Dear Friends,

August is one of my favorite months. Though we’re in the dog days of summer, it is also the time of year that most of the local vegetables are ready to eat. Nothing is quite as good to eat as fresh tomatoes off the vine or really fresh picked sweet corn. Sweet corn is my current excuse for a motorcycle ride, although as the season progresses, my ride shortens. The last couple of weeks I have had to ride over to the banana belt in Essex to the Mazza Farm, but recently I spotted some farm stands close by. I saw our neighbor Elwin Neil picking sweet corn for our local grocery store as I drove home the back way last night.

This August features a blue moon. Whenever there are two full moons in a single month, the second one is the blue moon. This is pretty rare, hence, the “once in a blue moon” saying. I’ll have to convince Dawn to do some sort of special Blue Moon sale later this month. Speaking of sales, all this summer we are feature an amazing special on Parallel Systems. If you buy any Mac from us we will give you a copy of the premier Windows emulation software for only $9.99—a $60 savings. This will allow you (with the addition of Windows software) to run Windows in a separate window on your Intel-based Mac.

We are developers at Small Dog and as such, I have access to the beta version of iOS 6 that is coming out this fall. I am very impressed with the integration using Mountain Lion. One of the features that I find very handy is that whatever windows I have open in Safari on my Mac are already open and ready for me to continue reading on my iPad. While Apple makes a lot of really neat hardware and leads the industry in design and innovation, we should never forget that Apple’s software as represented by OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion and iOS 5 (6) is just as innovative and ground breaking. It is that combination of the hardware and software that has made Apple into the dominant player they are today.