Open Letter to Willie Jackson concerning Brian Tamaki

This letter to the editor is concerning Willie Jackson's recent article in the North Shore Times "Preying on Tamaki" which I thought was pretty idiotic, as you will probably gather.


Willie,

If you are so ashamed by the New Zealand media (of which you are a part) why is it you are not investigating these "real crooks" yourself? Rather than becoming an apologist for Brian Tamaki under the assertion "he's not as bad as those other ..... guys"

Let's take the following statement:

"Clegg & Co finance director Brian Clegg was recently sentenced to a year’s home detention for providing false information to prospective investors .......... A year’s home detention for ripping off poor and vulnerable Kiwis to the tune of $15 million is a disgrace."

I can only imagine one logical conclusion is intended by this and that is that Clegg has been treated unfairly! Because there is another white collar criminal out there who "provides false information" to his "investors" every day and has ripped off the most "vulnerable Kiwis" in New Zealand "to the tune of" about ... "$15 million" (or at least with a personal income of 1 million a year is getting to that amount very quickly) and he hasn't been held to account at all, his name is Brian Tamaki.

But, though this would be the logical conclusion to draw from your statement and the facts, I don't think this is what you intended to say.

And I'm guessing also when you stated that:

"he’s turned around thousands – gang members, criminals and the worst of the worst in our society?"

... that you weren't meaning to support the notion that "Tamaki is a modern-day Adolf Hitler" who, of course, also turned around many street kids and gave them direction with the Hitler Youth and recruited gang members, criminals and other violent thugs to his service as well.

No, of course you were assuming that an ideologue recruiting thugs is a good, charitable and christian thing. Well, sorry Willie, history disagrees with you.

And this is the main reason Tamaki is newsworthy, because not only does he extort money from the poor and vulnerable but he does so with an ideology of divisiveness and separatism, in that he encourages Destiny's members to ignore and reject dissent or argument, intolerance, shown most evidently in it's homophobic, "enough is enough" campaign, and imperialism, in that he makes various claims of taking over New Zealand politics. His ideology also leads him to act in a ridiculous and often disturbing fashion which also makes for good news stories. So, he's not just a crook Willie, give him more credit than that, he's a white collar, bigoted, imperialist, messianic crook. That's what leads people to compare him to Hitler, that's what makes him a threat to society, that's what makes him interesting, not just the fact that he extorts money from the poor by lying to them.

But even if he was just a run of the mill white collar criminal, this is still no reason for you to make excuses for him.

Using the Dvorak keyboard layout with Final Cut Pro 6

Worst public announcement ever to follow...

I realise troubleshooting uber-geek program incompatibilities is not the coolest thing to be doing on New Years eve, but give me some time it's only lunch time. I plan to be off the computer by midnight!

I've been having an issue with shortcuts in Final Cut Pro 6 due to my Dvorak keyboard layout (this is an ergonomic keyboard layout for safe lightening speed typing available in your computer's operating system) for about a year. This is before I had a serious go at fixing the problem. Using the Dvorak-Qwerty language input I was incapable of using any of Final Cut Pro 6's keyboard shortcuts, making it impossible to edit and type using the same language. Some others on the net appear to have had the same problem (really, there are 6 billion people on earth, at least 10 other people have suffered from this exact problem), but no solutions...

The Solution:

Don't use the Dvorak-Qwerty language input, use the Dvorak (only) input. Quit FCP, and make sure Dvorak is selected when you open it again. The keyboard now types in dvorak and the keyboard shortcuts all function as you would expect. I have no idea why I didn't think of this sooner, nor do I have any idea why it was so difficult to find this solution on the internet, hence my reason for writing this blog.

Sorry to my regular readers... ha... regular readers... this is pure naval gazing, I don't have regular readers, not anymore anyway.

See you next week with more discoveries, like the exciting new development that I can now hide the names of audio tracks in my timeline to enable me to view the waveform correctly for multi-camera syncing... oooooh.

A very narrow target market might find this funny.

Darwin jumps through hoops

Darwin 9 Months

School Yearbook Photo

I recently found an old yearbook photo of mine. How things have changed.

Ah, the good old days when I used to look like something out of an Aphex Twin video. I had model written all over me.

Not even... bring a photo of yourself and visit Yearbook Yourself

Megawoosh