Dear Friends,

We had our company picnic down at Plymouth State Park and it was a beautiful Sunday at Lake Echo. In between burgers and dogs, I spent a lot of time in the water playing with my grandkids who seemed to prefer to climb on my shoulders and have me launch them into the lake over just swimming around. I got them to do some races and breath-holding contests and they were still going strong when I made my way to the beach. Gotta love summertime.

It was a big week for Apple with the release of their quarterly financial results and the launch of OS 10.8, Mountain Lion. I’ll talk about both a bit later. I am simply amazed that when a company like Apple beats their own goals for profit and sales, posts record sales and earnings, and makes a nearly $9 billion profit on $35 billion in sales for three months, anyone can call it “disappointing.” What an incredibly strong financial report from a company that continues to lead the industry and the world.

Apple released Mountain Lion from its cage on Wednesday, and naturally I was one of the first to download this $19.99 upgrade to Mac OS X.* It took about five hours due to the other 100,000 people trying to download it at the same time as I was. Once I had completed the 4GB download, installation was a breeze and it took only about 30 minutes to install on my MacBook Pro with Retina display. I will go over some of my first impressions below.

It is hard to believe we are in the last week in July. I had a friend set up a meeting with me for “next week” and when she said “how about Friday, August 3rd?” I had one of those hyper-time moments. It seems like just a blink of an eye ago that I had gotten my motorcycle out for the first time in the spring!

*I had some answering to do to our IT Department, but it was worth it!