Well, Anna's back in daycare today after my sister stated that she thought the kid was well enough to go. Her fever's been gone for a while and her mouth is pretty well healed up, and though I do love having her with me, my work suffers when she's here. Plus, I knew that I was going to be doing a video analysis for a detective from a neighboring agency, and it would be difficult to do with a squirmy baby. Therefore, I packed her little diapered ass off to school this morning.

The same detective was here yesterday, wanting to get part of a surveillence video enhanced. He'd called me earlier in the week to find out if I was available, and told me, "I contacted the FBI and they referred me to you, saying that you did really excellent work."

Yeah. Riiiight. Now, I'm more than willing to accept accolades when they are due, and I am a fair hand at the video analysis stuff, and we do have a system that cost somewhere around $27K, but I know perfectly well that the FBI was just foisting this guy off onto us because they didn't want to do it. Snort.

But I did manage to impress the guy anyway with what I was able to do with the video. Of course it helped that he was realistic with his expectations and was not suffering under the delusion that this is the movies. (i.e. not wanting me to try and pull a license plate from a car two hundred feet away from the camera.) I've had to explain to far too many seemingly intelligent detectives that when you enlarge a picture, you get pixels. And when you blow it up more, you get bigger pixels, depending on the resolution and quality of the camera in question. Face it, when Joe Schmoe puts a surveillance system into his Quicky Mart gas station, he's not going to pay for something equivalent to the Hubble Telescope. Heck, most of these store owners won't even spring for a new videotape and will keep using the same tape over and over, recording day after day until all of the magnetic material has been ground away and the resulting picture is a mess of static garbage. Thankfully, more and more businesses are going digital, which is a dream to process.

So, it took about an hour to do what needed to be done with the video, and now I'm twiddling my thumbs for the rest of the day. It looks like the purchase of my computer forensic equipment has hit another snag. I was given a budget of $15K, and I spent $9K of that on the two computers that I need (Yeah, they're SO COOL!) But then I was told that as long as the rest of my equipment came under $10K then it wouldn't have to be put out for bid. So, we managed to put together the list of the software and associated hardware I needed and it came to about $3500. And it should be noted that the list is very specific. I need a certain piece of software, from a certain manufacturer. And I need some certain pieces of hardware from certain manufacturers. Now they are telling me that it WILL have to be put to bid, which in my thinking is insane, because there's only one place that makes what I need! All this is going to do is slow down the entire process by two to three months. Argg. Sigh.

I swear, when I run the world, there will definitely be some changes.