Jim's Home Page

I am originally from Manly in Sydney Australia, and after working for a large American company for nearly nine years in Los Angeles and Sacramento, I have returned to live in Manly once again.

In America I worked for a nation-wide company as a computer systems manager (with the grandiose title of Staff Systems Engineer.)

With a small group of other people I managed to manage nine major OpenVMS clusters with over 130 terabytes of disk on-line, and sundry other systems. This kept me pretty busy, to say the least.

I am into a lot of things outside of work, including road cycling, 8 ball pool, amateur astronomy, and flying large (and I mean large) stunt kites. In particular, I go game fishing whenever I can (and when I can afford it!)

You can find me on the internet most nights on Austnet. If you're not on IRC, you have probably been confused as to why there is a picture of a snake on the top of my pages. Well, my nickname on IRC is "krait", so now you know. And if you are still confused, you can learn about kraits here.

Looking at my web stats, it appears that this page is the most hit, so it looks like you all want to know more about me. So, what else can I tell you about myself?

Likes: Music, gourmet food, wine, beer, women (that's the wine, women, and song out of the way :‑), fishing, really good books, bike riding, elegant engineering, the internet, chat (not just the internet type), travel, Manly, sailing, the ocean, cooking, trivia.

Dislikes: Personal computers (really), Microsoft, computer games, laziness, stupidity, fast food, domestic American beer, TV, people that complain they are bored while connected to the internet.

I love books. I have a lot of them. Most are action/thriller/spy or science fiction novels, however I also have a large selection of "classics" and some non-fiction. Books are amazing things. You can find out information on any subject that you can name. I am an intensely curious person. I want to know how everything works. Consequently, I read a lot. Worse, I buy a lot and keep them forever. I wonder how many books I own? If I was to take a guess, I'd say it would be in the thousands.

I also love music. About the only styles I'm not partial to is high opera, country and western, and rap. Other than that, I'll listen to it. I also have the same problem with CDs as I do with books. Buy a lot of them and keep them forever. My CD collection is not as numerous as my book collection, but I can tell you that it's approaching the thousand mark.