The official PP-Mobile is a 2002 Nissan Pathfinder, which is a fabulous conveyance for many reasons - but gas mileage is not one of them. For carrying necessary PolicePro related technical equipment such as skis, sea kayaks or camping gear, it is second to none - but when the time comes to make a 400 mile sweep through New Jersey visiting our NJ clients, the charm fades somewhat.

Hence, this shiny new dark gray bullet: a 2006 Honda Civic Hybrid. Surprisingly, you give up NOTHING in the name of fuel economy. This thing has plenty of power, cruises the Northway as smooth as silk far above the speed limit, and handles like a slot car on the winding roads through the farm country of middle Saratoga County. All that and 45 miles per gallon so far, which is slowly creeping up with the warmer weather and the car breaking in a bit.

The car is pretty much always under the control of financial officer and controller Vicky Lundgren, but the programming/road trip staff will get a shot at it once in a while when necessary. I wish we had two of these! Honda has an unbelievable home run with this car. Ours is the extremely popular and rare Magnetic Pearl color, which makes it a real head turner, something Vicky enjoys endlessly when people comment on the car.

As long as we're sort of wandering today, you want to hear an absolute masterpiece? Get thyself to iTunes and grab Shawn Colvin's Another Plane Went Down, from the Whole New You album.

I have been a Shawn Colvin fan forever. This one grabs you every time you listen to it, without fail. It's not her normal folk guitar-driven thing, but a very complex and layered piece of work. You have to really listen to what's going on with the instruments to realize how rich it is.

This is so good that I listened to it on the airplane on the way to and from Alaska, kind of unusual given the story it tells.

Everything Shawn does is worth listening to. Try Shotgun Down The Avalanche (what a great title!) when you're done with the planes and see if you don't end up dropping several dollars on iTunes if you haven't heard her before. She is supposed to release a new album sometime in the next couple of months, last I heard. This is a fantastic artist, worthy of the term. Hell of a guitar player, too.

What to do with the few free evening hours on the recent PolicePro trip to Skagway, Alaska? Why not write a quick program for a local tour/adventure tour outfit owned by some friends of one of Skagway's officers... not rocket science, but a basic, solid and useful tool for these guys to get their work done.

There is a force in the design/programming universe called Scope Creep which says that every project will grow beyond all recognition as requests for One More Little Thing are made and addressed, which lead to more and more. This project, being self-limited as far as my short local access, was an exercise in fighting that force. We whittled it down to the most basic useful form and worked to that and nothing more.

The result? No fancy audit trails, no endless snazzy automation, but a hell of a nice interface and a shot right at the heart of the work that actually needs to be done. The program tracks bookings and clients, sends automated email confirms, and handles the rest of the nuts and bolts stuff. If they ever want to go bigger, they certainly can, but this is a small family outfit and all they really need is to be able to track the clients and make sure everyone gets what they expected.

So they don't all have to be huge showcase projects... and it was a nice change, cranking this one out.

A couple of winding miles north of Skagway, the Dyea flats mark the end of the channel. During the Gold Rush, this area went from a mud flat at the edge of the Chilkoot Pass to a city of 10,000, and then back to a wilderness again. Today, there are only fragments of what was a boom town the equal of Skagway.

Gold hunters had a choice to make when they reached the end of the waterway: the deep water harbor at Skagway allowed boats to dock and discharge passengers and goods directly into the booming city, where the White Pass route went off towards Bennett Lake, the first part of the overland trip to the gold fields. A little further up, the channel ended at Dyea, where a wide flood plain made for a miserable, muddy start. Small boats would take people off the bigger steamers and transport them as close to the shore as possible, depending on the tide... but then it was a slog to the dry ground and the start of the infamous Chilkoot Trail, the only other way to the gold fields.

The White Pass railroad as much as anything assured that Skagway would prevail in the end, and the equipment required to build it was only able to be offloaded in the harbor that Skagway provided. Today, the Dyea area has returned to thick, heavy forest, with bright green moss covering all the ground under the trees. A few determined people still live there, and the area is a favorite with tourists and adventure seekers in summer, looking to experience the Chilkoot Trail.

To stand on the flats and try to imagine what faced those people only a hundred or so years ago, a thousand miles from the civilization of Seattle, is an amazing thing. It's tough to walk ten feet through the forests here, much less the thirty miles over the mountains that was only the beginning of a long trip further north. Consider then that a person had to take a year's worth of supplies with him - on his back - and the task seems impossible. For some, according to the Park service, the 30 or so actual miles meant a thousand actually trekked, going up and coming back for more again and again and again. On the Golden Stairs over the pass, if a man stepped off the path in the winter of 1898, it could take four or more hours for a break in the human chain to get back on.

And life was short here in those days. In the Gold Rush cemetery just outside of Skagway, the average perceived age might be 30 or so, but it might be a lot younger if you do the math with all the babies and children who never even got started before ending up on this now forested hillside below a waterfall.

Now, don't believe any of this as gospel - I'm just a fascinated visitor here myself. But the history of this place, and the hardships involved for those who came here, is so worth reading it can't be overstated.

The subject of conversation in the Sweet Tooth Cafe today: bears. Black bears, hostile bears, docile bears, bears up on the mountain, bears in the alleyways in town... bears! Lots of em, if you believe half of what you hear being discussed across a couple of tables near the front of the restaurant.

Well, why not? This is some rugged country. Skagway sits on one of two flat pieces of land anywhere around here, a small triangle whose base is along the Lynn Canal, and whose sides are closed down by the mountains that hover right over town. It's impressive to look at, and when you start to realize that those are pine forests way up there near the treeline, and they are much farther away and therefore higher than they first appear, it gets more impressive all the time.

This was all borne in on me yesterday morning flying in. Last time, we swooped in off the canal, at the wide part of the triangle valley... lots of room! Yesterday the wind dictated the other approach: you come in off the water at altitude, flying along the left shoulder of the valley where the Dyea Road starts off the main road, then stand that baby on its right wing and crank it around before you encounter the mountainside on the right side of the valley. Looking out the window as we started the turn, all you could see was trees coming at you.

But the pilot was the same guy I flew with last year, and he's still alive and well, and for him its probably pretty straightforward stuff. For someone not used to the immediacy of the mountain everywhere you look, it was a nice shot of adrenaline to start the day.

So now its Wednesday, a day and a half into the onsite part of the project, and the new Inventory system is running, the barcode scanner has been installed and is working like a champ, and the next order of business is to get the label printer going. While not doing all this, I've created a new Booking Intake workflow that includes the DUI Offense Report question form, written an output to the FBI Fingerprint cards, incorporated a new video capture section into the Arrest Record file for video recorded statements and interviews, rewritten the Traffic Ticket section top to bottom, screwed up everyone's account privileges, fixed them again, handled two remote tech support issues back in New York, and gotten halfway through a quick example file for a tour company in town back at the bed and breakfast last night.

Can you say Rapid Application Development? Every time I get a chance to really immerse myself in Filemaker, in the deep end of the pool, so to speak, I am impressed all over at what you can get done and how fast you can do it if you have a game plan and some expertise behind you. This Skagway project is looking pretty snappy. Ray Leggett (the Chief of Police) is on a mission to get rid of paper wherever possible, and this is going a long way towards realizing that aim.

The rest of the afternoon? The Alaska State Criminal Case Intake and Disposition form, for starters... then maybe on to the evidence file and some applications for the barcoding stuff there, as well as in the department's inventory system.

And lunch at the Sweet Tooth - yesterday and today - was pretty damn good as well. Tomorrow it's the Haven Cafe again, a favorite from last year's trip.

When the big Alaska Air jets take off on the southbound runway at the Juneau airport, they look to get some air under them quick! There are not one, but two substantial mountains just south of the airport that the outbound planes go right up and over. I'm sure it's more routine than it looks, but from my second story room at the Aspen Hotel across the street from the airport, it's a pretty impressive sight, watching the planes heading right at those snowy peaks.

So the hidden message here is of course that I am back in Alaska, heading up to Skagway tomorrow to get going on the PD's accreditation work, all being incorporated into their PolicePro install. Due to some very lucky plane connections and some fast talking in the Chicago and Seattle airports, I made it from Albany, NY, to the parking lot in front of the Juneau terminal in almost exactly twelve hours. Not a bad day's work!

Tomorrow morning it's that great small plane ride up the Lynn Canal to Skagway and time to get busy. I've scheduled five days - six with the inevitable Anti-Disaster Factor - and while there's a lot to get done, I'm sure there'll be some time to get around a little bit at least. I particularly want to head up into the Yukon Territory on the South Klondike Highway, and stop next week down in the Klawock/Craig area to visit a friend living there and have some King Crab.