That would be me, Jim Bell.
I've been blessed with many things in this life. The three most important ones are my wife, Leslie King, my son, Christopher, and my daughter, Lauren.
As Director of Senate Technology Services for the New York State Senate, I also have another rare gem: a job in a field I love that is challenging, rewarding, and filled with opportunities. Best of all, I get to work every day with an outstanding team of talented individuals.
In my down time -- currently from midnight to 4 a.m. ;> -- I read, write, tinker, and think.
Thanks for visiting.
First the disclaimer: this site is a personal labor of love and in no way represents the official position of my employer, family or anyone else. In other words, I have no one but nyself to blame for any mistakes you may find <grin>.
Special thanks for helping make this site possible to:
- Blogomania.com, which hosts this site. For my needs, Blogomania is ideal: they deliver very inexpensive web hosting that caters to blogs and personal sites and includes all the bells and whistles I need including MySQL, PHP, access to raw log files and analyzer software subdomains, e-mail accounts and e-mail forwarding, etc. Highly recommended.
- Movable Type, the excellent blogging software from Six Apart, and the company's generosity in making MT available for free for limited personal use.
- Blogjet, my favorite utility for creating MT posts. $20 and worth every penny.
- Gallery, a free volunteer software project for creating online photo albums.
- Macromedia Dreamweaver and Adobe Photoshop, the premier tools for web development and image editing.
- All the developers that have donated their time and talent to make incredibly useful freeware and low-cost shareware. The wealth of software tools out there is just amazing. I'm forever running into a problem and finding that someone has already developed a solution and is literally giving it away. These are unsung heroes of the Internet and they deserve a bigger spotlight. Here's a few: Jay Allen's great MTBlackList, which helps me kill blog spam; flo's freeware's NotePad2 for quick and dirty text editing; and Dan Cederholm's CSS mini-tabs for more stylish menus.
- The literally hundreds of people I've talked to -- in person, on the phone, and electronically -- over the years who have generously taken time to assist, instruct and inspire me. Despite what you may see on the news every day, the world is filled with good people. The Internet is just one more way to connect with them.