Kibbles & Bytes Blog

We received over 60 entries to our most recent contest where we asked folks to send in their dog to be immortalized in our Small Dog plastic dog collection. One of the many things that I’ve learned while working at Small Dog Electronics is not only do we have the best customers in the world, our customers have the best dogs in the world! The pictures and stories that were sent in were fantastic and choosing two out of 60 was tough.

Before we looked at the entries, we came up with some criteria:
#We wanted to make sure that we covered as many different dog breeds as possible in our collection
#We wanted to make sure that we selected dogs who might be recognizable either because of unique shape or coloring
#We needed to make sure that the dogs that we chose would be easy to mold

We then sifted through the collection of submissions, got teary-eyed reading through the obviously loving stories of your submissions, and narrowed down our selection to a handful of the entries who best met our criteria. We then looked at that group and chose two who in some way either moved us emotionally by their picture OR by the impact of their stories.

And the winners are…

Julie Rigby’s dog, Favor who just stole our hearts with such a photogenic face and
Chandra Aubery’s dog Apache who is honored posthumously and has a wonderful mask.

Thank you to everyone who entered and for sharing the love that you have for your companions. We really do have the best customers who have the world’s best dogs!

We’ll be posting all the entires on our Flickr site next week when we get spare moment. You can reach our Flickr page here.: http://www.flickr.com/photos/smalldog/

I’ve been playing around with the *Text to Speech feature within the Dictation & Speech settings in System Preferences* in 10.8, and was reminded that I mentioned in a previous issue that I’d report back on my impressions. (Thanks, Jim M.!)

Text to Speech is a nice feature for those of you who prefer hearing to reading — and less time squinting at a screen is always better, especially if you’re prone to eye strain or are visually impaired. I chose the voice “Alex,” since it’s designed to be the most natural and least robotic. (The other voices, especially Victoria, are nostalgic to me, though, as they remind me of when I first used a Mac with OS 8.6 — I’m sure many of you go further back than that!)

Upon setting it up, I wasn’t prepared for how much it would affect my workflow. At first, I found the audible prompts unsettling, but quickly got used to them, partially because I use a dual-screen setup at work. This meant that I could concentrate on my main screen, a 30″ Apple display, and not have to look away for certain things.

To go beyond Alex’s alerts and prompts and have “him” read something to you, copy the text you want dictated to the Clipboard and launch TextEdit. Then, paste the text into a new document and select where you want Alex to start speaking. Choose *Speech >Start Speaking* from the Edit menu in TextEdit, and listen to him go.

Alex stumbled on a bunch of unusual words at first — he read from a list of grocery items, including Stevia and Echanacea, and pretty much butchered them. However, it got the job done, and of course, I knew what he meant. (As my mother-in-law says, “listen to what I __mean,__ not what I say.”)

I’ll talk (write?) more about the other half of this technology, Dictation, next week. __That’s__ where it gets fun.

It’s been a few weeks since I last introduced one of the “young gun” employees of Small Dog. This week I wanted to introduce readers to one of my favorites, Nessy. Nessy, short for Vanessa, is on the right of the attached picture, shown during a trip to the fair with other SDE employees.

She joined Small Dog in early 2011 and has been working the retail sales floor in South Burlington. Recently, she’s been making the journey to our Waitsfield headquarters to help out in our Hammerhead division once a week and that’s how I’ve gotten to know her a little better.

Nessy is originally from Maine and I think that is the basis of her very down-to-earth personality. What I love most about Nessy is how optimistic she is about life and its little idiosyncrasies. She seems to look on the bright side of things and appears to be perpetually happy. You can’t help but feel the same when you spend time with her.

Nessy is a recent college graduate and she studied Chinese which is why we asked her to travel to Waitsfield to assist Hammerhead. She’ll help us converse with our representatives in China and translate documents when needed and she’ll get a chance to test her skills. Perhaps she’ll teach me a few Chinese phrases while she’s here!

Recently out of college, she doesn’t have a dog but she does have a rabbit — a French Angora named Lenore. (That’s a very sophisticated name for a bunny, but not quite as sophisticated as my cat’s name, Mrs. Middleton-Snugglesworth, but that’s a whole other story!) Lenore is very fond of electronics and by “fond,” I’ve been told, she likes to eat them. She is also very good at shedding — a good trait for an Angora bunny to have.

If you’ve been to our South Burlington store, you’ve probably had a chance to talk to Nessy. If not, be sure to introduce yourself. She’s the young woman with the winning smile who also knows a heck of a lot about technology!

Recently, I wanted to capture a set of commands to create a video tutorial, and I was ready to download a third party application to help me record them. Turns out, in Snow Leopard and later, QuickTime (v10+) does just that — and it’s included in the OS.

* Screen Recording mode is located under *File > New Screen Recording*
* Once the window pops up, access the audio input, quality, and mouse icon settings under the arrow in the bottom righthand corner
* Then, select which best suits your video (I chose “None” since I intended to use text boxes instead)
* Click the red button under Screen Recording to start your screen capture
* You’ll be prompted to either record the whole screen or to select a portion of the screen to capture (If you select a portion of the screen to record, you’ll need to click Start Recording to begin)*
* From there, everything you do will be captured, and you’ll be able to stop the recording by clicking the Stop icon or by pressing *Command-Control-Escape*

You can then save the movie as 480p, 720p, or 1080p quality, and there are options for iPod touch, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPad, Apple TV, and Mac and PC compatibility.

QuickTime does a great job of producing a basic screen capture. If you find that you need more options, “*Camtasia*”:http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.html is nice alternative, as well as the light-weight “*Jing.*”:http://www.techsmith.com/jing.html

__*Note that the exact prompts may differ depending on your OS. I am using Mountain Lion.__

_Dear Friends,_

It’s September and already some of the maple trees have started to change color. I went down to Rutland to the state fair over the Labor Day weekend, primarily as an excuse for a motorcycle ride, but also because Grace wanted to see the chickens. Let’s put it this way — it was a good motorcycle ride.

Speaking of Rutland, I have some very exciting news to announce. We held a press conference this Wednesday to announce that we will be opening our 4th store in downtown Rutland in April. This was a long-hatching (keeping with the chicken theme for Grace’s birthday today) plan that started a few years ago at the Deane C. Davis awards. We won the award that year and the runner up was a 100-year-old company — the Foley Family of Companies.

At the award ceremony, I met Mark Foley, Jr., who not only owns some real estate in downtown Rutland, but is very active in his community. We got talking and he convinced me to come to Rutland to talk with him. I saw a downtown that had seen better days but that was seriously on the rebound. A new shopping center had been built, a beautiful theater renovated and the town was pulling together.

I was still very skeptical, but we decided to hold this spring’s eWaste Recycling Event in Rutland and the community was very responsive and helpful throughout the great event. I was encouraged…but still skeptical. Enter my friend, Mary Powell. Mary is the CEO of Green Mountain Power and serves with me on the Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility Board. She called me and asked to get together to talk about Rutland.

That came as a surprise, but of course, we got together for a chat. Mary explained to me how Green Mountain Power, who had recently merged with Central Vermont Public Service (headquartered in Rutland), was going to make a big commitment to downtown Rutland. She told me she wanted to make Rutland the “solar city” and that GMP was going to put in an Energy Innovation Center and refurbish an old historical building in downtown to make that a reality.

I was getting more intrigued. She suggested that we work out a Memo of Understanding wherein Small Dog and GMP would work together in Rutland. She agreed to make us their Apple and technology supplier and a number of other exciting incentives, but the one that pushed me over the edge was that they would put in a dog watering station downtown jointly branded with Small Dog.

We hammered out the details in record time, I signed a lease with Mark Foley, and we announced our new store in downtown Rutland on Wednesday. We are excited about becoming a part of the community in Vermont’s second largest city and are thrilled with our partnership with Green Mountain Power. We hope to have the store up and operating by the spring.

“*View some photos of the press event and announcement here.*”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/smalldog/sets/72157631437642456/

Exciting announcements are expected from Apple next week; we are all on the edge of our seats!