About Us

Actually,
"we" is mostly me, Greg Lauver. My wife may answer the phone sometimes (don't be scared); and if I ever make any money at this enterprise, there might even be more of me / us.

Many years in corporations, numerous individual and collaborative efforts to compose policy, reporting, and training documents, and gracious guidance from American Indian Elders, left me ingrained with the sense of "team", and of "we." Coincidentally, a beneficial result of a lifelong pursuit of the foundations of awareness has been to relieve the excessive focus on "ME."

The upshot is that I find it easy to write a lot of material from a group perspective, and that's just what I needed for this site. Now you know that "we" aren't some den of corporate devils waiting to eat your lunch.

Quite to the contrary.

I've never been wealthy, therefore I've learned about technology from plenty of reading and plenty of trial and error - the "white hat" hacker's approach - not from classwork.

Along the way I discovered that technology had sufficiently advanced so the user side of it was no longer exquisitely difficult, yet I repeatedly met struggling users. Some were ordinary folks, others made 6 figure salaries; but computers had become omnipresent, and people were feeling the pressure to "get on board," with varying success.

When I finally reached a saturation point with mean bosses and the big city - with it's eye-stinging pollution, deafening traffic, daylit nights, and helicopters 24/7 - my inner country boy steered me to the outskirts of Durango, Colorado, with the idea that I could help people engage computing technology effectively, easily, and inexpensively.

I work to incorporate those 3 aspects into everything I write for this site, often into the wee hours of the morning, inspired, of course to attract work, but also by the possibility that readers may freely benefit. As time permits, I've written about issues with which I and others have struggled. Can you learn more elsewhere? Definitely. I hope to inspire you to learn.

I have. At a major corporation I taught myself, from scratch (learning how to log on), to be a mainframe computer systems analyst. That box was the size of 8 full size refrigerators, densely packed with chips, disk drives the size of washing machines, and supported up to 10,000 users. One day I bought a little toy called a "PC" (no wonder they call 'em microcomputers), and it's been the same ever since.

To all of you coders out there ...

When you look at my code you'll know it's done by hand, with (gasp) Frames! But no ordinary frames: if JavaScript is enabled, loading an inner frame page will assemble the entire window. I like frames - get over it.

I try to keep every page in this site compliant with W3C specs, even in dealing with the sometimes bizarre quirks of older browsers. It's becoming easier since browsers are increasingly updated for security and compliance with standards; but much of the so-called "responsive design", particularly in blogs and shopping sites, is anything but compliant. Most of it is now coded by automagical web design software that generates BLOATED PAGES that even the human web developer no longer understands beyond selecting options from menus. Looking at my web logs, I sometimes laugh at the many fishing expeditions testing for entry points to vulnerable features I don't have. Note that, since the introduction of HTML5, the W3C began beta-testing new validation apps that do not yet entirely embrace the specs.

Although I began this site as a means of advertising my services, it gradually became a personal art project as well as a training ground for experimenting with new (to me) techniques, without some Big Boss popping in to demand, "What's goin' on here?".

That happened once when I was building an "unnecessary" feature into a rush project - a feature I knew the boss would need for a future rush upgrade. When he did, I finished it in a couple of minutes. "How could you do this so fast when ... ?" (When I was so slow before - got it.) "Well, do you remember that thing you said was a waste of time?" Being a decent fellow, he was chagrined.

Another day, another boss (at one point, I had 40 - not a typo), another rush project: "Stop what you're doing and get on this immediately. As soon as he left my office, I could "smell it coming," and, sure enough, he returned a few minutes later: "Stop whatever you're doing and ... why are your feet up on your desk?" "Well, I'm now doing all of your projects LIFO (last-in first-out). It's much more economical to just wait 5 minutes between them." "But, but (as the understanding sank in that LIFO gets nothing done) ... ohh, will you please just get on this?" "Ahh! The magic word."

So, look around, Dear Reader; you may find something you like.

There are several goodies I wrote of necessity and some just for fun. If you're tempted to appropriate my code for yourself, I'd like to suggest a different approach: study it and understand the concept behind it, then improve it and write your own code. In any case, I ask only that you include an acknowledgement citing LauverSystems.com as the source of the concept.

Michigan!

After many years in Colorado, we moved to Michigan in the late summer of 2010. My blog, Prismatica, explains why.

Best wishes and safe computing!
Feel free to contact me for help.

P.S.: If you like my services or this site, here's an official link to LauverSystems.com.