But I've since joined the clan. I worship at the altar of Phil Meyer, Richard Mullins and Elliot Jaspin. I like using the phrase "comma delimited" in FOIA requests. And, most important, I get a thrill out of finding - even producing - original information. Information that government agencies hadn't thought to look for in their own data. Information that will never be in a press release.
This time last year a tipster told me it was taking far too long for ambulances to reach patients in Durham, N.C., "the City Medicine." Duke University boasts some of the finest doctors in the world, but it doesn't do any good if the ambulance is too late. I immediately asked whether a database of ambulance responses existed. It did.
After months of negotiation, request, request, calculation, conversion of a Julian calendar field, conversion of time in one-thousandths of a second, recalculation for runs that began before midnight and ended after mid-