Forty years fixing technology for people
No photograph yet. There will be one, and it will be me.
Photograph
A veterinarian in New Jersey was billing three hundred thousand dollars a month through a program written in COBOL in the 1980s. It ran on a Windows XP laptop. I kept that thing alive for ten years — until I started running out of laptops that still booted.
So I rebuilt it. I'm not a software engineer. I directed AI to write it, learned what I needed to learn as I went, and it's running his practice today.
That's the biggest version of what I do. Most of it is smaller — a phone that doesn't get answered, invoices nobody chases, forty questions a week you're tired of typing. Same job.
I'm 71. I mention it here rather than at the top because up there it would have been the story, and it isn't. I'm not at peace with it either — I'd take 60 in a heartbeat. I have plans.
How I got here
- 1973–1979
- U.S. Marine Corps. Sergeant, ground radio and cryptographic technician.
- 1979–1989
- Paramedic, Houston Fire Department. High-rise rescue, swift-water recovery. Ten years.
- 1994–2003
- Sun Data, WebMD, Lucent, General Electric. Network operations, security audit, HIPAA.
- 2004–now
- UR Gadget Doctors, with my son Jonathan. Phones, tablets, consoles, micro soldering. Twenty years of walk-ins.
- 2025–now
- AI-directed development. A production SaaS, and now this.
Why small businesses
Twenty years of walk-ins taught me that the people who need this most are the ones who don't think they can understand it. That's not a skills problem. It's a confidence problem, and it's the one I'm actually in business to fix.
I was late to this myself. There were people doing it nine months before I'd heard of it. It didn't stop me and it shouldn't stop you.