Jim Bumgardner is a computer programmer and teacher who resides in Southern California. He specializes in multimedia and entertainment software.

Jim grew up on the east coast, and then came to Los Angeles to study music composition at CalArts in the early 80s, where he made electro-acoustic music with a Buchla 200 synthesizer and other analog and early digital systems.

At CalArts, Jim's work on computer-aided music composition led to a deeper fascination with other aspects of computing, and to his eventual career as a programmer.

In the late eighties, Jim worked on various Multimedia projects and eventually landed a job with Warner New Media, a multimedia division of Time Warner.

In the mid nineties, while still at Time Warner, Jim created "The Palace" - a fun graphical chat system which took the Internet by storm (it drew one million users at its peak).

The Palace received numerous honors, including "Best of 1996" by Entertainment Weekly; a Webby Award nomination; "Cool Innovation of the Year" nominee; Chicago SUN-Times' Best Website: 1998; Top 100 Websites of 1998 and # 24 on the Forbes Magazine POV List.

You can learn more about early Palace history here. Although the Palace is now history, Jim still responds to "jbum" - his Palace-handle (although it helps if you hold up a snack).

At present, Jim is a consultant, working mostly for Pioneer Digital Technologies, in Burbank. He also teaches chess and robotics to kids at a couple of local schools.

jbum has a long history of creating amazing, creative internet and multimedia technolgies and content. Among other things, he's worked on award winning CD-ROMs, a time capsule that was sent to Mars, and a collection of free software toys which he distributes from his website. Thru his natural curiosity he has amassed a great deal of knowledge about many different things, including computer graphics, music, audio, internet stuff and other things too numerous to mention here.

Jim has a wife and two children, whose names all begin with J.

Visit jbum's website to learn even more about him: http://www.jbum.com/