Dear Friends,

This week, I did a presentation to one of Vermont’s outstanding companies, SymQuest, at the company’s annual meeting of their nearly two hundred employees. SymQuest’s president, Larry Sudbay, asked me to do it over lunch one day, and I admit that my first thought was, “how do I get out of this?” However, SymQuest is a great company and also one of the Deane C. Davis Award winners, so I agreed.

I knew that I needed to make the presentation about something that I was passionate about, so my thoughts immediately went to socially responsible business, motorcycles and dogs; soon, though, I gravitated toward science fiction and settled on the theme, Science Fiction, Science Reality.

It was fun putting together the presentation, and Dawn was a great help in finding clips from TV and movies to include. I showed how concepts dreamed up in sci-fi had found their way into reality. It also gave me the opportunity to show a bunch of Apple commercials to this PC-oriented crowd. (When I entered the auditorium, a woman came up to me and said, “I’m the only Apple user in the room…”)

I started my talk with a survey: How many people had iPods? About 70% raised their hands. I asked about iPhones and iPads with nearly the same results, and even when I asked about Mac, the PC crowd appeared to have about 35% closet Mac users. That got the talk off to a good start—many years ago, as I was stressing about giving a public speech, my PR consultant, Peg Devlin, called me over. As I leaned over to talk to her, she scolded me for being nervous and just said “get up there, relax and have some fun.” Simple advice, but I think about it every time I give a talk.

Larry and SymQuest made a $1,000 donation in my name as an honorarium and we gave that to ReBuild Waterbury, a non-profit aimed to help a nearby town hit very hard during Hurricane Irene. It was very nice of them to do that!

I rode my motorcycle out to Minneapolis for the ASMC conference with Jason Lewantowicz, our Service Manager. We took 4 days to get out there and 3 to get back, traveling through Canada and taking the high speed ferry over Lake Michigan on the way out. The Apple Specialist Market Cooperative meeting was one of the best ever with great attendance, lots of vendors and good presentations.

I was out in the hall chatting with some Apple folks when one of my friends came running out of the meeting and said “Don, get in here it is all about you!” So, I came in and on a 40-foot screen was a picture of my smiling mug with Hammerhead, my Bulldog. Gair Maxwell was giving a presentation called “The Branding Highway” and was using me and Small Dog Electronics as an example of how to do it right. He showed some of our commercials and it was great recognition.