I've recently become hooked on yet another emerging technology... The eBooks phenomena as delivered through Amazon's Kindle platform.

Not so much the Kindle itself... I remain unimpressed at it's design and limited versatility. But Amazon had the brilliant idea to put a Kindle application on the iPhone, and that's where I found and fell in love with it.

Amazon has added a PC based Kindle Reader as well that I can use through Parallels on my MacBook Pro... they say a native Mac version will be out shortly.

So here's what's so great about all this. Whenever I open a book on either my iPhone or my computer, the application syncs to the last point I was reading at, regardless of which device was involved. If I spent last evening in my Windows 7 virtual machine reading Clive Cussler and I now find myself at the car dealership getting my oil changed, all I need to do is open Kindle on my iPhone, select the Cussler book if need be (if it was the last one I was reading, it will automatically load) and click the Sync button.

They've put in some great user interface/interaction stuff as well. You can bookmark any page just by clicking a Plus icon on the bottom of the screen. The page will display with the top right corner turned down, a familiar enough metaphor! We've seen this in other applications, but it is great on an iPhone.

The iPhone version - which is free - also offers choices on how to view the page. My preference is Sepia, which softens the black text (which is also resizable) against a faint sepia colored background as opposed to a bright white. Weirdly, it "feels" more familiar that way, in any light.

Turning pages can either by done by dragging your finger or just tapping anywhere along the edge of the screen; right side for forward, left for back a page. It just could not be easier.

But the best part of the whole experience, where Amazon took a page from Apple's model, is the Kindle store on the iPhone. Sitting in the airport with nothing to read and a four hour flight coming up? Jump into the Kindle store on the iPhone and select just about anything either by viewing the latest releases or doing a search for title, author, whatever. Most eBooks are about $10, some less, some a bit more. Make a selection, click the button, and the book downloads damn near instantly.

Today I happened across a new Joseph Wambaugh novel that will be coming out in about two weeks. I ordered it on the spot, and on the official release date it will just appear in my Kindle library. How much better can it get?

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To add one more personal tech wrinkle to this whole thing: I've been looking around for awhile for a way to write stuff like this, or technical stuff for business, or whatever, on my iPhone. This week I've been playing around with Google Wave, and it occurred to me this morning that here was exactly what I needed. I am writing this whole thing as a new Wave to myself on my iPhone. When I go to my computer later, I can edit or just copy this text out of that Wave and stick it wherever it needs to go: in this case, into RapidWeaver, my weblog software, and it will become a blog entry in a heartbeat. Google is positioning Wave as a collaborative tool, and I'll be damned if it doesn't work great for collaborating with yourself!

So it's over, and I think it went out well. Not at first - I was howling for the first few minutes after the screen blacked out in the diner. What the hell is the matter with these people!

Then I thought about it for awhile, and this morning I've heard other opinions that sort of gel with where I've landed: You never hear the shot that kills you.

Phil didn't - he got it in the back of the head in front of (some of) his family. And think back to Tony and Bobby in the boat on the Adirondack lake earlier this season, talking about what happens when you die: "Everything just goes black".

The series didn't end at all, I think, it STOPPED. Tony's gone and no amount of rationalization by his wife or kids is ever going to take away the knowledge of who he was. Sort of a final come-uppance to people who routinely sold themselves out no matter what ethics they may or may not have espoused.

At any rate, it was a pretty good eight (?) years... now we can get back to Salt Lake City and Big Love, and wait for the return of The Wire. Take care, Tony, it was interesting knowing you.

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.

I love thinking up the new ideas for PolicePro, Sex Offenders, and now Investigator. I love working out the database schema to make it all work, solving the problems that arise, and addressing the new problems that solving the last one end up causing. Creating the design for a new project, doing the actual layout work, writing all the stuff that makes it go: love it all. For a 27 year cop, I turned out to be a pretty good database guy. I can sit here in The Bunker for 12 hours a day churning through all this stuff and never notice that it got dark somewhere along the line.

But marketing the result? HATE IT. Despise it. I am the world's worst marketing person, bar none. If there was ever someone who was the Build A Better Mousetrap guy, that would be me. The mousetrap is sensational, but getting the message out is like a trip to the dentist.

So right now, of course, is not a good week at all, because Investigator is just about done, it's a really nice piece of work that thousands of PDs could really use, and it's now up to me to make some of them realize that. Fire up the Spammer jokes, because this week we're sending a bunch of email out into the void in an effort to get cops from all over the place to come and take a look, and hopefully realize that this is a hell of a deal we're talking about.

And the best part, for them at least, is that no one is going to start calling and driving them insane every five minutes, like these demons from American Honda or Lowe's, calling and calling and calling just to make sure we enjoyed our last visit to Saratoga Honda or that the guy who installed the new storm door did a good job. For crying out loud, doesn't it occur to any of these people that if we were dissatisfied, they'd hear about it pretty quick? There was a time last week when almost every day one of these calls was coming in, and it was driving me crazy.

So putting myself on the other side of the fence, so to speak, is a tough one, something that just goes against the grain naturally. You just don't want to inflict yourself on people who are busy trying to get through their own days, even if you're carrying something that would help them do it. I guess what we need around here is a PT Barnum type who can waltz in the door. talking a hundred miles an hour, and just wear people out... but I would hate to have anything to do with an outfit like that. So if you're the surprise recipient of one of our emails or letters that has brought you here, before you shoot the monitor, consider that what we're talking about comes from a LOT of real world experience and wouldn't exist if I hadn't in my detective supervisor capacity said one day, "Dammit, isn't there something we can find that would make sense of all this stuff!"

And of course there wasn't, but especially in the case of Investigator, there is now. We took a page from 37 Signals' simplicity theory, and lo and behold, order out of chaos! Really cheap, too.

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.