Because I bought three of them.

We won the Chairman’s Award for Remix. This is kind of a big deal. Dick Schulze, Founder and Chairman of the Board for Best Buy, created the Chairman’s Award a couple of years ago. He funded it with a million dollars, and it serves to reward employees who come up with innovative, cool things that are really helpful to Best Buy. Remix certainly qualifies, and I’m very proud to have won, and happy to share the award with Bryan Brandau and Joe Zwack, two of the best teammates I have worked with at Best Buy.

It comes with a monetary reward which is very nice. When I submitted the application, I told the Remix team about it. Dave Micko, who was the tech lead for Remix pretty much from Day 1, but is not a Best Buy employee, asked what he was going to get if we won. I told him I’d get him an iPad. He thought I was kidding, I think.

I also told Steve Conover, the lead engineer of the Pivotal Labs team that did the actual coding work for Remix, that I’d get him one. He also thought I was kidding.

So we won. And I went and bought an iPad for Dave, and another one for Steve, and got them engraved with the Remix logo and their names.

When I gave Steve his iPad, he initially thought it was mine. He mentioned that he’d been looking at iPad and almost bought one a couple of days before, but the store he was at was out of stock. It wasn’t until I I opened the box and turned the iPad over and he saw that it had his name on it that he realized it was actually his, and I hadn’t been kidding.

And yes, I did get one for myself. It’s a really really neat device. More on that later.