The renovation of The Bunker, Steamboat's office and programming HQ, is nearing completion. Three and a half weeks ago this was a very well equipped basement - all the necessary and desirable computer equipment nicely situated atop a concrete floor, exposed pipes overhead, and excellent white pine wall studs cradling the insulation. What could be more conducive to a good creative attitude?

So now we've got proper sheetrock ceilings and walls, a beautiful cushioned Pergo beech floor, the pictures finally hanging against a very snazzy yet calming desert toned paint - Terra Cotta Red Clay, to be exact, from Valspar via Lowes. Nice thick stuff!

The second workstation goes back in tomorrow, at which point we can hide all the wires and finish up. The Airport Extreme wireless network is back online, we've got more power sources than we'll ever need, room to spread out into the "other" part of the space, past two very nice half walls that define the two rooms. That side has great Berber carpet and contains the new Elliptical machine and four guitars - to allow a nice escape from the desks when a break or general thought is called for.

All in all, a great project and a fabulous place to design and execute PolicePro's iterations, and to do the steady client support that we supply over the Net. Some difference!

Robert Cringely's column Friday spotlighted a dramatic and frightening situation for IBM employees and contractors, particularly in the US and Canada. While the actual numbers are subject to great debate, the trend is not: IBM is clearing out its Global Services division and other areas with what started out as small rounds of quiet layoffs that are now heading towards becoming thunderous in their impact.

Poughkeepsie, where I grew up and spent 23 years as a cop, is an IBM town. All of Dutchess County is pretty much an IBM town. Back in the mid nineties the Poughkeepsie and East Fishkill plants suffered 5000 layoffs in one day in a purge that almost killed the area. For over a year, it seemed that every third house on every street in Red Oaks Mill and the Spackenkill area was for sale as people headed for the hills after losing their jobs, or made plans to get out while they still could.

Surprisingly, the collapse of the county did not happen, as a huge influx of people from New York City and the the lower Westchester County region started moving in around the same time, after great improvements were made in the Metro-North train service to the City. The area stayed afloat and has even prospered, though the character of the county has been changed forever.

This is all a great oversimplification, of course, and from my own highly subjective point of view... but no one is likely to ever forget the Poughkeepsie Journal headline that simply said "5000 Fired" the day after the massacre. In a town where every family has someone employed by or closely tied to Big Blue, it was a hell of a shot.

So now it appears as though the same - or worse - may be coming, and soon. A week or two ago there was a quiet, little-noted round of fifty some-odd employees at Poughkeepsie; if you put any stock in the Cringely story - or, more tellingly, in the now over 800 comments attached to it - it appears as though a lot of people are about to get the shaft, and not just in New York. Further, it seems that time of service, job performance, any of the old work ethic criteria - none of it matters. Jobs are off to India, Vietnam, China, anywhere other than the USA.

I'm not here to argue the whole Globalization/Evil Corporation/Greedy Executive story. That's already out there and growing as this story meets the light of day in the greater media. I just think it's a damn shame in a human sense for people who have often given a great deal to their employer over the years. On the street I once lived on, over half the households suffered a direct hit in the Black Monday (I think it was Monday) layoffs. Good friends, who actually worked pretty hard at their jobs, with mortgages and children, were out in the cold just like that. Some of them are still out there. I just hate to see that storm blow in yet again.

PolicePro 9 will be the first version to support IBR - Incident Based Reporting. The Feds and various states have been pushing this since the early 80s as an "improvement" over UCR - Uniform Crime Reporting - which dates back to the 60s.

There are actually two parts to this story. The first, which applied almost instantly to UCR, was the perversion of the original intent of the whole thing in the first place. Uniform Crime Reporting - note the word "Uniform" - was supposed to be a nationally scoped levelling of the playing field, so to speak. Standardized reporting across the country would allow intelligent analysis of crimes, incidents and trends, right?

Wrong! The first thing that happened is that almost every state - with my own home state, New York, in the lead - immediately began perverting and diluting the value of the whole thing by adding what are known as "enhancements" to UCR reporting. "Enhancement" in this case means taking something that is logical, orderly and valuable and turning it into a meaningless morass of asinine statistics that no longer mean anything.

So Robbery in the UCR world - depending on what state you're in - became lists miles long, in some places boiling down to Robbery/Force, others Robbery/Force/Hands/Fists/Teeth, and elsewhere Robbery/Force/Intentional. All through the UCR Part One crimes - the important ones, Murder, Rape, Robbery, Arson, Assault and Kidnapping - various state Divisions of Criminal Justice couldn't wait to put their own wrinkle on it.

The result? Supporting UCR in several states is a nightmare, since every damn state is different. So much for Uniform.


So let's go ahead and modernize! Let's dive in to the Next Big Thing, Incident Based Reporting! After all, people have been asking for it for years, and on the surface at least it seems to make more sense than UCR.

Guess what? Does New York State report IBR? Why the hell would they want to do that when you can have NYBIR: the Enhanced version for, you guessed it, New York!

MORE work for less value and there's Your Tax Dollars At Work.


So just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, I'm going through the Victim tables this afternoon, dutifully writing new data tables to comply and support this wonderful standard, and I come to a table called Victim Residence Status.

Can you feel this one coming? Can anyone say "Illegal Alien"? Of course not, that would be rude.

OK, how about "Undocumented Alien?" Why no, that's not here either.

Take a look. In the year 2007, when we are under threat of assault from potential intruders who don't belong here, THERE IS NO REPORTING CATEGORY FOR ANYONE WHO IS NOT HERE LEGALLY. The best you can hope for is "Other Status".

This would be funny if it wasn't so pathetic. It really raises your confidence that we might ever prevail against any of our enemies if we can't even risk naming those who AREN'T our enemies, but just might not belong here legally. I have no problem with people trying to improve their families' lives by coming here for America's opportunities - if I'd been born in the wrong part of South America I hope I'd have the guts to come here too, but if something is blue, there's nothing to be gained by calling it gray. This is supposed to be policing, right? Close enough doesn't count.