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.  My 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 three Cocker Spaniels and two cats.  When one of the dogs has a litter of puppies, the fun REALLY begins!

I'm mostly a homebody.  I spend most of my free time at home...  working in my garden, playing with my dogs, taking photographs, or fiddling around with my computer.  You don't find me out at bars, or attending sporting events, or hiking and camping.  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".
But the older I get, the more I like to get out of town and visit my friends... or take a nice vacation away from it all.  One of my favorite places in the world is onboard a Carnival cruise ship!  I've been on seven cruises, including a group cruise with some of my Cocker Spaniel loving friends in the  summer of 2009.  In fact, that was so fun that we're going to do it again this Fall.  Click here to see pictures from the best I've been on, so far...  a 2009 cruise to Acapulco on the Carnival Spirit. 

Another favorite vacation of mine is visiting my sister's farm in Washington state.  It's so much fun that I go there almost every summer.  It's a 1000 mile drive each way from here, but I love that drive if I have the time to do it.  If time is tight, I just take a quick flight up there instead.

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.

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.

I got married to Kellyn in 1981.  We stuck it out through thick and thin for 29 years before finally filing for divorce in June of 2010.  Now I enter a new phase of my life.  It ought to be interesting!

Kellyn and I had two kids together:  Sheri and Jeff.

Sheri got married to her high school sweetheart in April of 2005.  They moved to Arizona, but after a few years ended up coming back to California.  They (temporarily) live with me now.  Well, it's a good thing they don't live in Arizona anymore, since it's probably just a matter of time before they make a grandkid for me to play with...  and I really didn't want to drive all that way to do it!

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.  He graduated in 2009 and now works as a newscast producer at one of the big TV stations there in San Diego.

The years go by pretty fast...  it wasn't that long ago I was changing diapers...  and now my kids are adults and it's just a matter of time before you'll be able to call me Grandpa.

Something I've been interested in for a long time is computer technology.  It all began about 1972 when some big company donated an outdated computer 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 business 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!

I'm a very computer-oriented guy.  I actually have three!  (Plus one at my "real job".)  I sure do appreciate our local cable company, Charter Communications, and the very fast Internet connection we get with our cable modem.  The computer at my desk is a Dell Dimension 8400, 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 several external hard drives.  Between all the drives, I've got over two terabytes of storage capacity!  Wow, talk about coming a long way since the days of paper tape storage!

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 T2i camera.  Check out my photo gallery, where you'll see some of the best pictures I've taken with the various digital cameras I've had over the years.

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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