Improvements I’d love to make to Charley if I could

Most of these are never going to happen. But a girl can dream, right?

1. Learn to use style sheets and put Charley on them. It would make updating and correcting cases a lot easier, at least I’ve heard it said.
2. Have a really nice NCMEC-style search engine so you can search by name, race, height, whatever. My brother the computer programmer promised to make one when he had time. That was three years ago and he’s had two kids since then.
3. Have foreign cases as well as American ones. Unfortunately I’m swamped with American cases as is, and in any case I can’t read any foreign languages. (In an aside, I’m seriously thinking about enrolling in college to study Yiddish, but that wouldn’t be much help to Charley.)
4. Have photo indexes as well as name indexes. When I first started Charley after the MPCCN died, I was going to put up photo indexes, but I eventually scrapped the idea.
5. Have footnotes on my casefiles, so I can identify just what scrap of information came from where and when people yell at me about supposed mistakes I can say, “I got it from ____.”

Reading After Etan now

I am presently on page 137, out of 400. Stuart GraBois has just taken over the case. So far it’s very good. Surprise: Etan’s surname does not rhyme with “cats” or even with “cots,” but instead with “gates.” I will have to retrain my brain to say his name right.

Did I mention here that Lisa Cohen, After Etan‘s author, generously sent me a free copy of the book and thereby saved me $24.99? If I haven’t before, I must say that she is awesome. I love anyone who gives me free books.