Hi there. My name is Jim McKinney and I'm the System Administrator Manager for the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) here at Carnegie Mellon University. Sooner or later I'll probably have to put up a picture, but until then I'll have to settle for telling you a little about myself.

Let's see, I'm originally from Youngstown OH. I currently live in Cranberry, a suburb of Pittsburgh. I'm married to a lovely (and VERY patient) woman, Nancy, and have a daughter, Danielle, who was born November 12, 1992. On June 27, 1995 she was joined by her brother, Douglas James, tagged Doogie by myself and his sister.

I know most of you are tired of seeing pictures of peoples kids and pets, but I'm really proud of mine. I do have a fairly rare photo of two siblings getting along so I figured I'd share it. I'm figuring that this will be the last time until after graduation from college.

For fun I help a friend of mine coach his son's baseball team in the summer and I've been known to pick up a bowling ball in the winter. I guess you could call me a Cleveland Indians fan, but it isn't a life or death thing. I like to read, mostly Sci-Fi and computer related stuff, but I am a pretty big fan of the techno-adventure stuff that Tom Clancy, and Dale Brown put out.

I'm a graduate of Youngstown State University, with a degree in Computer Science and minors in Math and Psychology. To get myself thru school I worked at a couple of campus jobs. Initially I was a member of the sports medicine staff. This was neat because I got to do some traveling and always had good seats :-) My last year there I was a student consultant in the various computer centers.

After I graduated I worked for a manufacturing company, Tridelta Industries, for about 6 and 1/2 years. I was in charge of the UNIX machines and installed their network during that time. All in all it was a good experience, but it was time to move on...

To a small company called American Cybercasting Corporation, or ACC for short where I was the Director of Technical Operations for about 3 years. ACC distributes on-line versions of periodicals and distribues a K-12 curricular product called Educational Structures. ES is a really cool product that integrates traditional educational resources like text books, etc with current information from recent publications. It also provides lesson plans and great search abilities. If you are involved with K-12 education in any way at all I strongly recommend you check it out.

Which brings me to where I am today, System Administration Manager for ECE at CMU. My job here is pretty much like that of an admin anywhere. I make sure that the machines and network(s) are up and available, unjam printers, try to fit some development in between all of the day to day stuff, you know how it goes. Heck, sometimes I even have the nerve to sleep...

While at ACC I also did some work for National Public Telecomputing Network, a non-profit organization whose mission is to help communities establish Free-Nets. Because of various relations between the companies they shared several resources, including the computer room and T1.

I've been seen at a couple of IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) meetings. I've not been as involved as I would like because of the two sub-units I mentioned earlier. I usually end up in the user services working groups. One particular working group (WG) that I found extremely useful was the Responsible Use of the Network group. They produced RFC 1855 , "Netiquette Guidelines". I think it provides some very good outlines and everyone using and associated with the net should take a look.

A friend of mine from a previous life runs a small company offering WWW page development and hosting. I think he does a nice job and has pretty reasonable rates, so check him out.

Check out the Task Force Tips pages. Owned by Stewart McMillan who is a friend of mine. They manufacture fire suppression and other related equipment.

Click here to see a pretty cool picture of the world we work and play in.