“Bounty Hunters!  We don’t need their scum.” – Captain Firmus Piett

Well ok, so maybe we DO need your scum, and of course we mean that in the most respectful way possible (if that’s even possible).  Image Freedom is looking for a full time programmer fluent in WordPress, Joomla, jQuery, HTML5, and overall modern website programming and development, and if you help us find that programmer we’re prepared to pay you a cool thousand bucks!

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If you’ve been following the Image Freedom Facebook (shame on you if you aren’t!) you’ve been watching the developing story of Sophie, the incredibly pregnant momma dog that we adopted from outside our favorite print shop on the south side of San Antonio. Well she had puppies, and tomorrow night they will be two weeks old.

It was an incredibly emotionally exhausting process, the vet had told us that Sophie was pregnant with 7-9 puppies, and that everything looked good, heartbeats, etc. Unfortunately, Sophie was actually pregnant with THIRTEEN little babies, but as a stray dog she wasn’t getting the nutrients to support all of these little gifts and we lost seven of the babies, six stillborn, and one that passed away the following day.

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The last four months have been pretty intense, and not just because we adopted a pregnant momma dog, but also because I’ve been mentoring some amazing companies as a part of the TechStars Cloud startup accelerator program.  Today marked demo day, the final day for the 2013 class, and the presentations were amazing.

I spent the last couple months of the program as a lead mentor for San Antonio local startup TrueAbility, founded by some former Rackers.  I got an e-mail saying that they’d like me to introduce them on Demo Day, but only if the mayor said no first!  Thankfully, (or unfortunately) Mayor Castro was already introducing the “second act” of demo day, so our friends at TrueAbility got the best of both worlds.  (Thanks guys, truly, for the honor of introducing you on Demo Day, it means a lot to me to be asked.)

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Last week was one for the record books.  This time of year always is, with many businesses getting their new year budgets finally released and setting out to do that marketing thing, but also due to my mentoring at TechStars Cloud.  Every year the TechStars Cloud group brings about a dozen companies from all over the world to learn from about 60 or so mentors, like me, on anything from raising money, to how to market their service or how to reach their target audience.

My busy week concluded Friday with a big “fly in” day where mentors came from all over to help these companies in a big “mass mentorship” day.  Only problem was, I was out of business cards.  Mentors love to hand out business cards, I have a small stack of them from folks I’ll likely never see or hear from again, but hey if I ever have a question that only a computer science engineer from IBM could answer… I’m set!

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When I started writing online back in 2001 I was the Gaming Editor for a website called TheOneRing.net. I would receive packages almost daily with products ranging from Decipher’s Trading Card Game to Games Workshop’s Lord of the Rings minis.

So coming from that background of product reviews, previews and new relase coverage, it’s hard for me not to review products and talk about the important business equipment (read: toys) that made 2012 such a fun year to “geek out” in.

So with that in mind, I give you my Top 5 (mostly) Tech Toys of 2012!

Number Five – Apple’s 15″ Retina MacBook Pro

I’ve always been a fan of Apple’s portables and the MacBook Pro line in general has always had a lot of praise even from PC Magazine, who named the 13″ Retina MacBook Pro their Editor’s Choice. What I love most about the Retina MacBook Pro is how fast it is. I’m not a designer but I do all of our documents in InDesign and I have to edit images frequently for this blog and for client website’s, etc.

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