A Good Thought:

DeseretBook.com - The Continuous Atonement: "Perhaps as we reflect on our lives, it is easy to convince ourselves we have sinned too often and gone too far to deserve the Atonement. We criticize ourselves harshly and beat ourselves up mercilessly. Perhaps we feel we have stepped beyond the reach of the Atonement by knowingly repeating a previously forsaken sin. We understand that God and Jesus were willing to forgive the first time, but we wonder how many more times they will be willing to watch us bumble along before they finally roll their eyes and declare, “Enough already!” We struggle so much to forgive ourselves that we wrongly assume God must be having the same struggle."

I thought this was pretty much the best summary of how it feels to make a mistake time and time again and not know whether God was going to continue to put up with me or not. I bet there are others out there who feel the same way, and so I posted this short quote. Read the rest of it by clicking the first link. It's really good.

Mater!

The Easter car show was a blast a while back! A blast from the past! Haha, just thought of that. There were lots of amazing cars there - old and new, and people young and old. It was a great time. I took waaay too many pictures (as usual), which is honestly why I haven't posted any of them up yet, is because posting means choosing my favorite pix, and I just couldn't bring myself to not show the ones that weren't as favorite as the other ones, and so I just didn't post.

Well, I've decided to post one or two of the first ones, and give you all the opportunity to view the rest of them here. Hope you enjoy looking as much as I did taking!

PS - can anyone tell me why these pictures came in so huge and others are only medium sized or smaller?

Baby's first Photoshoot!

Man, this baby thing is gonna be fun. I know, I'm glutten for punishment right?

My beautiful wife

Check her OUT! Isn't she a doll? We're so stinking excited to tell everyone that we're going to have a baby! OK, OK, so you can't see much more than a little bump, but we couldn't wait to do a tummy shoot!

Those of you who know me (Ronnie) personally, will attest to the fact that I'm absolutely horrible at keeping this thing up to date, but now I have hope. I'm going to have a baby to show off! There's nothing that excites me more than having our own little munchkin and documenting his/her (hopefully her!) early life through photography and showing her? off to the whole wide world on this blog.

Anyway, enough about the kid, this is about Sam right? LOL. But anyway, seriously, Sam, this is for you. I love you more than anything and am so grateful for you in my life and for everything you do. My wife is the best EVER!

Windows 7 - is it worth it?

Aside from photography, one of my other major passions is geeking around with computers. I haven't let that out much on this blog - Actually I guess it's fair to say I haven't let much of anything out about myself on this blog - but I plan to change that. I've turned over a new updating leaf, so hopefully you'll get more of a glimpse into me and the guy behind the photos as I continue to post. Ok, on with what I was originally posting about...

I've been running Windows 7 beta for about 5 months now, and it's been pretty cool, haven't gotten too serious with it. Yesterday I downloaded the RC (Release Candidate) version and installed it this morning to see what changes had been made.
On my primary hard drive, I'm running Vista 64. It's been pretty cool, and I've defended it against the anti-switch-from-XP people who just can't seem to realize that Windows XP is a dying breed - not because it isn't a good OS, because it is, but because change is coming, and I've found that it is coming in a big way. The new Windows 7 is turning out to far exceed my expecations, both as a geek, and as a consumer who wants an effective, convenient, uncluttered, yet attractive interface to work in.
I'll tell you now, Microsoft has achieved something with Windows 7 RC. I thought the beta version was cool, but like I said, I didn't get too into it because it felt like more of a toy than anything to get serious with, but from the outset, the RC version started off impressive. With previous installs of windows, I've planned in about half my day post-install to dedicate to locating and installing drivers for all my devices. Windows 7 installed all of them before I was even asked for any user input other than my time zone. And you know, I figured it shouldn't have too much trouble with most of my hardware - it's all pretty run-of-the-mill stuff - all except for my wireless adaptor, which is pretty obscure, and all previous versions of windows, especially Vista, have had lots of issues with it, even when I did install the correct driver. Not 7 though. Not only did it install automatically, but also came up with dear Pauletta's (the lady next door whose internet I like to "borrow") wireless connection and asked me if I wanted to connect. Never before have I been connected before windows started up. Yeah, it was refreshing.
So, if any of you are considering the change, I highly recommend it. Microsoft has it for free for almost a whole year. It will be good until June of next year, but bi-hourly restarts will start on March 1, 2010. Pretty good pay-back for making us endure Vista, eh?

For a full review on the RC and its new features, check out this video.