Dear Friends,

I took my annual day trip to Lake George, NY to attend Americade. The Americade rally is very different than most motorcycle rallies because it is focused on motorcycle touring. There are seminars and rides and a very large touring exhibition with lots of vendors offering anything from parts to trailers to custom painting. I ended up buying some gloves a few other trinkets including a big auto magnet that is a dog paw that says “I sleep with dogs.”

On the way home, Grace, Tony and I decided to stop at Geoff’s camp in Chestertown. Geoff liked his camp so much when he was a child that he decided to buy it as an adult. Forest Lake Camp is one of the premier boys and girls camps in the Adirondacks and is simply a beautiful piece of property. (We are planning on renaming it “Uncle Geoff’s Holiday Camp” for Small Dog Electronics retreats!) We met the camp director, Sara Robertson-Ryan, and she gave us a tour and left us to explore. There is a beautiful lake and lots of great facilities. They were gearing up for the summer season and it was a great opportunity to get a little exercise during our motorcycle ride.

I will be heading out to the Apple World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) on Sunday and have meetings with the Apple Reseller Advisory board and the AppleCare folks down in Cupertino. It will be exciting to be in town for the new announcements and to meet up with other Apple Specialists and our friends at Apple’s headquarters.

Can I take a moment to remind you to back up your computer? Hard drives fail and they take your valuable data, pictures, movies and music with them. In the past month, two of my closest friends lost all of their photos and try as we might, we were unable to recover the data. There were tears, anger and I hope, a resolution to back up from now on. It took me three times to learn this lesson; I hope you never have to learn it the hard way. (I even paid DriveSavers over $1,500 once to recover essential data before I learned.)

It has never been easier, either! With Mac OS X Leopard, Time Machine and any backup drive you can easily automate this process. Hard drives have never been more reasonable in price, with prices falling and capacities increasing. We also have some of the newly discontinued Time Capsules that combine a 500GB hard drive with an AirPort Extreme base station to provide wireless backup solution, too. You have no excuse left not to back up your drive!