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.