Jim Zim's Home Page More than you ever wanted to know about this Cocker-crazy guy

Hi there!  I'm Jim Zim...  and this is my home on the web.   My full name is James Allen Zimmerlin, but I like my friends to call me Jim Zim.  My initials have a ring to them, too...  they're JAZ.

I live in Grover Beach, California, a neat little town located about halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco.  Our house is just a 14-block bike ride away from the Pacific Ocean!  It's a bit of a zoo around here, though...  in addition to three humans you'll find five Cocker Spaniels and two cats.  When we have a litter of puppies, the fun REALLY begins!

I'm a homebody...  I like to spend my free time at home, not out on adventures.  I like to work in my garden, play with our animals, take photographs, or fiddle around with my computer.  Often I take a vacation day from work just to be able to stay home and enjoy an extra day around the house.  It's called a "stay-cation".
For real vacations, I like to visit my sister's farm in Washington state.  It's a 1000 mile drive each way from here, but it's so much fun that I do it every few years.  A recent vacation I enjoyed a lot was our cruise to Acapulco.  We've been on three cruises now...  and cruise #4 is coming up in 2009.  Someday, Mrs. Zim and I would like to head to the Caribbean to see what it's like to swim at beaches where the water is warmer than 50 degrees!  Someday...

The short version of my life story:  I was born in Chicago, Illinois, but my family moved to the town of Orinda in the San Francisco Bay Area when I was two years old...  and have lived in California ever since.  I grew up in a very "normal" family with three siblings, two Cocker Spaniels, and Ozzie & Harriet for parents.  I really appreciate the way my parents raised me...  it was full of love and low on confrontation.  My father passed away years ago from Alzheimer's, but my mom is still doing OK and has a few years left in her!

In 1975 I moved to San Luis Obispo to attend college.  That's when I discovered the college radio station (read my anecdotes here) and began my career as a disc jockey...  one of three careers I've had.  My radio career peaked after about five years when I became the Program Director of a soft rock radio station...  but that career came to a crashing stop when the station sold to new owners and they fired me!

Getting out of radio turned out to be a good thing, though, because once I got in to sales I started making a lot more money.  My first sales job was selling consumer electronics equipment for a big chain of audio/video superstores.  Later, I graduated to selling computers, and eventually to Honda automobiles.  I really wasn't very happy being a salesman, though, and decided to make one more career change.  This time I'm in it all the way until I retire!

Since 1992 I've been working for the Pacific Gas & Electric Company...  you know, the evil corporation in the movie "Erin Brokovich".  (Ironically, one of my favorite movies.)  During most of my PG&E career I've worked at the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, although I did also spend a couple of years as a meter reader...  an experience I'm hoping to never have to repeat!  During my years working at a nuclear power plant, I've had a lot of interesting experiences!  If you'd like to read about some of them, and see some beautiful pictures I took while on the job, please visit my Diablo Canyon page.

My wife and I have been married since 1981.  It really doesn't seem like that long ago since I tried to impress her by making home-made lasagna for her on our first date.  We fell in love on that very first date, and have somehow managed to hold it together through thick and thin ever since.  I recently read that 66% of marriages have ended by the 25th year, so I guess we're doing better than a lot of folks!

We have two kids,  Sheri and Jeff.

Sheri got married to her high school sweetheart in April of 2005.  They're currently living in Arizona.  I figure it's just a matter of a couple of years at the most before you'll be able to call me grandpa.

Jeff is a real chip off the ol' block...  very technology oriented, and with a goofy sense of humor!  He began working at the local NBC-TV affiliate when he was still in high school.  He quickly impressed them with his technical skills, and became one of their newscast Directors.  It was amazing to see him running things from the control room.  Jeff moved to San Diego in July of 2007 to attend San Diego State University.  The years go by pretty fast...  it wasn't that long ago we were changing diapers...  and now we've got an empty nest.

Something I've been interested in for a long time is computer technology.  It all began about 1972 when some big company donated a SCM computer they no longer needed to my high school.  The computer took up the better part of a small room, and basically didn't do anything other than very elementary word processing tasks.  This was in the days way before hard drives and floppy disks...  when data was stored on paper cards or paper tape with holes punched in them.  What a thrill it was to be able to save a letter on to paper tape and to reprint that letter again later!  I vividly remember that old SCM computer...  with the jumper wires to change, and the dozens of replacement circuit boards to use when something blew up!  Lots of fun for a teenager in a world where the personal computer hadn't even been invented yet!

We are a very computer oriented family.  There's just the two of us at home, but we still need four computers!  I sure do appreciate our local cable company and the very fast Internet connection we get with our cable modem.  The computer at my desk is a Dell Dimension 8400 with two gigabytes of RAM, but what's REALLY special about it is the RAID hard drive array.  It seems like hard drive performance is always the biggest bottleneck in a computer, so I paid a little extra to outfit my machine with a RAID array instead of a normal single hard drive.  In case you don't know what a RAID is, it's basically two hard drives working together to do the work quicker.  If you imagine a guy with a shovel trying to dig a ditch, and then imagine how much faster the work gets done when there's two guys with shovels working together to dig the same ditch...  you get the idea of how two hard drives working together at the same time can move data much faster.  Dell is one of only a small number of places where you can get a computer with a RAID array...  and that was one of the main reasons I chose Dell when I bought my PC.  Of course, with all the digital photos I take, I quickly filled up that 320 gig RAID array and now I store all my photos on a 750 gig external hard drive.  So, between all the drives, I've got over a terrabyte of storage capacity!  Wow!

I also appreciate great technology when it comes to photography.  I've had several digital cameras over the years...  and these days I'm using a Canon Digital Rebel XSi camera.  Check out my photo gallery, where you'll see some of the best pictures I've taken with it.

I am totally sold on Canon technology.  Besides the awesome digital SLR camera, I also use a Canon flatbed scanner for scanning prints, slides, and negatives.  Speaking of printing...  wow, have things improved in printer technology over the last few years!  We have some incredible 13x19" prints on display in our house that came out of our Canon Pro 9000 printer.  At my job at the nuclear power plant, there's a hallway in one of the buildings where I've posted framed prints of many of the photos I've taken at the plant.  We jokingly call that hallway "the Jim Zim Gallery".

Besides computers, a big hobby of mine is breeding American Cocker Spaniels.  An interesting project I work on that combines these two hobbies is the Open Directory Project, a directory of web sites that is compiled by an all volunteer staff.  Data from the ODP is used by many of the major search engines.  I edit the American Cocker Spaniel section.  Because the Open Directory Project's data is used by so many of the major search engines, I have a huge amount of control over what web sites will pop up when someone searches for Cocker Spaniels on an Internet search engine.  (If you have a Cocker Spaniel web site, make sure I know about it!)  I have also designed several Cocker Spaniel related web sites for other breeders.

During the first few months of 2001, I didn't exactly look like the guy in most of the pictures on this page.  The picture on the left, taken of me in the Spring of 2001, shows you what I looked like while I went through chemotherapy treatments.  Do you think I looked more like Kojak, Star Trek's Jean Luc Picard, or a neo-nazi skinhead?

Why chemotherapy?  In November of 2000 my doctor discovered a lump in my neck which turned out to be a cancerous tumor.  Lymphoma, to be exact.  You can read the full story here, and see some funny photos taken while I was sporting the bald head.  Thankfully, after my cancer treatments were completed, my hair came back and I look basically the same as before.  And don't worry...  the hair came back, but the cancer never did!

If you've enjoyed this page, please take a moment to write and let me know!
My email address is:  jimzim@charter.net

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