I owe a debt to Tom Negrino and Dori Smith that I could never hope to repay.

You may not know this because I only talk about it all the time, but years ago I wrote a dumb fake Apple news site. It’s true. I did it for seven years and then, only five years after it stopped being funny, I stopped writing it with any regularity and went on to write other things. For money, even. The reason I could do that was because of Tom and Dori, who introduced Jason Snell and others at Macworld to my dumb site back in the day, which they inexplicably seemed to like well enough to eventually let me write for the magazine. Writing for the magazine allowed me to go on and write and do other things that were more fun than corporate IT.

I met Tom and Dori in person for the first time in 2007 when we had dinner together the night before Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone. Tom had just bought a BlackBerry Pearl I think it was and the three of us mused on how in the world Apple could make a phone that was better than that. Somehow they did, if you haven’t heard. It was in all the papers.

Tom and Dori helped grease the skids that let me to quit my day job toiling away in the SQL mines which I had come to hate. They changed my life. They made it better.

Tom is dying and will shortly leave us. But the lives that he touched, like mine, will be a lasting and heartfelt legacy. Thank you, Tom.