Jim is a Senior Contributing Editor for Linux Gazette, and the founder of The Answer Guy column (the precursor to The Answer Gang).
Jim has also worked in other computer roles, and also as an electrician and
a crane truck operator. Jim has also worked in many other roles. He's been a
graveyard dishwasher, a janitor, and a driver of school buses, taxis, pizza
delivery cars, and even did some cross-country, long-haul work.
He grew up in Chicago and has lived in the inner city, the suburbs,
and on farms in the midwest. In his early teens he lived in Oregon--
Portland, Clackamas, and the forests along
the coast (Brighton). In his early twenties, he moved to
the Los Angeles area "for a summer job" (working for his father, and learning
the contruction trades).
By then, Jim met his true love, Heather, at a
science-fiction convention. About a year later they started
spending time together, and they've now been living together for
over a decade. First they lived in Eugene, Oregon, for a year, but now they
live in the Silicon Valley.
Jim and Heather still go to SF cons together.
Jim has continued to be hooked on USENET and technical mailing
lists. In 1995 he registered the starshine.org domain as a birthday gift to
Heather (after her nickname and favorite Runequest persona). He's participated
in an ever changing array of lists and newsgroups.
In 1999 Jim started a book-authoring project (which he completed
after attracting a couple of co-authors). That book Linux System
Administration (published 2000, New Riders Associates) is not
a rehash of HOWTOs and man pages. It's intended to give a high-level
view of systems administration, covering topics like
Requirements Analysis, Recovery Planning, and Capacity Planning.
His book intended to build upon the works of Aeleen Frisch
(Essential Systems Administration, O-Reilly & Associates) and
Nemeth, et al (Unix System Administrator's Handbook, Prentice
Hall).
Jim is an active member of a number of Linux and UNIX users' groups
and has done Linux consulting and training for a number of companies
(Linuxcare) and customers (US Postal Service). He's also presented
technical sessions at conferences (Linux World Expo, San Jose and
New York).
A few years ago, he volunteered to help with misguided technical
question that were e-mailed to the editorial staff at the Linux
Gazette. He answered 13 questions the first month. A couple
months later, he realized that these questions and his responses had
become a regular column in the Gazette.
"Darn, that made me pay more attention to what I was saying! But I
did decide to affect a deliberately curmudgeonly attitude; I didn't
want to sound like the corporate tech support 'weenie' that I was
so experienced at playing. That's not what Linux was about!"
(
curmudgeon means a crusty, ill-tempered, and usually old man,
according to the
Merriam-Webster OnLine dictionary.
The word hails back to 1577, origin unknown, and originally meant miser.)
Eventually, Heather got involved and took over formatting the column,
and maintaining a script that translates "Jim's e-mail markup hints"
into HTML. Since then, Jim and Heather have (finally) invited other
generous souls to join them as The Answer Gang.
![[BIO]](../gx/2002/note.png)
Jim has been using Linux since kernel version 0.97 or so. His first
distribution was
SLS (Soft Landing Systems). Jim taught
himself Linux while working on the technical support queues at
Symantec's Peter Norton Group.
He started by lurking alt.os.minix and alt.os.linux on USENET
netnews (before the creation of the comp.os.linux.* newsgroups), reading them
just about all day while supporting Norton Utilities, and
for a few hours every night while waiting for the rush-hour traffic to subside.