Hey, the October issue of Police Magazine has a pretty good - but too short - feature story on the great Joseph Wambaugh, retired LAPD detective sergeant. Certainly the greatest police storyteller of all, in my book he's one of the greatest writers of our time, period. No one paints a picture of a time and place like Wambaugh. My personal favorite, the nonfiction Line And Shadows, can still put me out in the San Diego canyons in an instant, with all the looming menace that hung over the place in the time of the book.

After long periods of apparent silence, it is a great thing to see Wambaugh back on the shelves and out in the public world, so to speak. Lieutenant Chris Davies of my former police department, a longtime contemporary and great friend, speaks of coming to his decision to retire when he looked around the lineup table one morning on a day shift and realized that not one of the young cops on his squad had a clue who Joe Wambaugh was. Time to go!

But now they get a chance to climb onboard, along with us old dinosaurs, with last year's Hollywood Station and the pending sequel. In the meantime, the Police article is a good place to start if you see a copy lying around the station. GREAT writer, apparently a pretty good guy too, from what I've heard. One of the top people I'd like to sit around and have lunch with someday. Chris could come, too!

I love a guy who thinks outside the box! Who in the world would have thought that people could - in some circumstances - actually welcome a return to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when a text editor was plain white text on a blue screen? In this time of a million toolbars, Drag and Drops, every damn thing in the world? Who'da thunk it?

So along comes Hog Bay Software and WriteRoom, which is just that - a plain, completely abstracted and non-distracting environment for basic text creation, and I'll be damned if it isn't very pleasant to use for some things. You can set up whatever color scheme you like, and there you are with that old-fashioned rectangular cursor and nothing but a blue (in my case) background in front of you. Nothing else competing for your attention.

This is really basic stuff, and of course it is not going to run Word or Pages off your desktop. We do all our promo and page layout stuff in Pages, and I love it like a brother. But it IS going to knock TextEdit back a few steps! Word has been gone for months on our systems, at least - who would figure such a completely other end experience as WriteRoom would find a spot?

Very cool application, and a quick trip back to the Seventies - if not the Sixties, for that matter - for me on small things.

Mac OS X only, but I wouldn't be surprised if a Windows alternative might not have sprung up out there as well. If not, there's always that old PC Jr in the back of the closet under the basement stairs!

Greg and I spent a couple of days at the excellent 10th Annual New England Conference on Child Sexual Abuse in Burlington, Vermont early this week. The conference was held at the Sheraton on Williston Road, which has really stepped up in style over the last several years. It is big and beautiful, with a really nice outdoor courtyard in the middle of the structure. The University of Vermont Conference Center is part of the overall building complex, near the large indoor pool.

We set up a booth in the exhibitors section and for two days talked to a LOT of people in the business of keeping kids safe and tracking down those who would have it otherwise. This was a little out of our usual comfort zone, so to speak. While there was a ton of detectives and police investigators, we also talked with and learned a lot from district attorneys, their investigators, Child Advocacy specialists, social workers and others who we still don't know exactly what they do! It's an involved and often depressing arena these guys choose to operate in, with stories that are tough to hear even through our longtime police ears. I recall from my detective supervisor days that you can't leave one person doing child abuse investigations too long without a break - it's a crushing emotional onslaught.

But we got a lot of insight, put some CaseBook and Sex Offender software out there, and learned a lot for the next round of revisions. It was a bit surprising that of the two products we were talking about, CaseBook seemed to ring more bells. I guess it's the overall investigative process that a lot of people in this field are really concerned with, and CaseBook plugged right in to several agencies, requirements or Wish lists.

Burlington - where I spent a colorful couple of years around my UVM experience, WAY back - has changed a lot, but is still recognizable. One thing I remembered pretty quick was that swirling, blasting wind in the mornings, coming up off the lake! At least for this trip it was unusually warm. I can well recall a lot of winter mornings heading off to class in the face of that wind, often with a nice six or seven inch snowfall as well.

The Church street pedestrian mall, which I understand was modeled after one in Boulder, Colorado, is a great enhancement to downtown. What they've done with the lakefront is remarkable. We had a very good trip, and we'll be attending next year as well.