Dear Friends,

After moderating a panel at the Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility spring conference with our congressional delegation, I hopped on a plane to head to New Orleans for the Apple Specialist Marketing Coop’s annual conference. It was a chilly 45 when I left Vermont and a humid 85 degrees in New Orleans. At the VBSR conference there was an interesting moment during the keynote address by David Cay Johnston. David talks about how the wealthy enrich themselves at the expense of the taxpayers. His talk was a bit of gloom and doom but he ended the talk with a positive message about how we can change this situation.

I know he has given this speech a few times and towards the end as he was talking about political action, he asked, somewhat sarcastically, “how many of you can call up your congressman or senators and get a few minutes of their time?” He was fully expecting few (if any) hands to go up, but he was in Vermont where you may run into your senator in the local supermarket and say “hey, Bernie”—so, the room was a forest of hands because here we have the most accessible government and leaders anywhere (can you tell I love my state?)!

The journey to New Orleans was pretty uneventful, but coming home Geoff and I had an aborted landing in Detroit and flew through a lightning storm on the way into Burlington. I’ve talked before about the FastMac TruePower IV and the Amazon Kindle reader for the iPhone, but this trip really demonstrated the value of this combination. I am a really fast reader since I was part of an experimental speed-reading program way back in the 50s, so it is easy for me to read a novel on an airplane flight.

This usually means I am packing a couple of books for business travel and if I go on vacation, books are most of the weight. With the Amazon Kindle reader, I have found that I can read just as fast with good crisp text and fluid page movement. I read a 650 page novel, Without Warning by John Birmingham during the two flights. It is an apocalyptic novel—a genre that for some weird reason I find to be fascinating, how these fictional people deal with extraordinary circumstances. Amazon has seen the success of the iPhone Kindle application and have recently updated their Kindle store for the iPhone that makes it easy to search and buy books for your phone.

The only drawback to the iPhone with Kindle reader is that I have to turn it off for take-offs and landings, cutting into valuable reading time! I’ve queued up Red and Me by Bill Russell for my next trip. This is a story of perhaps the greatest basketball player of all time, Bill Russell, and his unique relationship with perhaps the best basketball coach of all time, Red Auerbach (can you tell I love the world champion Boston Celtics?). The iPhone battery will go a long way and the Kindle application doesn’t seem to take much power; however, if you are also using other features, making calls, etc. you may find that you need some juice. The FastMac TruePower IV is just that: an IV for your iPhone! It packs enough power to charge the phone in a short time or operate it for a long time. It is a very high quality and very useful product—highly recommended!

Every day we talk to customers who have lost their vital data due to a hard drive failure. Hard drives are mechanical devices rotating at high speed. They fail. It took me a few drive failures to realize I was not invulnerable and to become a back-up fanatic. My friend David Lerner, from Tekserve in Manhattan, has his email signature say “May You Have 1,000 Backups and Never Need One.” Apple has made backing up your data exceptionally easy with Leopard’s Time Machine automated backup and now with the Time Capsule, it is even easier and wireless.

The Time Capsule is a combination of a hard drive and an Apple AirPort base station for creating a wireless network. The combination of this device and Time Machine make the chore of backing up your data automatic. We were fortunate to acquire a great buy on some of the 500GB Time Capsules, so if you are looking for a wireless back up solution, please check out the details here in Kibbles. The alternative is data loss or a referral to DriveSavers where you may be able to get your data back for a couple thousand bucks!