps a less idealistic proposal is to sink a few lazy billion into projects like Nunn-Lugar and NTI.

I know I'm probably being overly optimistic but there do seem to be a few glimmers of a positive new momentum for nuclear disarmament growing again. Obama is heading in the right direction by chairing a UN Security Council summit on nuclear non-proliferation and nuclear disarmament. It's the first time a US President has done that.

Earlier in 2009, in his first address to the UN, Obama promised three important things...

America intends to keep our end of the bargain. We will pursue a new agreement with Russia to substantially reduce our strategic warheads and launchers. We will move forward with ratification of the test ban treaty and work with others to bring the treaty into force so that nuclear testing is permanently prohibited.
We will complete a Nuclear Posture Review that opens the door to deeper cuts and reduces the role of nuclear weapons. And we will call upon countries to begin negotiations in January [2010] on a treaty to end the production of fissile material for weapons.
I will also host a summit next April [2010] that reaffirms each nation's responsibility to secure nuclear material on its territory and to help those who can't, because we must never allow a single nuclear device to fall into the hands of a violent extremist. And we will work to strengthen the institutions and initiatives that combat nuclear smuggling and theft.

If he just gets those three things happening he will have earned that Nobel Peace Prize several times over. Let's see what happens with those promises in 2010.

While Obama may be at the beginning of something new, some of our other institutions just continue to reinforce the same old thinking. Take the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for example, perhaps instead of the paradoxical statute of "...accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy to peace...", we could lobby for someone who has been to the brink, like Mikhail Gorbachev, to be the head of a new United Nations body for Nuclear Abolition (UNNA). Screw peaceful use! Let's burry this crap for good.

It will take a someone to make a move that is uncharacteristic of most of the conservative clowns mis-managing this stuff today. I suspect politicians are the wrong people to be running this disarmament show, their self-serving, small-minded, nationalism will continue to reinforce their little-dick militarism and get us nowhere. Take Chirac for example, who decided in 1995 it would be fun to screw the Pacific some more with another eight underground nuclear tests - mutha-fucker! We don't need clowns like that in charge ever again.

We need a new paradigm of thinking to manage nuclear material. A structure that sits above nationalism and restates the purpose of the UN agencies. It should have two parallel streams of work, one to rid the world of nuclear weapons and the enriched material to make them and a second stream, to begin undoing the damage the nuclear power industry is inexorably storing up for future generations with waste from power generation that none of us can work out what to do with. We need a base-load of new thinking.

Get the power stations managed by a central global body, no one can own them any more, make nuclear power the possession of the globe. It will be a while before we can completely replace those things with clean energy options, but we have to start heading that way now rather than building more of them. If you want a nuclear power plant in the interim, it has to be managed by the one international body, the land it's on is excised from the national boundaries - no chance to get in there and start bomb making classes again.

Further to this we should link the possession or suspected possession of nuclear weapons or the material to make them to trade in a similar way to a carbon tax. Every gram of nuclear material you are suspected of possessing will increased a hefty tariff on your exports. This way there is an incentive for transparency, and for all nations, including the US, UK, France and the others holding on to this shit, to be seen to be giving it up. Now I know this is crazy talk, I have no idea how you would administer a tariff like that - but it's an idea.

Here ends my potted history of nuclear disarmament. Sweet dreams and throw down your guns.

ClickToFlash - dumb-is-good

2009-10-07T07:54:41Z

A while back I made a decision to stay away from using any Flash in building this web site...

I am deliberately avoiding the use of Flash. The misuse of flash in web sites is responsible for some of the most ridiculous, frustrating and avoidable usability issues. So, dumb-is-good could be the motto here.

So I was pleased to see the new ClickToFlash plugin for Safari today and tried it out straight away. It elegantly blocks those shitty flash impositions all over the web. You gotta be happy with that.

Because NetNewsWire on the Mac uses WebKit, the plugin also works there too - twice as little flash trash has got to be even better.

I guess it's not Flash that's the problem really, it's the crazy overuse of it ruining user interaction that gets me. I know there are sites that are totally Flash driven that will just be blocked but then I generally loose interest in them in a few seconds anyway. I'm sure in a few days I'll find a number of situations where having Flash blocked will be a pain... but I'll give it a go.

NetNewsWire 2.0 for iPhone Unusably Slow

2009-09-26T07:18:10Z

I recently upgraded to the latest version of NetNewsWire for the iPhone. Like many out there, I had been eagerly awaiting the new version 2.0 that would sync with Google Reader. Having my desktop feeds back in sync with the iPhone was going to be one of life's small pleasures

...it was not worth the wait.

In short - NetNewsWire 2.0 is unusable.

The software has numerous design flaws and seems to be faulty in many ways. The biggest issue is the time it takes to load feed data. It's so long my short attention span has moved to other things (like watching paint dry in the shade) before the first blank screen has refreshed. It's a huge step backwards from the previous version in my opinion. When I say slow - this is on the iPhone 3G over 802.11g wireless.

Of course it's free so you'd be a prick if you complained too much but they are trying to flog the no-adds version for a couple of bucks and this is not making me feel inclined to cough up.

Issues I have with it are:

Faults

the unread badge count doesn't work - mine has been stuck on 940 for a few days
slow as all fuck in many screens
the Show/Hide Feeds takes for ever to show up
Show/Hide Feeds doesn't work - after unselecting numerous feeds and going back to the feeds list it starts to download everything again. Sometimes they stick sometimes not.
it has crashed a few times
and when it crashes the feeds are all selected on next launch - which in turn takes for ever
when selecting or de-selecting feeds in the Show/Hide Feeds, feed icons seem to come and go from the left, not just the one being clicked.

Design issues

no sort order for feeds - in particular the sort-by-attention option
no unselect or select all button in the show hide feeds
Show/Hide Feeds is a flattened list of all feeds - why not follow the convention of many other iPhone apps of having an edit button, leaving the hierarchy of feeds and their folders in place and adding the delete, hide, add option in that view?

I could go on...

Admittedly it's easy to slag things off in a blog after minimal testing. I have tried a few times to limit the number of feeds in my list (82) on the iPhone to see if performance improves but even that has been difficult to achieve with it crashing and turning them all on again.

It leaves me with the impression this is one of two things

- either a rushed job by good developers whose work got compromised by some crazy deadline promised by the boss

- or they don't care about this product any more but felt they had to knock some crap together to keep the punters off their back.

Let's see what transpires.

I'll be looking for a new feed reader, perhaps the google offering will do.

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Gwitha McLean and Whangaehu Beach

2009-09-20T07:32:43Z

Gwitha Mclean often painted these whimsical little landscapes in watercolour as she traveled around the country.

She lived in the beautiful area of Porangahau in the North Island of New Zealand.

This painting from 1984 is of Whangaehu Beach near Porangahau in the North Island of New Zealand.

More...

The Feel of The Day

2009-09-15T11:06:17Z

Waking up today and seeing the grey, overcast sky reminds me of working on the farm. The feeling of what the day would be like out in the the weather was tangible. What the wet grass, the frosty gate latch and crossing the ice on the wooden foot bridge would feel like.

Wet dogs, finding a horse for the day in the dark before breakfast. Cracking the ice on the water troughs that never thaw out in the shade of the wool shed, so the dogs can have a drink.

The chill of the morning pine plantation that becomes a stifling heat in the afternoon in those woollen trowsers and working boots.

...different to the days now, with office tower, fluros and computers. I can go a whole day in 21 degree air-conditioning without knowing what it's like outside.

Apple Address Book - Snow Leopard - One Step Forward Two Steps Back

2009-09-06T04:04:00Z

Apple have updated Mac OS X in all sorts of great ways in their latest Snow Leopard update 10.6 but here's a backward step - in fact a backward step from what was a pretty weak starting position.

The Country field in the address book has for a long time had the somewhat-lame and counter-intuitive auto-fill feature where you could type Option Escape to be presented with a list of options to auto fill from.

This has always been an odd pair of modifier keys to me - in fact why not just offer the drop down items automatically as the Google search field in Safari does or any number of other examples. The Escape key seems like a poor choice to me.

That aside, when using Option Escape a list of countries previously entered in the address book would be offered in the drop down. In Snow Leopard it now seems to offer words from the dictionary as showing in the image - what bloody use is Aubergine or Auckland to me in the Country field?

Update: 2009-09-12

I've been moving this blog from Blogger to Movable Type. The following comment got caught between technologies...

Anonymous said... "The best part is it does that for every field. I put in S and then option-esc and I get S., S.'s, S.Dak., etc. You have to scroll before you get to a word. I used to use it all the time to keep my entries the same across people to make the smart groups work well. While I agree option-esc is probably a poor choice, especially since it really isn't documented anywhere, this is definitely a step backwards."

Update: 2009-09-12

On thinking about the address book a little more I can see that the drop down list has benefits. It allows me to populate items that are not pre-existing in my address book. I guess its coming form some system wide clean-up and I will learn to appreciate it. I guess.

Luther In My Lounge Room

2009-08-30T07:26:00Z

Martin Luther was a bit of a prick really, I never did like having him over to stay.

He was so fucking impatient, always banging on the bathroom door while I was trying to back-one-out in peace and quiet. I was glad to see the back of him when he moved out...

The full title of this oil painting is Luther In My Lounge Room. Continued...

Late '60s in New Zealand Somewhere...

2009-08-30T06:55:00Z

...elsewhere others were having their fun too; Woodstock was happening, the Americans invaded the moon and Penthouse was launched.

I also seem to remember Popes dying and important Americans being shot. It was worrying but it didn't really seem to matter ultimately, because we knew the Russians were going to invade New Zealand and we would all die in a final blaze of glory fighting them off in the mountains with our .22s. Continued...

Cutting Corners

2008-07-30T10:21:00Z

This puzzle was hours of fun as a kid. A box of wooden blocks with pictures stuck on each side. There was a bus, car, plane, ship, a steam train and a second newer train.

After a while we worked out that once you got one image correct, you could flip a whole row at once to see the other pictures. It wasn't quite the same thrill as working it out from scratch but it taught us to cheat and cut corners early in life and that was a valuable lesson that served us well from thereon in.

See the different pictures...

Life Tips for the Risk Averse

2008-01-05T11:59:00Z

A few life tips for the risk-averse, things I have picked up along the way that you may find useful:

Assume all car drivers want to kill you when you ride a motorbike.
A tractor wants to kill you every second you are around it, even when it's off - remain conscious and deliberate in your actions.
Resist the urge to apply the brakes or jump off when sliding out of control down a wet hill in a tractor.
Never look up if someone talks to you when you are using a power saw - remain conscious and deliberate in your actions.
Treat all electrical wires as if they are live, even if you know you turned the main off.
To avoid jarring the wrist when digging in rocky ground always let go of the spade at the last moment.
The right tool for the job - A boot is not a tool.
Don't climb fences with a rifle.
Don't piss on electric fences.

iPhone, WiMAX and Unwired - a love in?

2007-09-06T10:42:00Z

Okay, finally I think apple have caught up with themselves with their new iPhone. I may have to officially retire the Newton. Although I'll be fully convinced when I can use a WiMAX iPhone on the Unwired network in Sydney. Let's see how long that takes.

By the way the image on the screen of the Newton is a drawing I did at the Singapore airport of a weary traveller with his head in hand.

Drawing detail...

The Triffids at the Enmore

2007-07-07T06:06:00Z

Here's another one from a while ago. 1989, The Triffids at the Enmore theatre in Newtown, Sydney, Australia. Standing room only, poor sound but I guess that's the deal with the real thing.

Bob Dylan with Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers

2007-07-07T05:07:00Z

Here's an oldie. The last time I saw Bob Dylan in concert was in 1986 in Sydney Australia. Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers were support. It was great, but hell that's a while ago now. Back to the EntCent to see him again Aug 15 2007 - let's see what 21 years of touring does to a singer. And how about that price 26 bucks!