Snowfella

Wish mine would flower like that, tallest one is getting close to the 8 foot mark so got my fingers crossed for this season! This little one has no hesitation to put out buds though. Bit of a mishap after the last bit of rain we had. Drying up nicely though.

Taken up bird photography in the last few months so I could likely flood this thread with little feathered things. This is more a landscape thing though, early morning at Penrith weir.

Better have some tinfoil ready I'd say! If you want to be untraceable in todays day and age you better take steps to drop of the face of the earth alltogether! And I'm not just talking about ditching the opal card and walk to work but ditching everything, down to mobile phone, bank cards, credit cards, bank accounts, medicare, road toll boxes and anything even remotely connected to the net! I was born in a country where at birth I was assigned a personal unique identification number used for just about everything, think the Australia Card on steroids. It was and is required for just about everything and still I wasn't worried about being tracked. Hell they even sent me my own set of dogtags with said number on them just a few months after I was born, tags I still have mind you although now a second set given to me in the late 90's...only difference to the original tags is that the new ones also sport my blood group.

Yep, I was cheating with both tripod and a dslr Plus a long lens with teleconverter to boot. It's my only hobby aside from cacti so I've spent abit of money on it over the last few years. Though I've never to date bought a new lens for the camera, I've relied on second hand stuff from Ebay or Gumtree. That's about to change though as I'm saving for a new birding lens, can never have enough reach when it comes to that type of shooting!

From a hobby photographers perspective you really ought to play with your exposure or metering system ;) Here's my effort from Sunday night

Guess at some stage I'm going to have to rearrange that bed for that very reason. They used to be spaced pretty far but now it's less than 10cm between the plants. Unfortunately it's not really a place I can let a terschecki grow till maturity so it's likely that one that will have to go, no idea what I would do with it once that happends though.

Nah, these 2 have lived happily where they are for a few years now with no ill effect from weather. Put them in the size of pingpong balls in 2011 and since then they have lifed through heatwaves and light frosts and just kept on ticking. Compressa back then And the Tricho The mystax went in at a later date after an echeveria I had in that spot was burnt to a crisp on a warm day.

Haven't really done anything to my plants for months now, apart from some light weeding here and there. It's winter so I'm 100% leaving them to their own devises. Went out today though and shot a few photos. A year and a half worth of growth, can't complain much. Feb, 2013 Today M. compressa cluster in my older bed is starting it's first flowers for the season. M. mystax has it beat hands down. Neighboring E. terscheckii is finally starting to put on some height rather than just girth.

Just to clarify here, my viewpoint doesn't come from the Australian military. I'm Swedish and did my drafted service plus volountary SFOR deployment to Bosnia before moving down here.

Where to start! Probably best to start from a personal level, yes I am ex army and yes I've been deployed overseas and came home with bagage that I'd rather not have. Simply put I've got "issues" both emotional and physical that your average joe just do not have. It does not however have anything even remotely to do with morals, I'd say ex-service men have higher morals than just about everyone else. We have it drilled into us from day one to be above the bar when it comes to our behaviour and actions. "Unfortunately" that also has a downside, we get it drilled into us to look out for the man to our left and right above everything else, he/she is our brother/sister and is who we are fighting for. That all has it's downsides when it comes to translating from a fighting role into a policing role, as army if I were part of kicking down a door I'd do anything to look out for the guys with me...you even asmuch as hint towards threathening my boys and we have an issue but in policing it has to be the other way around, we are there to protect the general population. Sure ex-military makes perfect sence when it comes to policing but it also comes with the above problem, we have been trained to look out for the guy next to us, not to safeguard the guys we are hitting, it's not that it's the enemy we are hitting at whatever cost it might bring. As for the article certain things do pop out. First would be flashbang into bed/crib, if you don't know how these things work it sounds sinister but flashbangs generally ain't what you think they are..ie single flash and bang to disorient. They are multiple bang/flash things, generally what is used are 7 or 9 bang charges that even if tossed into a safe are can move around between detonations. And I seriously doubt that the guy who tossed into the room aimed for the crib, you generally bounce it along the floor aiming for a back corner of the room as you want the people in the room to follow it with their eyes. They are made to be a distraction so you can enter the room safely. And it's the US we are talking about, guns are abundant so I would not be doing a no-knock entry without something M16 like in my hands. Again it's not there just so I can "take out" joe blow but as a protection if the fertiliser hits the fan. Flame suit is on

2 minutes with google found me the official ACER service guide detailing how to take the rig apart. Will still leave you with the "issue" of how to get the disc out of the drive without a manual. Then again it's generally all of 4 screws to remove the casing from a dvd drive and get access to the internal bits. http://data.manualslib.com/pdf2/24/2330/232907-acer/aspire_x3990.pdf?9a424ce7dbf2d732da9895f72b7a3794&take=binary Computers ain't really that hard to build and take apart aslong as you RTFM (read the f*** manual) and never use force. Bits generally only fit one way and even internal parts can be taken apart with due care. I even managed to rescue a DELL laptop belonging to one the wife's workmates that had the power lead socket ripped from the motherboard. Dell quoted her in excess of $400 in repair as they would have to replace the whole board, cost me $10 for a replacement socket shipped from the states and a few hours of work with screwdriver and soldering iron to get it going again.

And on second thought, here's what I would do before breaking out a screwdriver or paying $160 to have it fixed. Unplug the computer and tilt it up horizontally Give it a gentle shake Front of the dvd drive should have a tiny hole just below the tray Gently poke a straightened paperclip into that hole, it should eject the tray a cm or so with minimal pressure on the paperclip Manually pull the tray out If you are lucky the cd should now be on the tray, likely out of alignment though.

10 minute job with a screwdriver and knowhow though I'm not sure what that would do to your warranty. Take it what got stuck was a mini cd and not a full sized one? If so not many cd/dvd drives are able to use those if mounted verticly without an adapter, and those adapters would be a hassle to find nowadays since mini cd's just ain't used anymore. Been years since I even saw one! Doubt the support person at ACER even know what they are to be honest. I'll pass this thread onto the stepson who asfar as I know works in the repair side for ACER, maybe he'll have some insight into it. Edit: what you are going to need for the future is something along the lines of this. http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/Mini-CD-DVD-Disc-Adapter-Adaptateur-Adattatore-Adaptador-Adaptor-Adapteri-/321426614070?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item4ad684e736

From memory that's got nothing to do with you as a reciever but rather that Australia post has recorded the ID of the sender. Think it's a legal requirement for them to do on any parcels heading overseas.

Nice Hamilton's shot Torsten. 2Mb files are huge by jpg standards! Sure a modern camera generates larger files but for posting online 1024xwhatever is generally enough, in my case I even limit file size to 400kb when I work up a photo for online use. With no crops in my case that's going from 6000x4000 and around 9mb to 1024x683 and >400kb. Below photo is a mere 333kb, can you tell?. Sure the original sized image has fine details that you won't be able to see in a downscale. Here's a portion without any scaling.

Hostilis: sure those are rubrispinus? Look so much paler in colour to mine and more in line with "regular" rigidissimus. Got my fingers crossed for some flowers on the Trich's in that bed come spring, peru and bridgesii are still way to small but the pach and scoup could possibly flower this year. Main stem on the pach is a good 5 to 6 foot now so it's big enough for sure, just the scoup that's borderline but it doubled in size over summer.

Hit the cactus bed with some well needed weeding, was kinda overdue to be truthfull. Before After

Working within the distribution chain of said company everything I've read about it stinks to high heaven! Knowing how we recieve, pick and distribute produce there's no way only one store would put out a recall on a suspect product unless they had a unique supplier for just that store, in all likelyhood that would not be the case for something like mushrooms. It comes in by the pallet load and gets picked for store delivery in a random fashion, there's no telling what store gets what box of stock or from what pallet/batch. If one delivery ends up suspect then every store that got deliveries of that product on that day would have to quarantine/recall their stock. My bet goes to some muppet picking, cooking and eating suspect mushrooms that they were not sure about and then trying to pass the buck onto one of the bigger chains.

Checked em over for hail damage after last nights thunderstorm. Mainly just grazing blows but 2 trichs copped direct hits. The culprits, wasn't game enough to run out and grab them while things was coming down so these had been on the ground for a few minutes already..

Not a freak in any shape form or way but plain freaky in what it's doing. Been sitting without roots since the beginning of this month when the mother plant fell over and I had to chop it up. Had no buds when I selected this tip to be kept and now it's kicking them out bigtime.

Might interest someone, yesterday around 1pm the sun had dual halo's over Sydney. Best photo I got of it with massive amounts of post processing to bring out the colour.

Just make sure you have dense enough soil to keep the columnars upright, just had a 9 foot C. peruvians keel over on itself this afternoon likely from to pourous sandy soil that it was planted in.

Left: Echinopsis hybrid something Mid: Parodia microsperma? Right: Gymnocalycium monvillei?

Not sure to be honest, though it isn't unheared of for offsets to randomly change their minds and turn into a flower or vise versa. Here's what it looked like mid bloom, far right flower.

Not really much of a freak but still somewhat interesting on one of my Echinopsis. Thinking this is an offset that changed it's mind and turned flowerbud, since flowered out but seems to still be growing.