Too many hours in the office, a long, cold winter... enough already! Wednesday it’s back to Jamaica and Sandals Royal Caribbean in Montego Bay for nine days. See you on the other side.

We spent the weekend wandering around the mountains of Franconia Notch, New Hampshire, guests of Vicky’s sister and her husband at their three acre wooded retreat in Franconia. What a place to be in the Fall! Great cool weather, a trip up the Cannon Mountain gondola, breakfast at Polly’s Pancake Parlor... even the four hour drive back home across the middle of Vermont was gorgeous. We do live in a fabulous part of the world.

A waterfall at the top of the Flume in Franconia Notch park


A classic Fall mountain view


On the way up the Cannon Mountain tram


Snow on the Presidential Range - winter is coming!

One quick minor PolicePro tech support issue on Saturday, resolved with my faithful iPhone from the top of Cannon... what a country!

Greg and I spent most of last week at the Milltown, New Jersey police department, upgrading their five year old PolicePro system to version 9. We had a productive, enjoyable, and sometimes frustrating (it's computer work, after all) trip, resulting in the PD personnel settling in even quicker than we expected to their new system.

So across the street from our hotel - not three hundred feet away - is one of our favorite barbeque joints: Famous Dave's, this one the East Brunswick place. It's all good, right?

Not so fast! This is New Jersey, the home of the Jersey Barrier, a place where the government seems to think that no person alive is capable of turning the steering wheel to the left for any reason. Down the middle of the highway, looming and unbroken, runs that ugly concrete barrier that graces every major road in the state. To get to that Famous Dave's, to cover that 300 feet, involved almost three miles and six minutes or more. To get back across the street to the hotel was four miles and nearly ten minutes. If you missed the sneaky entrance to the parking lot because of the endless traffic streaming from the ramp off route 18 right before the place, that four mile return became ten miles and took damn near half an hour by the time you ran through the whole stinking loop again!

Want to get gas? Five mile round trip to THAT gas station right over there. Move to another hotel for the extra night I tacked onto the trip? Something like ten miles, a half hour in heavy traffic, to get to and back from a Comfort Suites that I could SEE from the intersection I started at.

I would go stark raving insane if I had to put up with this every day. I kept asking the guys how the hell they live with it, and they just said that you get used to it... and that's why gas is cheap in New Jersey!

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.

Now, this is more like it! My son-in-law and myself are meeting in Poughkeepsie and hopping on the Metro North line this afternoon for Madison Square Garden and another Jimmy Buffett concert tonight. Makes for a longish day when you live in Saratoga County, but there is no better show anywhere than JB and the Coral Reefers. It's gonna be a great evening, even if summer is already gone. Ski season starts next!

Yep, it's mid July again, and that can only mean we're heading for North Carolina. Greg and I will be conducting business from the wireless-equipped decks of our respective beach houses as needed. This year there seems to be a pretty good pile of stuff to work on when we're not out on the beach or trying to turn over the Hobie Cat in the Sound: we're into the wrap-up phase of the new IBR capabilities of PolicePro, writing all the exception stuff that will catch errors or non-tagged required fields for the reports; compiling the final system for a Child Advocacy center that will be going in service the week we return; and enabling all the new Filemaker 9 capabilities that we can now talk about since yesterday's public release of FM9. It's been tough keeping quiet on this stuff, with the huge new SQL and Oracle data exchange and some of the PDF changes they've brought about. We're fired up now and ready to go with a bunch of it.

In the meantime, there's the daily trip up to the Crab Pot for fresh fish, Jimmy Buffett music playing in the bar there, our three busy beach houses and the nicest stretch of unoccupied beach on the East Coast. I've been hitting this place for over fifty years now, and it never fails to deliver. I hope everyone out there has a place like this in their lives, whether it's a beach, a mountain lake, whatever... this stuff is irreplaceable.

I was at the Mantoloking, New Jersey PD yesterday (December 7) for the retirement lunch for Chief Rick Ortley. Rick is bailing out today, after (I think) 35 years on the job. Current sergeant Mark Wright (right in the picture) will be taking over the reins as the new Chief.

Rick is the guy at the left of the picture above.. Don't be fooled because he's not smiling in this shot: he's a hell of a nice guy, and has been a popular figure within and outside of the PD around Mantoloking. He told me his agenda includes lots of road trips - he's going traveling.

Typical cop humor was the order of the day: apparently Rick sort of piled up a police car back in 1988 and someone had the foresight to grab the driver's door off the thing. It's been cleaned up and stripped of all the inside stuff and reappeared as a retirement gift yesterday. Everyone got to sign it and Rick has something a little out of the ordinary to hang in his garage.

We've been with Mantoloking since around 2000, when Bruce Garon was the Chief. Bruce showed up yesterday as well, looking great and as relaxed as only an ex-chief can. Mantoloking always has been a great outfit to us and continues - even though we've never been able to talk them into lending us the four wheelers for a race down the beach. Some strange fear about citizen complaints!

Best of luck, Rick. It's been a pleasure.

Not a moment too soon, it's off tomorrow for the annual Fall Fish & Puke trip, a weekend of guys tent camping at Fish Creek Ponds off Upper Saranac Lake. The Spring and Fall F&P trips are eagerly anticipated all year by all members of our hardcore Saranac Lake gang. Two generations are represented: the 50s age grumpy old bastards such as myself, and the mid 30s group of sons, sons in law, and friends. Days are spent out on Upper Saranac in various bass boats, evenings sitting around a big fire talking, joking and loudly and uproariously quoting entire scenes from old movies. Nothing out of line, just a great weekend in the woods with like minded friends.

In a world where even innocent Amish 6 year olds in a bucolic one-room schoolhouse are not safe from the savages, you gotta get away once in awhile. On that subject, you can hardly believe what happened and what almost happened in that town this week. Watching the news and seeing the amazing capacity for forgiveness on the part of the Amish families suffering these losses, I hardly know what to think. On the one hand I want to admire their forgiveness, but I just can't. Sometimes fury is necessary. Not everything is forgivable, nor should it be. It seems that no matter what you do anymore, you can stand up in court or before a camera and call it a "mistake", and credence automatically attaches.

But despite our best efforts to destroy it sometimes, we still have a beautiful world here, and a great way to touch that is with a group of good friends off on a quiet mountain lake on a sunny Fall weekend. Good for the soul.

If it's the middle of July, then it must be time to head for the North Carolina coast again. We look forward to this trip all year, and in two days we're on the way. We'll be on the beach near Wilmington for a week. The forecasts from the Weather Channel are looking good, so everyone is pretty well fired up.

The beach house has, among other great attributes, a very nice and private home office area at the top of the stairs with broadband Internet. We bring along an Apple Airport Express, and lo and behold, wireless internet! This year I'll be able to work on client systems from the huge deck - right on the ocean - as well as from the office. It's pretty cool when you can sit at a table on a ninety five degree day fifty feet from the Atlantic and work on computer systems in Alaska. It makes the time spent working pretty pleasant.

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.