Working with the Roanoke County Police, we discovered that the crime data in our database did not include about 200 offenses reported between December 30, 2007 and June 7, 2008.

My source for the county's crime data is a weekly report of serious violent and property crime the department publishes on the web. Since the police began posting it weekly at the beginning of the year, it went up on Tuesday afternoon and covered offenses from the previous week.

What was invisible in the report is that some offenses that happen in that week aren't included because, for a variety of reasons, the reports aren't always filed in the same week. Sometimes, for example, a supervisor might kick a report back to an officer for revisions, causing a delay in the report's completion.

We compared the offenses in my database with those the department could find in its, and found I was lacking something like 40 percent of them. The department graciously agreed to provide me with a complete listing so I could complete our database, which I did this morning. That brings the total number of offenses in the database for Roanoke, Roanoke County and Salem to over 1,300.

Going forward, the police will now post their report on Thursday instead of Tuesday to allow time for more delayed reports to get into the system and be included. In addition, I will periodically ask them the run a query to catch offenses that slipped through the regular reports.

So, whatever gets missed will be caught eventually. It's not a perfect system, but it's the best we can manage right now within the realities of what it takes for the police to produce these records. And to their great credit, the department and Lt. Chuck Mason have shown great concern for presenting a complete and accurate record in these reports.

The long and short of it is, now you know what you've been missing.

It includes a special prosecutor and allegations of candidates and an unregistered political action committee running afoul of state election laws.

It also includes what is now an incomplete record of the financing of this election, despite laws that demand a complete, accurate and transparent record.

As a data-geek, a journalist who believes fervently that open government is good for everybody, and the purveyor of a database of city council campaign contributions , that troubles me.

The record of this election apparently has a signifiant hole in it. How big a hole?

We've been offering crime data for months now, and have moved from our first static-but-clickable maps for Roanoke, Roanoke County and Salem to searchable databases with mapped results.

Now, we're closing in on full crime data coverage for the heart of The Roanoke Times circulation area.

Last week, we added data for Radford, and today, data for Montgomery Couny is now online.

As always, the offering is only as good as the data we get. We have to start someplace, so there's not a ton of data available, but as time passes, the databases wil become richer and more informative.

The Montgomery County map -- built and maintained by Online Production Editor Jim Ellison, who works in our New River Valley bureau -- shows misdemeanors and felonies recorded by the Montgomery County Sheriff's Department. It doesn't include offenses reported to the Christiansburg and Blacksburg police department.

We may never have every place covered, but this is a pretty darn good start. It's valuable information which, if you pay attention to it, can help you live your life in the best and safest way. Check it out, and as always, let us know what you think.

And, if you live in the New River Valley, we now have something closer to home for you. Thanks to Jim Ellison, online production editor in our New River Valley bureau, you can now search a crime database and map for Radford.

Jim says a separate map for the rest of Montgomery County should be up in the next few days.

So if you live in the NRV, thank Jim, and thank local law enforcement for making the data available.

You can see the list on the city's department of billings and collections website, and there are photos on the Woltz and Associates site.

But I wondered where they were, so I tossed the list onto a map:

No surprises here, really. It's the more depressed parts of town where the pinpoints fall. But part of the story might be in where there aren't any pinpoints.

As Roanoke blogger and neighborhood activist Chris Muse points out, the presence of delinquent properties "a fairly good sign of the progression or regression of a neighborhood."

Chris is rightly proud that there's a single delinquent property on the list this time in his part of Old Southwest. I know that property, and while I haven't asked Chris, I wonder if some aren't glad to see that vacant property seeing some action and the potential for a new owner to make it a credit to the neighborhood, and not a blight on it.

That, after all, is what the city says it's up to with these tax sales. It might be a bad sign when your neighborhood is host to landowners who can't or won't pay their taxes or maintain their properties. But everytime one of those properties is turned over to a new owners, it's a new chance for the land, the house, and the neighborhood.

Check out the precinct-by-precinct results for the Roanoke Mayoral and City Council races still online at roanoke.com. I think part of the answer to that question is in those columns and rows if you peer into them long enough.

Harris, a Democrat, split from his party and backed the independent “For the City” slate for Roanoke City Council in 2006. That ticket roared into office on the strength of victories limited almost exclusively to the populous and vote-rich Southwest quadrant of the city. It seemed precincts home to younger, middle- and upper-class Roanokers were ready to push progress in the city by choosing progressive council members.

That set up the conventional wisdom in this election was that heavy turnout in those same precincts in South Roanoke, Raleigh Court and Lee Hi would favor Harris, and might even be enough to give him a victory.

The theory didn’t hold up.

In the meantime, we happily report that our Roanoke Valley and Salem crime maps are once again updated through the most recent weekend's offenses.

And our database of donations over $100 to Roanoke City Council and mayoral candidates for 2006 and the current campaign is up to date through reports filed by the 10 candidates on Monday, April 28. That's a darn quick turnaround that allows you to see who is financing these campaigns within days of when the checks were written in some cases. In all, 76 new itemized contributions were added. (Donations under $100 aren't itemized.)

Again, many thanks to our friends and colleages at the Virginia Public Access Project, who turned the paper reports filed in Roanoke into the electronic data we offer you in the DataSphere. VPAP, in case you don't know by now, offers online searching of an extensive database of statewide campaign contributions. (The non-profit also happens to be lead by a former Roanoke Times reporter, David Poole, whose name still causes a few office holders around here to grit their teeth.)

That election seemed to have changed the game, and brought to local elections, at least in a more significant way, the idea of special interest groups buying influence. It also shined a light on the importance of making more available information on where money to finance political campaigns comes from, even at the local level.

You can find that very information for both the 2006 and the current Roanoke City Council elections right now in the DataSphere.

Take a look, and see how much the candidates are raising, and from whom. And, just as important, see where in the city is that money coming from, because the addresses of the donors are mapped for you.

You can see, for example, that mayoral candidate David Bowers, while he has a hefty warchest with over $15,000 raised, has funded his campaign almost entirely from his own wallet with a personal loan.

You can also search by donor, and see what kinds of candidates a particular donor tends to support.

It's all there, and it's all a matter of public record. Candidates for local office are required to file disclosure forms detailing each contribution with their local voter registrar. The Roanoke Times collects these paper records and, working with the Virginia Public Access Project, converts them to electronic records. Thanks to VPAP for that. VPAP, which maintains a terrific database of statewide campaign finance data, also has information in individual donors, such as their professions, which they add to the data in the public records.

So, you tell me, is anyone buying influence in this election? What does it say about our political process, when campaign finance comes from such limited quarters? All those things you hear about special interests funding for in federal and state election campaigns, can they really be problems at the local level, too?

Our database of nearly 12,000 Virginia freshwater citation fish won't tell you about the ones that got away, but you can track trophy catches right down to the pound, ounce and inch.

We just updated the database with about 5,500 fish from 2007, so there's two years worth of trophies in there in 23 species, plus the names of the anglers who caught them and where each was landed.

And don't think this is inside stuff just for serious fisherman. You won't find me hanging around the baitshop, but I gotta say, when I first saw this database, the first thing I did was try to figure out, what's the biggest darn fish in there? I mean, who isn't interested in the biggest anything?

The answer, by the way, is a 95 pound, 11 ounce, 54-inch blue catfish landed by Archie Gold in 2006 in the James River. That's a state record.

But there are other curiosities. Like where they are caught. Check out the related graphic of where the most trophy fish were caught in 2007. Here's a tease: The top producers aren't all big rivers and lakes. Think of that cliche about fish in a barrel. Fish in a farm?

And if you want an expert's view of the data, read Roanoke Times Outdoors Writer Mark Taylor's take on it.

A hearty thanks to all three police department's for their cooperation in providing the data to the public and to The Roanoke Times.

I can tell from tracking traffic on the maps that plenty of you all are finding the new maps and aren't spending time looking for the old ones. Still, I haven't heard from you about what you think of the maps and available data.

The invitation still stands: comment here, email me, or give me holler at 540.981.3331.

The old static maps with only a few weeks of data are gone, replaced by our new and improved crime data map and search.

Now, in one place you can see data from Roanoke, Roanoke County and Salem. Choose one locality or search all three.

Search all serious violent and property offenses, or select just a particular offense. Enter a date range to limit your search. You can even enter a street name to see offenses just on that street (though at this point, because of the limited amount of data available, many street name searches won't find any records).

We did lose one aspect of the old maps that I really liked, and that’s the color-coding by offense type. However, the web service that we’re using to publish our databases and maps now, Capio Bridge, is promising an upgrade to their map mash-up programming this month that will allow us to add the color-coding again.

Typically, I'll be updating the database weekly, usually on Tuesday.

In addition, we still have a separate Salem crime data map and search. The Salem crime report we receive by email isn’t limited to serious violent and property crimes. It’s a complete list of reported felonies, large and small and of all varieties. We just didn’t want to throw that detail away. So, if you want even more data on Salem crime, check out the Salem-specific map to see everything from shoplifting and forgery to parole violations and perjury.

And, as always, tell me what you think. I consider these changes a terrific improvement, but that’s not to say we can’t do even better. Is any part of the search confusing? Something else you’d like to see?

So comment here, email me, call me (540.981.3331).

Heck, send smoke signals.

I’ll be watching the horizon.

This is lives, stories, deep heartache and grief that speak to you from cells in a spreadsheet.

Roberta P. Turner, died in 1938. Her stone reads, "TILL WE MEET AGAIN." Two years later, her daughter Ruth, 17, died, too. Her stone reads, with solemn determination, "I WILL FOLLOW."

Levi Barber Jr. lived but 15 years, from August 26, 1923, to a week before Christmas in 1938. The pain his death inflicted is carved right into the stone in the words, "MOTHER'S DARLING."

All credit for this fascinating piece of history goes to Robert Bird, the retired Roanoke municpal auditor who with a troop of Boy Scouts has made clearing the graveyard a mission, along with documenting the identities of more than 1,000 people who found their last resting place there between 1937 and 1979.

Roanoke Times columnist Shanna Flowers wrote about the effort in a column in Tuesday's paper.

So far, Bird has identified the occupants of 289 graves, and catalogued all of the information he's gathered in a meticulous spreadsheet he graciously shared with me so I could put it online for people to search.

The first idea was that people who have relatives buried there might learn a little something, or just as good, share some information with Bird.

But anybody might find themselves pulled into this history in columns and rows.

And a guy says to me, “You write for the paper, right?”

Not so unusual. I see the guy in there from time to time, though I don’t know his name, and I talk newspaper biz out loud. It's not a big secret where I work.

But that’s not what’s triggered this. It’s my face. He just recognized me. He wasn’t quite sure where – was it in the newspaper, or on the web? – but he saw my face and put it all together.

Well, this was really satisfying. I follow my blog traffic and traffic on the site. I know how many people check out my work. But this was different than seeing some numbers. This was something altogether separate from data.

This was something that eases up to being, for lack of a term that’s not such an overstatement, fame.

That means methods, materials and systems that demand fewer resources and creates less waste in the construction, and use energy more efficiently once they're built.

The widely-embraced measure for whether you're doing this well is something called the
Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System. Maybe you've heard it before in its short-hand form: LEED certification. It's a set of standards issued by the U.S. Green Building Council.

But is anybody around here really doing it?

The shock was that, even with a pacemaker to keep his ticker ticking, his life as an independent man was over. His health was disintegrating, and the heart attack had triggered a landslide decline in his cognitive ability. He was very suddenly a dementia patient, too.

All at once it seemed, he had to leave the VA Medical Center in Salem, but he couldn’t go home. To our great relief, social workers at the VA excel at getting patients like Dad placed in nursing care. Though the first place he landed was a nightmare, and he returned to the hospital within a week, the second time he was released he wound up at the Virginia Veterans Care Center next to the VA. To his family's comfort, that became his home for the rest of his days.

Everything worked out as well as it could for Dad, who died in November. But looking back, I wonder, what if we’d had to go into the marketplace for nursing care on our own? I wouldn’t have known where to start except the yellow pages, and they don’t give you much but boasts and phone numbers.

I hope you never find yourself in the position my siblings and I were in last year, but if you do, you now have a place to start your search for senior care resources.