I was born in Chicago, which should have been my first warning about weather. I survived it anyway, then spent nearly four decades in Boston, which is essentially Chicago but with worse drivers and a self-congratulatory accent.

In 2008, having finally lost patience with winter, I moved to Charleston, South Carolina, where I discovered that escaping one kind of miserable climate is not the same as finding a good one. Charleston was warm, which was the point. It was also approximately the surface temperature of the sun from May through September. I left in 2014.

Asheville, it turned out, had figured out weather in a way that Boston and Charleston had conspicuously failed to do. I've been here since, and have no current plans to leave, which for me is something close to a miracle.

Fifty Years in Technology

I started writing COBOL code in 1973. If that sentence means nothing to you, that's fine. The short version is that I've been working with computers since before most people knew they existed, and I've watched the whole thing unfold from punch cards to touchscreens.

Along the way I taught computer science at Suffolk University in Boston, owned a website development and hosting company, represented one of the first commercial email services (MCI Mail), and spent eleven years as a software engineer supporting payroll and financial systems for a major supermarket chain. I graduated from Oberlin College in 1970.

Eventually I retired, which is when the writing started in earnest. It turns out that fifty years of explaining technology to computers leaves you reasonably well-positioned to explain it to people instead.

What I Write

TheSeniorTechie.com exists because a lot of technology writing assumes its readers are twenty-five years old and grew up with a smartphone in each hand. I write for people who didn't. Practical, direct, no unnecessary jargon.

Don't Move to Asheville started as something else entirely and became a book that's part honest guidebook, part memoir, and part argument that Asheville is one of the few places in America that actually delivers on its reputation.

Asheville Civic Life

I've served on the Buncombe County Board of Adjustment since 2024, as well as being a member and Chair of the City of Asheville's Board of Adjustment from 2017 to 2023. It's quasi-judicial work involving zoning, variances, and a surprising amount of patience. It's not glamorous, but someone has to do it, and I've found I'm reasonably good at sitting through long meetings without losing my mind.