Sempervivum

[mickeyobe]

Sempervivum aka hens & chickens. I never knew there were so many varieties of this hardy plant that can withstand our winter freezes and summer droughts and still multiply like rabbits.
They all seem to grow in a spiral pattern.
There are more but I guess enough is enough.

Thanks to Edwards Gardens and my Pentax K100D with a Tamron Adaptall 80<210 CF Tele-Macro Zoom.

Mickey

[John Parry]

Magnificent shots Mickey!

Sempervivum (always lively, or always alive) - I feel I should recognise them, but sad to say....

Yes - get in close. These digitals seem to be able to cut the mustard at that.

Regards - John

[doubs43]

Mickey, those shots remind me of a Disney film from many years ago called "The Living Desert". That's a well-earned compliment as those images are outstanding IMO. Well done!

Walker

[mickeyobe]

Thanks both of you.

I seem to have fallen in love with digital. It is so versatile and once one has been kitted out it is so inexpensive.
That Tamron lens is a marvelous macro. Due to some stainless steel in a knee joint I am reluctant to bend down, never being sure that I'll get up. The Tamron gave me those pictures from about three feet away from the subject.

Mickey

[mickeyobe]

Ron,

I do have one kind of Sempervivum in my garden. We always called it Hens & Chickens. The only reason it still survives is that I ignore it. Plants that require my care seem to resent my tender ministrations and commit suicide.

I, too, resent the 'complex' technology of the digital world. Hence, whatever digital madness I find myself engaged in I practice KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid. When the talk gets to RAW and jpeg and TIFF and mega and nano and all the other electronic gibberish my mind sort of drifts off to "far away places with strange sounding names" until I hear something familiar that may or may not be relevant.
I am acquiring a library of supposedly helpful, now mostly obsolete "Idiot" books. The trouble with them is that one must know what question to ask before one can seek an answer. What I need now is "The Right Questions For Idiots To Ask Book" book.
Why am I going on like this??? I am really trying to become part of the new technology so I wont embarrass my grandchildren two of whom are at university studying to become I.T.'s.

Sempervivum. Sempervivum. What a delicious word. Even Latin is better than technoese.

Mickey

[SidW]

Hens and chickens? 'Cos you get lots of small ones round a biger one? Was that name particular to your family or did you find others using it? Also known as houseleeks. It's supposed to be common knowledge that every Norwegian has them growing on the roof of the house. I'm not tall enough to see if it was true in Oslo.

The comforting thing about technical change is that the photography stays the same, and you certainly got it right here.

[mickeyobe]

SidW,

My grade 8 teacher maintained a wonderful collection of cacti and succulents in the classroom. He called them hens & chickens for the reason you gave.
Mr. Reid. The best teacher I ever had.
Many of his students went home with little pieces of his plants with instructions for their care.
That was over 60 years ago. I hope he has the biggest cactus patch in heaven.

Mickey

[PeterW]

Mickey wrote:

When the talk gets to ... jpeg and TIFF … my mind sort of drifts off …

I agree, Mickey. Technobabble is so boring. A lot of the words, like JPEG and TIF, are acronyms for boring prosaic phrases.

But people who write software and invent these names aren’t entirely without a sense of humour. My favourite technobabble word is TWAIN, a piece of software for connecting a scanner to a computer. It sounds as if it should be an acronym, but it isn’t.

Some people have made it one by calling it Technology Without An Interesting Name, but I prefer the story which goes that in the early days of scanners they were particularly difficult to connect to a computer. They produced digital information that a computer couldn’t understand, and the two were likened to Kipling’s East and West – never the twain shall meet. The software that solved the problem was called Twain software.

However, in some cases the flow of information became blocked. The Twain wouldn’t work. It needed an extra small piece of software to make it run properly. This was called a Twack.

Why Twack? Well, a Twain needs a Twack to wun pwoperly. ;D

Sorry!

PeterW

[mickeyobe]

Peter,

It sounds like the developer is Elmer Fudd. Wealy and twooly!!

Mark Train

[GeneW]

Peter, some of the folks who wrote software, especially Unix software, had a fun sense of humour when it came to naming the products. For starters, how about 'ping'. A clever metaphor based on sonar -- the way we 'ping' a server to see if it's online.

Two of my faves are recursive acronyms: GNU (GNU's Not Unix) and PINE (PINE Is Not Elm). Pine and Elm are both Unix email readers -- Pine is the younger, more featureful.

Gene

p.s. forgot another fave: demoronizer. It fixes the strange HTML code exported by various Microsoft products, such as Word.

[SidW]

I believe pinging came originally from the telephone world, a connection would be pinged to see if it was working, the bell would be struck just once (they were real bells in those days). By the 1950s we were saying "give someone a ping" meaning phone him (possibly air force slang from 1939-45).