Who is Jim Schrempp?

Hello from almost always sunny Saratoga, California.

You want to know about me? Here's probably more than you want to know...

I enjoy theater and good eating. I never miss the local San Jose Repertory theater and dine out as often as my waistline allows (and often more often than that!).  I enjoy taking a camera with me and you'll see the outcome all over this web site. I am lucky to be dating Angela, a software engineer I met at a Christmas In April event many years ago.  Volunteering is a lot of fun, but I find it hard to make enough time to get out there these days.

For me a great day starts with coffee and the Mercury News at a local coffee shop. Now that I'm in Saratoga, the Blue Rock Shoot has been my place of repose every workday.  Weekends I'm most often in San Carlos and then my butt is down at the Plantation Coffee Roaster.

When I've exhausted the daily Merc, who knows where I'll go. Sometimes I end up in a park with another good book. (Books I can recommend)   Sometimes I just drive the Miata down the road and back. I'm always on the hunt for fun things to do around the bay area.

I also enjoy cooking. There are adventures here around cooking, and I keep a recipe archive here of my favorites. I think you'll find a few unusual but tasty recipes. And I love doing anything with a group of friends or family.

If I'm not home, I like to be far away. I enjoy just about any traveling, as long as someone else plans it. Sometimes I write it up with a few photos.

I think of myself as an explorer, a traveler, a sponge for information. Myers-Briggs pegs me as an ENFP, although on the tests that I've taken over the years that F/T score is almost 50/50.

You can read and see photos of the family. You can also read about our family on my brother's web.

I used to work for Hewlett Packard Company.  19 years it was, almost to the day, when I announced that I'd be leaving for a small start up of my own making.  Well, Vance and I started it and six years later it's going strong. We've been in the paper many times, including the NY and LA Times! Read all about Audible Magic on the corporate web site.

In my 19 years at HP I did so many things.  I started in 3rd level technical support; we only took the calls that two other levels of engineers had been unable to resolve. Mostly they were tough, low level bugs in the software. It was fun ferreting them out.  Then I moved into management. I managed 3rd level support teams, sometimes starting them from scratch. I had a lot of fun creating and leading the System Performance Consulting team.  We built up a team of experts in wringing every last drop of performance out of the HP3000.  We tuned customer applications, we tuned the operating system, we routinely worked with the kernel lab to change the way the system worked.  I also managed 50 engineers in one of the MPE development labs.  My teams had the powerful, but waning, Allbase, and we added ODBC to Image/SQL, thus bringing it into the future. And my system test and integration team went through a complete revolution from doing standard nothings into a team that found problems early in the development cycle and kept a software release on schedule. Someday I'll have to write up a few stories from those days.

My last job at HP was managing the knowledge engineering program for the software support services division. I had a team that improved the content in the knowledge base (4M docs - way too many) and a team that looked to understand and plan for strategic needs of the businesses. We were successful in improving the usefulness of our content by coupling analytical analysis of keywords in our content with pattern based analysis of our users' behavior. It sounds dull, but it was pretty exciting to me. I also was program manager of the HP Electronic Support Center. It became a great place for business HP-UX and NT customers to get support via the web. If you're inside the firewall you can check out the K&I site.

At one point my teams were as large as 50 engineers and $7M a year in expenses.   Now the new company will have to grow from draining my checkbook to filling my bank account!

2006: Historical pages

• The old Veo Web Camera in Saratoga page.

Email me ... and say hello.