About This Web Site and The Author

Before I begin...

  Howdy! Come on over to my bar and have a drink while I tell you about myself and this web site. It is my wish to make this web site as friendly, quick, and fun as possible. I have tried to accomodate the two most popular web browsers, Netscape and Internet Explorer but at the same time have reserved the right to use some of the later extensions of HTML at the risk of leaving some of the older browsers behind. I have tried to keep the unasked for images at a minimum, knowing that sometimes the web is really slow and that slow loading images can be a pain.

  Before I go on I would like to explain where the title of this web site comes from. I read a book by the name of "A Year in Provence" by Peter Mayle about a region in southern France named Provence. It is a delightful story of an ex-advertising executive who takes up residence in the area. The book was followed by a sequel called "Toujours Provence". The word toujours means "always" or "forever". Having traveled through the region by auto in 1985, and having such fond memories thereof, I decided to commemorate that memory. Thanks for your attention.

VOILA!!!!!... Here I am.   Anyway, my name is James Douglas Gray, and I am a retired aerospace software engineer living on the central coast of California in the good old USA. I live in Arroyo Grande, which is one of the 5 cities consisting of Shell Beach, Pismo Beach, Oceano, Grover Beach and A.G. For those of you not familiar with the area, that's 200 miles north of Los Angeles. I live here with my wife, Terri my mother-in-law, Ruth and my cocker spaniel Ginger. And here's the house we now live in. We have built our own house on 5 acres on a mesa south of A.G.

  I have many interests but the one I keep coming back to the most is my home computer. I enjoy doing a little programming now and then and like to send and receive email. I recently became curious as to how many of my namesake (Jim Gray) are on the internet. I did a search and now have email addresses of over 100 Jim Grays around the world--mostly US, Britain, and Canada. I have sent email messages to each of them and have had replies from quite a few. If you would like to read some of their messages, click here. The Book of Jim Grays Since you obviously have some interest in computers, you might be interested in the kind of computer monitor I use and why I think it is one of the best on the market. It's a Taxan Multi Vision 770 Plus multi-sync monitor and I have used it daily since 1989 and it has never been in the repair shop. Although it is only a 14" monitor, it has excellent resolution as well as a multitude of controls to allow you to adjust almost any feature such as horrizontal & vertical size and position and can be adapted to the requirements of almost any vga/super vga video card or graphics accellerator card.

  Well, I could go on and on but most people don't want to hear about it anyway. That's all for now. If you want to know more, wait until I put some more stuff into a follow-up page then you can click on it if you're really that curious. Have fun tripping through the rest of my web site!

  And don't forget to sign my guest book or
I'll really feel bad and won't come out and play for a month....
This site best viewed using your own eyes.





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