Great post, Jerry. I just submitted my first contribution last night. This project had caught my eye after you delegated to it a week or two ago, and elear commented on one of my witness reports.

I'm going to pop over and give them a delegation right now.

Also, I really appreciate details like these:

"After watching the course, he joined Steem and got my attention with a 10 Steem wallet transfer featuring his post about Utopian after nothing else worked to contact me successfully."

Some people would have left that information out, as it arguably is irrelevant and arguably could look "bad". I see it as simply an honest example of the information overload any of us who are on Steemit as much as possible every day. With the hundreds of fake/scam message transfers for .001, sometimes seing 10.000 instead of 00.001 is the thing that ultimately gets your attention, whether it is about the 10 bucks or not.

Enjoy your trip! You better tape that stand-up and post it.