Day After Christmas

Hello Family and Friends,
We are sooooo sorry that we have not updated anything since the middle of last semester. With Bianca and I in school full time and working we were drowning in homework and church activities so we just did not have time to update anything meaningful. I am also happy to announce that this blog will remain strictly for the family events and updates, and to please my wife, I am moving all of my geeky to a new blog; "the modern cool geek". Is it a corny title...you betcha :-) I will be working on uploading a lot of pictures through out the evening so hopefully we will get everyone caught up on our lives and all the fun things that are happening. Hope everyone had a great Christmas!
We love you all lots and look forward to another great year with all of you!
-JR and Bianca
ps. doesn't Bianca look great with Andy....she is so cute :-)

An El Paso legend passes away.

I am sure most of you have heard by now, but yesterday afternoon Coach Don Haskins past away in his El Paso home. Our family especially loved the Bear and he will be missed by all El Paso. Our hearts and our prayers are with the family. Here is the official AP article on coach.
ESPN
-JR

Saw this on Digg today !

Dude this is totally true...are you a version 1.0 or 2.0?

Hug a developer

My buddy Javier sent me this video today and I loved it.
If you know a developer give them a hug today!

Enjoy!
Cheers,
-JR

Tech in Plain English

Many of you have already seen these guys, but I have been showing this site more and more to people at work to explain some pretty complicated concepts, so I thought you all might like it. If you are reading this you probably already know about blogs - but what about Twitter, RSS, Podcasting and social networking? Check out this sample video from the guys at Common Craft and see what you think.

Honestly I think they are a great tool to explain to people how these new technologies work.
Hope you all enjoy!
Cheers,
-JR

Photo Touch Up

Howdy all,
Just wanted to drop a quick little line to let everyone know that we are ok and still working hard :-) Also wanted to talk very briefly about photo touch up software. I know that most of you already use photoshop or software like that, but if you are like me and on a budget there are some very nice alternatives. If you haven't checked out GIMP I highly recomend it. It has some really nice features and the best part its free. It can do alot of the photoshop things so if you are in need of a quick alternative this is the way to go. I am not big on the ISO hunt and torrent of pirated software, manly because there are so many great free tools out there. That and the fact I really don't want the FBI knocking down my door lol! There is also a good tool that kicks the old windows app Paint up a few notches called Ultimate Paint. Also a good little piece of software.
You can find these software titles at:
www.gimp.org
www.ulitmatepaint.com
Well hope all are doing well and enjoying these last days of summer!
Cheers
-JR

Screen and video capture tool!

Howdy again from Southern New Mexico,
The other day I needed to down load a video and convert it into a .wmv format for posting on a client web site. Needless to say things got a bit tricky I had a free problems. A while back I was watching Tekzilla and they gave some great little tools for just that. Unfortunately I am broke so spending money was not really an option. So I stumbled across a little tool called Freez Screen Capture. This guy is just awesome with a lot of different setting for quality and codec choices. I highly recommend this little app and best of all its FREE. There is also a slew of different apps that the parent company Small Video Soft makes that I am dying to try. Things like IPOD video converters DVD rippers and all sorts of other cool toys. If you all need to rip a video from the net that is not your standard .flv file or something like that this is a great little tool. I know a lot of people out there will tell you to grab Real Players which lets you down load just about any video, but I would really not go that route. All videos are stored as .IVR files that dont help alot since, from everything I have read, there is not a smooth way to convert IVRs to anything useful. If you do have Real Player though, grab a video display it on your machine and copy it with Freez screens capture. Its fast easy and a great little tool. All these products can be found at http://www.smallvideosoft.com/. Hope you all enjoy.
Cheers,
-JR