About the Mac Maineiac

Hi! My name is Pete Zimowski and I've been a Mac user since Day One. Here's my quick life story: I was born in Houston, Texas, an Air Force Brat,and lived all over the US before going to high school in San Antonio, TX. I went to college at the "School for Wayward Boys" - the USAF Academy in Colorado Springs. I then went to Pilot Training in beautiful Lubbock By The Sea, and went on to fly the McDonnell-Douglas F-4 Phantom II for eight years, stationed at Spangdahlem Air Base, Germany, and George Air Force Base in Victorville, CA. During a stint at a "staff job" in Albuquerque, N.M., I saw that my Air Force future was more likely to be behind a desk than a stick and throttle, and was blessed with a job as a pilot at Delta Air Lines. I have been at Delta for fifteen years, and am currently a Boeing 737-800 Captain based in New York City.

I live in Bath, Maine with my wife of 26 years, Jackie, who is a professional photographer. Our grown kids have three kids between them. Jackie and I live in a 160-year-old American Gothic house in the historic district, with six cats, one dog, and three miniature horses (actually, the horses live in the carriage house stable).

I got my first Mac (the original 128k) after we returned from Germany in 1984. I saw the famous "1984" commercial and the "Test Drive" ad (you remember, the one with the hand clothed in a driving glove clutching the mouse...well, maybe you don't...) and was hooked. My previous experience with computers was a brief stint as a computer science major at college (before I took the course that separated those that wanted to be CompSci majors from those that actually had the capacity to be CompSci majors), building Blackjack games in Basic on the Ti99/4A, and using the DOS computers at the squadron.

I had that 128k Mac until 1987, when I went to a Mac Plus with a whopping 20MB external hard drive. In 1990 I moved to a Mac SE. In 1994 I went to my first MacWorld in San Francisco, made the move to color with a PowerMac 6100, and participated in the eWorld beta program.

Then living in Dallas/Ft.Worth, I had been writing movie reviews for a non-profit family movie review magazine, and saw the internet as an ideal medium for our reviews. I started out hand-coding, and then along came Adobe's PageMill and SiteMill web design tools. My first Mac writing gig was a series of tutorials on PageMill and SiteMill for the now-defunct Web Publisher magazine. Then I tried out GoLive CyberStudio, which I switched to for web design. When GoLive was purchased by Adobe, I was able to participate in beta testing in GoLive, Photoshop and Livemotion.

One of the most knowledgeable Mac users I know is Deb Shadovitz. Over the years, she has graciously given me the opportunity to learn more about Mac technical writing by helping out with her GoLive Bible books. Thanks, Deb!

Also, while living in DFW, my wife and I started writing film screenplays. After finishing the third one, we found that it was going to be impossible to market them while living in Texas, so we up and moved the family to "beautiful downtown Burbank". While there I also started doing some basic video editing. We lived there for four years, never sold a script, but met some wonderful people before the whole L.A. thing started closing in around us, and we escaped to Maine.

In Maine, there is a big push going to get more technology into the classroom, called the Maine Learning Technology Initiative. This program got me interested in becoming a Mac journalist, and the rest is, well, on the Articles and Columns pages of this site. Enjoy!