PBS Instagram Page News

[Bwosczyna]

Hello everyone;

It was recently agreed that PBS would begin to forge a larger presence on social media.  To that end, I will be handling the recently created Instagram account. 

I'm excited to announce this today to our members and persons on the list that I have made our first post.

If you wish to follow, you need only search Pacific Bulb Society on the Insta app and you can begin to follow our account.  Be advised that I intend to keep the page "private" at this point so the page is not spammed. I will have to approve anyone who wishes to follow the page, if you intend to follow as a business and not an individual, kindly send me an email to let me know and I will accept your request.  Otherwise, we'd be seeing all kinds of offers in post responses and I assure you, some of them can get strange and irritating.  

I wanted to personally thank our member Zeon for grabbing the @PacificBulbSociety address so that we can utilize the PBS name as the place to find the page. He created an account when the idea was floated several weeks ago and he was gracious enough to hand the account over to me when I asked him to do so.  It was quick thinking on his part as often others may already be using the name when you try to create a new account.  For this I am very grateful; we have our name in full on the account and searches for our page will be very easy. 

I am keenly aware that not everyone participates in social media.  I'm not going to encourage anyone to do so if they are not inclined.  That's totally fine!

The Instagram account will simply be a page with nice pictures and minimal information on bulbs/flowers/tubers/corms/plants.  It will be an avenue for people to find PBS and hopefully help us grow our membership.  It will not have loads of information.  It will have a link to the membership in the bio.  The Insta account should only be considered a complement to our Wiki and the Forum. Instagram was not created for long discussions or deep-dives: it's basically eye-candy to promote interest in whatever subject is posted.  

Do you have something cool or interesting flowering or growing in your bulb garden?  Feel free to send me a few pictures privately and the name of the plant you're submitting.  We will not be getting in-depth with these posts since we have the most valuable tool already, our Wiki, which I also intend to promote. 

Feel free to email me privately with questions as I don't wish everyone to be overwhelmed with a thread in their in boxes.  I'm really looking forward to PBS having more of a presence on social media.  We need to encourage beginners and younger people as well as more experienced plant folks around the globe to join us in our passion of growing bulbs.

Thanks for your time,
Bridget
Vice-President/Bulb Exchange Manager
PBS  

[Michael Mace]

Yay! This is awesome!

[Martin Bohnet]

Beeing of the unfortunate Generation in between "I'm old and I won't understand it so I can use it anyway" and "I've grown up with Social Media and couldn't think of living without", I'm of the Social Media skeptical type, so I guess that's why I miss a link in Bridget's post - maybe links are not how Insta is supposed to work. I've added one anyway to the News menu section of this forums starting page, so one can find it without being used to the medium.

[Bwosczyna]

Martin, I'm a little envious of your "in between" status.  I am tied to social media as I am .... social.  So many of my connections with people evolved with it.  I don't have any issues with FaceBook and Instagram as I judiciously guard my privacy settings and since I've seen ads forever, I literally don't even "see" them any longer - I just keep scrolling.  In my case I'm able take what I like from social media and have the ability to just glide away when I need a break, etc.  
It is a conundrum, as it is built to pull you back in for those likes, comments and "validation".  I simply use it as a tool to show my pretty plants to my friends and to advocate for joining bulb societies.  

Thanks for including the link!  I believe I simply assumed it would go one of two ways: persons who use Instagram would know that the @pacificbulbsociety would get them where they needed to go and everyone else would roll their eyes and say: nope.  

We've got a few dozen followers already.  Good start.

[Martin Bohnet]

Don't be too envious, it's a trap. I've learned coding on the C64 - pure, down to earth 6510 Assembler, knowing exactly what the processor is doing, tact by tact, painful step by step. Adding 2 integer numbers, range 0 to 255?

* clear the carry flag (CLC)
* Load first number from storage $xxxx to the Akkumulator  (LDA $xxxx)
* Add the second number from Storage $yyyy (ADC $yyyy)
* Store the result at $zzzz (STA $zzzz)
* do some reaction if you had an overflow (= the result is bigger than 255, sets the carry flag) -> BCS $XX (Branch on carry set to that point in memory relative to current position)
etc.

Absolute control, absolute control freak. And as the processing time was in a range where the cathode ray of the monitor (!) traveled a visible distance, I could use this to visualize if any step took longer than expected - the number of tacts single commands take depends on whether relative addressing is crossing a memory page boundary, don't ask. Not even modern assembler works this way, with parallel processes, a strict division of data and executable pages (CLC in the memory just looks like the number 24), branch prediction - but still that's the level of control I'd love to have with computers. that's not easy.

[David Pilling]

UK car number plates include a three letter group in capitals - once in a while I twitch when I see a 6502 op-code go past.