Dateline Coeur d'Alene

A nice story today from the AP wire, and the title says it all: "Goose Befriends Elderly Man With Cancer."

"Are You a Mental Patient?"

I guess there's a reason that soldiers in both Vietnam and Iraq have nicknamed particularly dangerous areas "Little Detroit." A night terror from Motor City:

A boy who was scolded by a 911 operator while trying to get help for his dying mother is not the only Detroit resident whose emergency call wasn't taken seriously by a dispatcher, the boy's lawyer said.

In a series of calls in January 2005, a 911 operator questioned the sanity of a Detroit woman who reported she had been shot in the head. An emergency crew didn't arrive until after the woman called her son and got him to call for help, attorney Geoffrey Fieger said. [...]

In her first call, Lorraine Hayes calmly asked for an ambulance, gave her address and said she had been shot in the head. The operator asked if she was male or female and Hayes stumbled, first saying she was male and then correcting herself.

After some more questions, the operator asked: "Are you a mental patient?"

"My body is numb. I'm getting ready to die," Hayes said at one point.

The operator said she did not believe Hayes would be able to call if she was shot in the head and told her she would get in trouble if she was making a false report. [...]

Robert, then 5, was alone with his mother when she collapsed in the bedroom.

He called 911 and told the operator that his mother had passed out, but the operator asked to speak with an adult.

When he called back about three hours later, he repeated that his mother had passed out. Another operator said: "You shouldn't be playing on the phone." Later, she said: "Now put her on the phone before I send the police out there to knock on the door and you gonna be in trouble."

Police eventually arrived at the house after the second call, but Sherrill Turner was dead. An ambulance never came.

His mother collapsed. He did the right thing. At the age of five.

Attention dumbass operators: "You gonna be in trouble."

Some may remember the infamous story from the early 90s of the boy whose arms were severed in a farm accident. Though totally alone on the farm, he managed to get back to the house and dial 911 with his tongue, only to be challenged by the operator on how he was able to call for help with no arms.

Flav was right: Far too often, 911 is a joke.

The Ballad of Rosco

Great story from the AP today about Rosco, American Bulldog. That boy wanted out:

An American bulldog that had escaped from a kennel by scaling a 7-foot concrete wall topped with barbed wire was found Wednesday night, Animal Control Bureau officials said.

Rosco chewed and bent the latch on his outdoor pen, enabling him to push open the door and escape over the wall on Tuesday. Police and animal control officers continued to search for Rosco Wednesday until he was caught at 6:30 p.m. in a lake about four miles from the kennel, said Wayne Gilbert, superintendent for animal control.

Gilbert said Rosco was captured without incident, was "extremely exhausted" and wasn't aggressive toward the officers.

Then comes the kicker.

A female companion American bulldog that was with Rosco at the time also was taken into custody and remained at the kennel, Snyder said.

What the hell?

Am I understanding this right? The dog chews his lock open, climbs over a seven-foot wall and through barbed wire, then picks up some bitch by the lake?

And he was finally captured "in" the lake?

"Extremely exhausted." Yeah, no shit.

High-Quality PDFs from OpenOffice

For the past two weeks I've been going out of my mind trying to figure out how to make very high-quality PDFs in OpenOffice without having to use Adobe Distiller. Finally I've figured out how, and I'd like to share that information in case anyone else needs to know. Specifically I've been trying to make PDFs of a scientific article (in the page size A4) and a research conference poster (in A0).

Most important: You can't just "Export to PDF" with OpenOffice itself. That works fine for text, but for print-quality publishing, or for anything with imported, high-resolution images (especially in EPS format, the kind produced by many science programs for figures and diagrams), exporting directly from OpenOffice will lead to PDFs with badly flawed images, regardless of how they appear in your original files. The solution is to "print" to a PostScript file (ending in .prn) on your hard drive (not to paper), and then convert that PRN file to PDF using Ghostgum.

You'll need a PostScript printer driver on your computer; there are good, simple directions at the University of Sussex for how to find and install the free generic one from Adobe (which is here). Ghostgum is also free to download and use. Ghostgum wasn't entirely stable on my XP machine--the program crashed sometimes, seemingly for no reason--but it got the job done reliably enough to use again and again. Sometimes the size of the resulting PDF will appear to be 0kb in Windows Explorer; rest assured that it worked. Just "Refresh" to see the real file size.

Be sure to keep your image files as EPSs (rather than trying to change them to bitmaps, jpegs, etc.). Gary Steele from MIT offers a brief, clear tutorial about this topic here. The one jpeg I tried exporting looked okay in the PDF, but not great; getting jpegs to look perfect seems a bit complicated. However, EPSs look better in the PDF than in the original.

That applies to the rest of your document, too. It's interesting that the resulting PDF of your OpenOffice Impress presentation looks far better as a PDF than it did in OpenOffice itself, no matter how or where you're looking at the PDF. Lines are smoother and clearer, text is cleaner--everything looks more professional. Pictures you make in OpenOffice Draw (sxd files) come out terrific. Jagged, pixellated lines become so rounded and even that you'll wonder why you ever used OpenOffice itself for live slideshows.

Once you get used to making PDFs this way, you'll never present direct from OpenOffice (or Powerpoint) again, and you'll be able to share your work, either online or in print, much more easily and confidently. Everybody wins.

The main drawback to this process: Serious lack of useful documentation. It took me several days to figure all this out. Please write in with comments, questions or suggestions.

Viera vs. Couric

Good news and bad news today for those of us who a) watch The CBS Evening News, and b) can't stand The Today Show.

The good news was that the insufferable Katie Couric is leaving Today to be replaced by the very cool Meredith Viera. Even though Viera is now most famous for hosting Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and shilling for Bayer, she has a real hard-news background; years ago she was a 60 Minutes correspondent. What really makes Viera stand out, though, is an astonishing capacity for self-effacing honesty--like when she revealed on national television that her husband sometimes bones her while she's asleep.

The bad news was that Couric is set to begin anchoring The CBS Evening News in September, taking over from the flawlessly classy Bob Schieffer. I've always liked the Evening News best of all the nightlies--no Brian Williams idiocy, no Elizabeth Vargas melodrama, no Lou Dobbs awkwardness. Just (mostly) good reporting. Well, those days are over. The idea of Couric anchoring an evening broadcast is repellent. Surely no one could or would seriously call her a "reporter"? Brainless perkiness in the dinner hour is the last thing anyone needs--and the last thing CBS needs is a further cheapening of the House That Murrow Built.

Then again, all CBS honcho Les Moonves cares about is money, and Couric is sure to bring in loads of it. In that regard she's an excellent investment. Rest assured: Edward R. is rolling.

A final irony is that, of all the possible candidates, Viera would probably have been the best choice to lead the Evening News.

Courage.