About me: Welcome
to my Web site, and I hope you find something here you like. My
name is Jim Bearden, and I live in the "Silicon Valley" area of
California, south of San Francisco (actually in Milpitas, a town
everyone likes to make jokes about). This is a chance to share
with all of you some of the things I like to do. As you can see
from the headings, that includes music (singing, playing-- mostly
on guitar-- and writing songs), photography, and doing outdoor
things-- hiking and backpacking in the warmer months,
cross-country skiing when there's snow. I spent most of my
younger years in northwest Texas-- mostly in Lubbock, a town
which has certainly produced more than its share of
singer/songwriters (including Buddy Holly, Mac Davis, and Waylon
Jennings, to name a few well-known ones, as well as lesser-known
ones like Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and Angela Strehli, and
some who just spent some of their formative years there, like
John Denver and Glen Campbell). But like all the rest of them.
Lubbock was a place I wanted to leave (Mac Davis's Happiness
is Lubbock, Texas in the Rear-View Mirror being possibly the
best example of that feeling), so I've lived a lot of other
places since high school-- Houston, Texas (when I was an
undergraduate at Rice University); Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (when
I was in graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh); back
in Houston (when I was a post-doc in the Texas Medical Center);
Honolulu, Hawai'i (when I was on the University of Hawai'i
faculty, doing research on cancer); and finally, since 1984, here
in "Silicon Valley", after the research money ran out and I had
to get a job (actually several jobs, by now) in computer
programming. Right now my "day job" is writing software to
analyze blood cells for Abbott Laboratories, which keeps me too
busy to do "fun stuff" as much as I'd like to, but it pays for
all the expenses of doing it, so I guess I can't complain too
much. And since most Webmasters indulge their ego by posting a
picture of themselves somewhere, I guess I can get away with
that, too-- here's one of me, on one of our skiing/backpacking trips, near Lake Alpine in Bear Valley, California, sitting in
front of our tent enjoying the morning sun:
Family: I've got a wife, Sallie, to whom I've been married for just over thirty years now (hard to believe these days, isn't it?), and we're still managing to have a lot of fun together. You'll see her in some of the photographs in the Sky Pilot Photography section. I've also got three kids, who have grown up to be people that I really like. My oldest son, Donald, is working on a degree in Computer Science at San Jose State University; is active in wheelchair tennis, basketball, and track; and has a Web site of his own, at http://www.geocities.com/Colosseum/6234/. My daughter, Carrie, graduated from the University of California at Berkeley; got a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania; married John Monterosso in 2000 (for more about him, and his family, look here); and in 2002, gave birth to our first grandchild, Zack Maddox Monterosso. My younger son, David Ross, also graduated from UC-Berkeley; worked at the Berkeley Free Clinic for a while, where he got interested in medicine; and is now in Medical School at the University of Rochester.
Why "Sky Pilot"? Finally, you may be curious about why I've used the name
"Sky Pilot" for several of my activities. From my essay (and song) about John Denver,
you might think it came from a personal interest in flying. It
didn't -- where it actually came from was the outdoor activities,
like hiking, mentioned above. One of the things we like to do on
these trips is to identify wildflowers, so when I was trying to
think of a name to call my operations, it seemed natural to name
it after one of the wildflowers we had seen. The flower I chose,
the Sky Pilot (Polemonium eximium), is one that most
people haven't seen-- you only see them at altitudes above 10,000
to 12,000 feet in the Sierra Nevada. Our guide book calls it the
"king of the mountain." I took the picture of the Sky Pilot which
you see on this page, and most other pages on this site, about
12,000 feet up on Mount Dana, in Yosemite National Park. It is a
beautiful flower, all the more remarkable for the harsh
environment in which it survives. I hope some of my creations can
live up to the example it sets.
Questions? Comments? Please send e-mail to jbearden@ieee.org
Material Copyright © 1998-2003 by Jim Bearden