Dan 7.0 · 2026
70 years of paying attention.
Still an early adopter.
I’ve spent a career finding out why things actually work the way they do — on factory floors, in boardrooms, behind a service counter, and behind a camera. This is where I write about what experience teaches slowly.
Year 2026 —
What I’m doing right now
I’m all in on artificial intelligence. I watched the dot-com boom happen largely from the sidelines, for reasons that had more to do with my personal life than my interest, and I decided I wasn’t going to miss this one. So I’m learning it from the inside — the way I learned computers, spreadsheets, scanners, networks, and digital photography.
I’m also actively consulting, returning to writing with a renewed sense of purpose, and beginning the slow work of organizing a life’s worth of photographs and family stories. I call this season Dan 7.0. Not because the earlier versions failed — because each one added something.
Still working. Still learning. Still sorting things out.
Forty-four years of being early
My first computer weighed as much as a sewing machine
People sometimes assume that being seventy means being behind. My history runs the other way. I’ve usually been out ahead of the curve — not because the newest tool was reliable, but because I wanted to know what it could do.
Seattle, 1982. That white case is an Osborne 1 — a five-inch screen, two floppy drives, and about twenty-four pounds of it, on its way down the stairs to a consulting site.
Forty-four years later I’m doing the same thing with a different machine.
1982
Osborne 1
A five-inch screen, two floppy drives, CP/M. Flight attendants asked if I was bringing a sewing machine aboard.
1982
Portable video
Camera on one shoulder, VCR on the other, playback deck at home. Enormous. Felt like the future.
1980s
Lotus 1-2-3
Macro programming and menus so others could use my models. Hit recalculate, go find coffee, come back.
late 80s
Scanners, LAN, EDI
Trying to scan a pallet twenty feet overhead, discovering the limits, finding the next workable answer.
1990s
Windows 3.1
WYSIWYG. For the first time the screen resembled the page. Hard to explain now how remarkable that was.
1990s
The bag phone
Magnetic antenna on the car roof, handset like a kitchen telephone, minutes watched like a hawk.
late 90s
The web arrives
Ask Jeeves, then Google. Everyone asking the same question: how does anyone make money from something free?
2000
Survived Y2K
Years of systems updates and contingency plans. Midnight came, the lights stayed on, and everyone decided it had never been a problem at all.
2020s
Apple silicon
Built my own PCs for years chasing photo horsepower, then moved to an M1 Mac. My daughter: “Welcome to the dark side, Dad“.
2025
All in on AI
Learning it the way I’ve learned everything else: from the inside, with a few wrong turns along the way.
I was never interested in technology for its own sake. The question was always the one behind it — how can we use this to improve the way the work actually gets done?
Writing
What experience teaches slowly
Leadership
The technical answer is rarely the whole answer
Two companies run the same process and get completely different results. After forty years I’ve stopped being surprised by it — and started asking a better question.
Faith & grace
Regret can teach me. It doesn’t get to name me.
I have a long list of things I’d do differently. What changed wasn’t the list — it was what I let the list do to me.
Attention
There’s always a show after the show
A lesson I learned photographing sunsets beside a man who knew better than to pack up when everyone else did.
“Never visit the past without the Holy Spirit.”
A line I keep close
Photography
A discipline of attention
Photography isn’t mainly about producing an attractive picture. It’s what makes me slow down enough to see what’s actually in front of me — whether that’s a field at first light or a person who expects me to capture their best side.
About
West Tennessee farm boy, industrial engineer, consultant, photographer — still figuring it out
I was born in 1955 and grew up on the land, where cause and effect are impossible to argue with. Weather matters. Timing matters. Maintenance matters. You cannot talk a crop into growing. I’ve spent the fifty years since learning that organizations work the same way, and that the visible problem is almost never the real one.
There have been accomplishments I’m grateful for and failures I’d change if I could. The road ahead is shorter than it used to be, but it is not empty.