Cloudy's Cafe-a conversation zone- January 2, 2011

[Firestormalpha]

Originally Posted by Luvian Yeah I feel old too! You remember back in the days when we had to walk uphill in the snow ....

don't forget, it was uphill both ways.

Finally putting in some earnest effort towards getting employment. My last employer gave me a bit of a run-around to get my employment info. Called the store, they told me to call corporate. I called corporate, they told me to call HR. I called HR and they told me to call the number of a 3rd party group that holds all their employee info.

A few gardening questions:
My mom has an aloe plant currently in a pot. basically brought a plant that wasn't doing too well back to life. Now a couple of the leaves have been turning pale green to yellowish in the middle, getting soft and finally just folding over. What, if anything, is wrong with them and how , if necessary, do we fix it.

Also have some hybiscus where some of the leaves are starting to dry up and curl. As far as I know they've been getting plenty of water.

I'll try to post some pics later.

[Azred]

Back in our day, we had 56k dial-up and we liked it!

Actually, back in my day we had 2400 baud and all 4 of us at university who actually had modems would set up text chat sessions. Ah, the joys of 1987.

[Firestormalpha]

And here's the pics from the garden. We kinda started it late and if it looks dry, that's because it's about mid day, and I tend to water in the evening. Let the plants drink up over night.

Our pineapple. I thought I killed it awhile back when some of the center leaves died and rotted loose, but then I noticed a nice crown of fresh green growing up in the middle.

That is a picture of the hibiscus leaf curling up, so if anyone knows that this is anything worse than the normal progress of the plant, please let me know and some possibilities as to how to fix it.

And this is the aloe plant. I'm curious about the mid-section of the leaf turning yellow like that. It becomes softer, and eventually can no longer support itself. Is it overwatering, underwatering, too much or too little sun, something worse? All knowledge is appreciated.

and that's a picture of what the rest of the garden looks like. The taller plant is a rose bush, all of it's blooms passed their prime not too long ago. Still waiting to see if another batch grow up on us. Any insight on the best way to prune the plant to encourage more blossoms? The shorter plants are dwarf penta's, they're supposed to attract butterflies. The pink ones handled the transplant very well, but the purples had a rough time of it and are only now really bouncing back from it.

You can see it, but behind the post, against the garage is a mango tree that we're going to plant this weekend. For the lunar planters out there, I know it's not anywhere near the waxing moon, but we don't want to let it set for a month before we get it planted.

I remember 56k, when you thought you were going fast if you could download a 1MB file in under a half hour.

[SpiritWarrior]

With the Aloe, they don't need THAT much water, be a bit stingy. One time I left some Aloe without water for 2 weeks and it was still alive. If you can, take to watering plants in the morning (say 8am) as opposed to night. Overnight watering can cause a lot of fungus issues for plants as the moisture doesn't dissispate in pots or hard to reach corners all night. Especially if the nights are humid. Humidity + poor ventilation = mold.

[Luvian]

I'd try with less water too for a little while. Plus you have to remember that changes are not instant. You won't see the effects of your watering habits until a couple of days later.

I remember when I was proud of my 56k modem. But if I left the computer idle for more than 15 minutes it would disconnect me. So when I wanted to download big files (10-15 megs!) I had to stay at the computer for hours just moving the mouse every couple of minutes. :o

The sound of a modem connecting is so nostalgic I can't help smiling when I hear it.

[Azred]

Originally Posted by Luvian The sound of a modem connecting is so nostalgic I can't help smiling when I hear it.

There are teenagers in high school who do not know what a modem sounds like while establishing a connection--they have never heard one.

What a roller coaster. The old company got sold but I managed to jump sideways from tech support to SQL coding with only a 17% pay cut. Now that all the legal rigmarole settled down my former VP wants to be my new VP again for a 41.7% pay increase over my current position. This, kiddos, is what you call a "no brainer".

[SpiritWarrior]

IDK, that modem sound evokes negative flashbacks for me. Waiting for pages to load, redialing to get a better connection. Resetting because the connection was dropped. I used to turn the noise off after a time. And this present-day practice of streaming video was incomprehendable at that time. Those flash videos you see on game websites, showcasing the latest trailer for an upcoming title - you'd never see them anywhere on the web back then. At most a website had that horrible low-bit nintendo music added to it. Even now, things have changed so much that it is a rare site that has music on it because its just so annoying.

But then there was great aspects about the internet back then. The thrill of connecting to the world. The free access the internet afforded. Chatrooms. Email - people thought they were elite to have an email address. The innocence of downloading MP3's and not referring to it as piracy, because the laws had yet to deem it so. There was this mindset where people assumed since they weren't getting an actual CD or casette with a cover on it (CD-burners had not hit the mainstream yet - for that matter PC's and modems had barely scratched the surface!), that having just the digital format of the song was okay because it would only play on the computer and wasn't actually "real". The internet was just so new and most lawmakers were from a generation that had trouble even understanding it, nevermind make laws for it. There's something to be said of the way things were. Remember they would call it the "world wide web" on TV rather than just "the internet"? lol. Now you never hear that really.

[Bungleau]

Whippersnappers.

I remember when we excitedly took notes of which of our customers had finally upgraded to 2400 baud modems... what a joy it was to work on them! Fully twice as fast as the older 1200 baud modems...

'Course, as one of my coworkers pointed out, it doesn't matter what speed the modem's going if your brain is going at 300 baud....

[Luvian]

I bought an iPod touch 4! I want to thanks the University of Virginia whose dormitory furniture I have been building nightly for the last two weeks. Thanks for the money.

(I already jailbroke it and installed classic games on it!)

Hey Firestormalpha how is your garden doing?

[Firestormalpha]

The good news is, it's not dead yet. We're thinking of putting in some more dwarf pentas around the others to fill in the spaces. Got another pineapple top to plant. And we just put a young mango tree in the backyard. Held off on watering the Aloe plant for a couple days and it hasn't gotten any better, but it hasn't gotten worse either. (the back of my head says there's something not quite grammatically correct about the previous statement, but I can't quite put my finger on it.)

And to be technical, it's my mom's garden, I just try to take care of it.

Some photos:


Our second pineapple. Our neighbor kept it in the fridge for two days, not sure if that will impact it's survival odds.


New pineapple planted to the left of the old pineapple. I did this about 30 min. ago.


View of old pineapple from above. You can see the new growth in the center.


Close up of the new pineapple.


And finally, the mango tree. Right now, it stands at about my height. So a few inches shy of 6ft.