Not that pissy, and I am a big Geraldo fan, but I give no one carte blanche when challenging my big apple ego. I am not a commercial apple grower and have a great deal of respect for anyone who has gone that route. My business is making sure home growers get great fruit and if they don't, I'm out of business. Commercial growers can be out of business even if they're succesful fruit growers. I have read articles about using Crockers fish oil to blossum thin apples organicly in the west. The information I get is that blossum thinning isn't so useful out east because of more unpredictable fruit set. As I understand it, when we get cool wet weather during and immediately following petal fall it can have a strong negative affect on fruit set. Of course cool weather also affects the efficacy of chemical thinning- but the other way, by reducing thinning. As far as my suggestion of removing all blossums from branches when all else fails to create annual fruiting, it is based on personal experience with a Goldrush apple tree on my own property. Even after removing all flowers on every other spur and coming back shortly after petal fall to hand thin thoroughly I couldn't break biennial bearing on this tree. It was as if the tree just sent out a signal that could only be stopped by going radical. I did and of course it worked. Goldrush is considered an annual bearer and further south it behaves much differently than here in NY. Even here, the reason my tree gives me so much trouble is that it looses the sun from mid-afternoon on but even in full exposure Goldrush can be difficult here. When reading Beach's Apples of NY it is interesting how many of the heirloom varieties were noted not only for being biennial, but even triennial, so obviously thinning on such a variety as this wouldn't work consistantly. Most newer varieties are fairly reliable annual bearers or they wouldn't be released. One clear exception for me, even when grown in optimum conditions, is the Fortune apple which has actually been triennial on a couple of sites- one with full sun exposure. I'm hoping the trees will settle down when they mature. In the humid part of the country the growing season doesn't give fruit trees as much total energy to work with. It's like a solar battery loosing power on cloudy days.

Hee-hee!! Ahead of the curve in this group!!! Don't get too cocky!!! lol. Edna, actually, the English Oxford Dictionary regularly updates and changes both words and definitions, and occasionally removing archaic and unused words!! Check this out: Notes on OED's March 2009 release of new words bird-dogging n. This North American colloquialism is interesting in its own right, the work of a dog trained to retrieve birds for hunters finding figurative expression in the sense 'determined searching or pursuit' as early as 1933, but a side note adds extra fascination. The 1972 quotation in this entry seems to point to a possible explanation of the hitherto somewhat obscure origins of the name of DOGGING as an exhibitionist pastime. However, caution must be urged: the gaps in time and distance between this 1972 U.S. use and the first 1986 use in Britain of dogging argue that perhaps nothing more than coincidence is at work. achy-breaky adj. Inspired by the title of the 1992 hit "Achy Breaky Heart", written by Don von Tress, and performed by Billy Ray Cyrus (now perhaps more famous as the father of Miley Cyrus, TV's Hannah Montana), this adjective has found life after the pop charts in a variety of contexts, possibly aided in this by a capacity to prompt either extremely positive or extremely negative reactions in the people who hear it; not unlike the song itself. lifestyler n. The current release of revised material, which contains, among other things, human, social, community, life, and related words, has something of a focus on human society, the changes that it has gone through, and the reflection of these in the English language. This word, first appearing in 1970 (the word "lifestyle" itself dates back only as far as 1915), forms rather a nice microcosm of these themes with regard to the later 20th century. The quotations at the first sense reflect a selection of (often unconventional) lifestyles characteristic of the time, and the increasing familiarity of these to an audience broader than the actual participants. The second sense focuses on a specific social phenomenon, urbanites moving to the countryside in search of a (frequently somewhat idealized) simpler life. This is as familiar in Australia and New Zealand as anywhere, but only there have such people earned the epithet lifestyler. humanly adj. This last item, as well as being a good example of an old word which is new to the dictionary, is interesting precisely it appears not to have caught on at all. It's logically formed, its sense ("characteristic of human nature") is easy to divine intuitively, and its two obvious parallels in the language, manly and womanly, both went on to flourish in the language; in fact humanly owes its origins to a translation of the Dutch equivalent of the former. The reasons for its failure relative to these words perhaps lie in the ready availablity of human itself as an adjective by this time, denying a suffixed adjectival form the room it needed to grow. Graeme Diamond, Principal Editor, New Words, Oxford English Dictionary I know, I know, I am a word geek. Nancy.

I have a 2TB Passport and two smaller external drives. I use a 17" Dell laptop with Windows 7. Just purchased in July because my previous laptop hard drive failed. I did not want Windows 8 so I really had to shop around for something with W7. I currently have no dedicated office so the work I do is generally while sitting on the sofa. Not optimum but it is what it is. As such, a NAS would not be practical. I know about NAS, they were used in the design department I used to work in. I'm tired of dealing with external drives and remembering to manually back up. It got me in trouble once, it will get me in trouble again. The cloud is really the way I want to go. I didn't know that bells and whistles would go off if I tried to upload 30Gb of photos. I'll contact my ISP and see what they suggest. Thanks. Jodi-

If you have these in digital form, I suggest that you print the most treasured ones on good photo paper to serve as a backup. Store these flat with a non-stick archival quality separators between each photo, better yet, slip each photo into an archival quality sheet protector. Sheet protector can be found at office supply stores. Lowest cost per protector is to buy by the box-full. Include with each photo place, date taken, and names of people. If the photo was taken at an event, name that event for example, Thanksgiving day at Bill Jone's house. If something out of the ordinary happened, also record it, for example, Billy chipped a tooth while sledding on the hill behind the house. These little notes tells a family history that would otherwise be forgotten in the future. Mow, about digital storage. The problem here is to pick something that can be read 10 to 20 years or more later. PCs and personal recording media has changed rapidly over the past 20 years with the result that older media can not be read because the technology was abandoned as new and better things came along; think 5.25" floppies, 3.5" floppies, superdisk, various tapes, and recently, CDs. Today, of this list, the average PC can read only the CD and believe it or not, the CD is going away, too. I keep one computer equipped to read 3.5" floppies for retrieval purposes. In a pinch, I can still read and write 5.25 floppies (That's caveman era for a computer.) I have been storing photos on CDs, but last winter I took a genealogy course and the instructor convinced me that CDs may go away within 10 years if not sooner. She advised the class to store records on DVDs as these will still be around after the stores stop selling CDs. A DVD holds so much more data than a CD and that spells the end to the CD. I brought up my concern that I thought that a CD was a more secure recording media than a DVD owing to its larger 'spot' size; DVDs spot size is extremely small and more easily damaged or corrupted. The instructor said maybe so, but the DVD has been developed enough to take over and it will. CDs are going away. She urged the class to copy their genelogical data and photos to DVDs She also recommended to use archival quality DVDs. These cost more but have a better backing material. One has to seach to find these because most stores stock only the average disc, but if you treasure your data, you'll use archival quality media for long term storage. You can store mountains of data on external hard drives and at a very resonable cost. These should be drives that are not used on a daily basis, only for data storage and retrieval. Again, if you depend on these, keep aware of changing technology in the interface between the drive and computer. If you buy an external drive today, i'll most likely have a USB port. Just think, a little over 10 years ago, there were no USB. The ports could change again in the next 20 years and you'll need to shift your data to another media. One caveat: A DVD may better survive the shock of a drop than a hard drive. Some may be tempted to use "Thumb Drives" for permanent storage. These have solid state memories, no moving parts, and are very compact. This is very tempting, but I do not recommended it. There are technical reasons. The storage junctions are good for about 10,000 read/write cycles before failue. Manufacturers have develped schemes to use all the junctions by moving partitions in memory so that eventually, every junction gets used. This spreads the useage over the entire drive. This process is transparent to the user. This feature made possible commercialization of the product and for the average home user, he's unlikely to run into the wear-out problem. However, a gamer might. The second feature is that the memory is volatile; It requires a voltage source to keep the memory "alive". Fortunately, the current drain is extremely small for this task and can be provided by a small, long life battery, Typically a lithium battery. This is the thumb drive's achilles heel. Eventually, that batteriy will fade and the drive will be scrap. About 10 years is expected. Again, this technology is a moving target and some day, we might see thumb-drives with non-volatile memory. But for now, I recommend thumb-drives only for temporary storage. I would not depend on one to hold data for 15 years. Some folks may give up on managing data storage and opt for the cloud. Wonderful, but how sure are you that the business model for cloud computing will survive? (The instructor I mentioned is well grounded in this technology. She teaches classes to certify IT people for MicroSoft Windows Support and maintence.) Fifty years from now when we are dead and gone and our media trashed, think about a future family genealogist discovering that backup box of photos and the notes that go with them. She/he will be joyful and will suddently become an expert family historian. It is advised that you print all photos, notes, and text on acid free paper with fade resistant ink. You can't beat hard copy for endurance. Geez, I've almost convinced my self to start scrap booking my genealogy family data. I could include historical happenings such as presidental elections, war beginings and endings, photos of schools and other public buildings that are scheduled for tear down, etc.