Hi! I'm Jonathan. Welcome to my Web site! I'm a technical writer working in the San Francisco Bay Area.

A Brief Biography

I was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1943, to Estelle Liff and Henry Kamin. Yes, they were married. My mother was ahead of her time. I lived in Brooklyn, where I was a Dodger fan until they left.  Through my father's radio-listening habits, I was introduced to Charlie Parker, B.B. King, and Hank Williams, among many others, and was fortunate to have Henry Umans, my father's best friend and a fine boogie-woogie pianist, as an honorary uncle. I pretty well flunked piano lessons, but took up clarinet and sax in high school, and played in the band, the orchestra, and the dance band. Meanwhile, I began teaching myself guitar. In 1959 I went away to college at Brandeis University, where I majored in sociology and minored in music and drama.

In 1968, after I finished my education, I moved to the Bay Area. I lived in Berkeley, Oakland, and Petaluma, and taught sociology at Sonoma State University until 1972. After that, I started Bay Arts Press Service, a news service marketing reviews of San Francisco/Oakland/Berkeley performing arts events to suburban newspapers. While managing a stable of critics in various fields, I reviewed theater performances, and rock and jazz events, and was a member of the Bay Area Theater Critics Circle.

After several years of mucking about in various free-lance jobs, I joined the staff of the Institute for the Study of Private Schools at University of San Francisco as a research associate in 1980. There I helped to research and write several monographs on parent choice of schooling in Canada. When the Department of Education became largely un-funded in 1980, I got into computers, and was hired as a staff editor at Sybex Computer Books in 1983. Shortly thereafter, I was promoted to staff writer, in which capacity I wrote and co-wrote books on a wide range of computer subjects. For details, see my bibliography.

On the strength of my best-selling MS-DOS Power User's Guide, I went free-lance again in 1987, as a technical writer and consultant, founding Kamin Consulting Services.

In 1992, having not yet recovered emotionally from the Loma Prieta earthquake and dismayed by the Oakland Fire, we moved to the Portland, OR, area. While there, I successfully created information solutions for many small businesses, especially in the medical and design fields. I also developed software for a commodity brokerage firm that was uniquely effective in managing information to support three-handed transactions and to manage the relevant product information, which increased sales efficiency by 50 percent.

In 1997, after several reverses and unfortunate family situations, I returned to Berkeley, where I am now living with my son Jordan (see my Family page), and worked as a contract technical writer, mainly ghostwriting chapters of other people's books that were about to miss their deadlines. In March 1999 I began working as an in-house technical writer for Siebel Systems, Inc., maker of sales, marketing, and customer service enterprise software for Fortune 500 companies.

Comments? Questions? E-mail me! or ICQ me!

This page was last updated on July 04, 1999.

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