I was Tom Clancy’s personal tech “wizard” (his words) since 1998, and I served as a tech consultant for Clancy’s book Red Rabbit in 2001.
While I worked for Mr. Clancy, I shipped his computers multiple times before his visits to New York City and London, England. I helped him on-site in NYC, and he offered to put my family and me in the Plaza Hotel.
When Mr. Clancy sold the rights to his video game to Ubisoft in 2008, his website www.tomclancy.com was dark until 2011. I convinced him that his fans would appreciate having his website back online. I spearheaded an initiative to get the site back online. I showed him the website for JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, at www.jkrowling.com. Ms. Rowling had a pretty complex and fantastic website at the time! I thought Mr. Clancy’s publisher could have done MUCH more with his, but I got him online again. Also, the domain was at risk at one point, so I secured it for him, and I remain the Technical Contact for the domain today.
I also helped him save over $40,000 on a complex fiber optic cabling job due to my unique knowledge of the process.
On my first visit to Camp Kauffmann in Calvert County, Maryland, I fixed his broken PowerBook G3 by soldering his power port back on. He was absolutely amazed that I had a soldering iron on my person for an on-site visit. I successfully fixed the unit on the floor of his office while he watched.
Mr. Clancy also had an Apple II system that he kept in his home gym to play his favorite video game on. I worked on that system multiple times to keep it up and running.
After Mr. Clancy passed away in 2013, I was hired by his estate to catalog all of his digital files. I visited Camp Kauffmann and his condo in Baltimore at the Ritz Carlton to collect his Macs and hard drives. I then copied all of his data from everything onto a master archive then backed that up. I then cataloged all of the data. It ended up being about a million data points.
I’ve also worked with the White House on multiple occasions for several different administrations, and in one instance, my visit was worthy of its own Tom Clancy story. You can hear about that visit in this Podcast.
