Don was a genius software engineer, artist and loving husband and stepdad. Unfortunately after taking care of many others his whole life, as an elder, he was hustled out of his monetizable assets and abandonned in truly dire circumstances. Don served as a worker bee in the industry for 50 years, doing various forms of programming and software engineering. When my Mom met him in 1980, he was a very, very handsome, "yuppy nerd", working at IBM up Route 2, outside Boston. "Worst morning commute ever." Later, he worked for On Technology in Cambridge, but then at some point, he was proud to have been invited to be a founding member at Microsoft. Wow! My Mom, however, didn't want to move to the Pacific Northwest at that time so he did not take the job. Ooops. He married her anyway.://:) Around 1995 he and his wife ended up moving to Maui. My Mom had been diagnosed with Cancer so why not go swim with dolphins? In Hawaii, he created some really cool imaging software for some top secret, government thingy, that he needed clearance for, (supposedly) but who knows. When my mom died in 2005, Don was crushed and more or less fled Maui. He moved to Northern California and after open heart surgery to repair some gentic valve issue, he worked for a number of start-ups including the cutting edge medical startup Cardiopulmonary Corporation although my time line is fuzzy on that. I lost touch with him for a while during this period. Eventually, I had to retrieve him, all busted up, during the 2024 Christmas blizzard, in the Sierra Nevadas, denuded of his assets, homeless and with dementia (and maybe a little too much of a taste for a good IPA). He had been working for Finding QED up until 2017 when his memory started lapsing, (RIP Jay. Blessings Judy.) From what I could piece together, Don was living off CPC stock in Northern California around 2019 and was being babysat by his friends at the Three Forks Bakery and Bar, in Nevada City, CA until it all fell apart. I thought another family member was looking out for him. Nope. He was just getting bled dry. Some of the residual software he made over the years would have been really good app material, and a fun late life project and probably quite profitable, but his beloved Macintosh computer, with all his life's work on it, was also stolen by one of his caretakers. He really wishes he had that back. There was an avatar of his whole personality on it, written in code. Who would do such an awful thing as to steal someone's life's works and the things that defined him and kept him anchored? The good news is Don is finally safe back in Hawaii, well fed and on a tight beer budget (he forgets how many he has had). He finds benefit in being in one place long enough to work on that Sci -fi novel he could never quite get to before. It's about AI, of course. .:://::)) I guess his early stock in On Technology, that he earned while working there in the 1980's wasn't worth anything in the long run. Maybe I should auction it off as a collector's item? It has Mitchell Kapor's "Jon Hancock" on it:) Don has alot of frilly paper stock in a folder in his dogeared briefcase. Names like Aries, Common Stock Inc, Cortronix Inc, etc... which I may frame for him for fun:) Don can't quite afford the sociability of a rest home, or community style nursing facility which he would eventually like, not on his subsistance Social Security and all their mandated Medicare fees anyway. Anyone know of a slush fund for aging OG programmers out there? He took pretty good care of us when we were kids and was a fantastic chef and loved to party. Things got more complicated as we all got older. My parents weren't always that sensible and made a few $ mistakes, but they were mostly love bugs. Certainly no one expected me to be the last adult standing, so I didn't get much training in adulting. I do my best now, but have been taking an absolute beating in multiple courtrooms trying to repatriate his and respectively, our lost assets. I'm not going to lie, it's looking bleak. It's a dirty business, estate law and our relatives and adversaries are extra cunning in all the nasty ways. Maybe some of you can help me to help him? It's a lot for one person to deal with. If you can't donate, please pass this link around. We much appreciate it. Yours truly, Sam Starr Cole
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