The dogs have been doing pretty well on California Natural Lamb & Rice kibble since we started feeding it to them about 8 months ago. It’s a nice simple kibble with not a lot of ingredients and no grains other than rice. This is important because we discovered early last year that Nala has problems with barley. Finding a kibble that doesn’t contain any barley is harder than you might think too. So far I’ve only seen about 3 or 4 other kibbles that don’t contain barley or wheat that I can rotate through.
Lately I’ve noticed that while Nala and Simba’s coats are still nice and glossy, their skin has started to get a little flaky, so I decided it was time to add some fish oil back to their diets. When we first got Nala, we were supplementing her food with fish oil (3V Caps) but then stopped for a while to see how she would do without it. Now we’re adding some Grizzly Salmon Oil (from Grizzly Pet Products) to their food. Dolittles happened to have some and since I was there picking up another bag of food for the dogs, so I figured I might as well try it out. While it’s not quite as fishy smelling as the 3V Caps were, you can still tell it’s fish oil and it definitely gives the dogs some funky fish breath for a while. Getting them to drink more water helps wash some of it away, but you definitely don’t want them licking you for a while after their meals.
They’ve only been on it for a couple of days now so it’s too early to tell if it’s helping with the flaky skin. The dogs don’t seem to mind the extra addition to their food.
Whither Palm
PDAs have a well deserved reputation for suddenly going belly up (bits up?) when you least expect it. Although mine isn’t showing any signs of dying anytime soon (aside from wear and tear) it’ll be three years old in a few months, so it’s probably time to start thinking about a new one soon.
Problem is, unless you want an all-in-one combo smartphone type device (which I most definitely do not want), Palm‘s offerings have become rather thin. Palm’s only new announcement over the normally busy holiday season was the Treo 680. No new ‘plain’ PDAs in sight, nor have I caught any rumours of any coming down the pipe either. There’s just the E2 and TX left (the Z22 is too entry-level for me) now that the LifeDrive has been EoL‘d.
I guess if I needed to get one today, it would probably be the TX. Hopefully my T3 will live long enough for something new to come out of Palm. Otherwise I might have to go back to actually using my brain to remember stuff.
Thumbdrive guts
This is what the inside of a HAL9000 Memory Unit. For something that’s only 43x19x3mm, it sure packs a lot of storage in there (2 GB).
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The x-ray was acquired on an 8″x10″ cassette at 50 kVp, 1.6mAs using the small focal spot. The HAL9000 memory unit was placed directly on the cassette.
Down CPU memory lane
Anybody remember these?
This is a pair of 200 MHz Pentium Pro CPUs that I found lying around in our PACS storage area. It was probably pulled out of an old server several years ago. I thought they would make a good decoration piece for my desk.
It’s a beast of a chip with the entire package measuring 6.8×6.3 cm. The Pentium Pro’s were introduced in 1996, with this particular variant, 200MHz and 512 kB cache, coming out in mid 1997. This makes it a veritable fossil in computer time.
Haven’t quite decided yet what I’ll do with them or how I want to display them. Maybe I’ll see if I can pop the heat spreader off one of them to expose the actual CPU. Tried to take an x-ray of the die, but despite using some pretty hefty techniques, I wasn’t able to get any significant penetration through the chip. Managed to get a faint outline of some of the CPU at 90kVp and 50mAs, but nothing interesting enough to post. It’s a pretty dense package. Might have to try a different tactic and shield the surrounding area with some lead so I can really blast through the chip.
Dog show weekend
Spent a good chunk of the weekend at the CSCLRC‘s Supported Entry dog show, which was held in conjunction with the Charleston Kennel Club‘s annual show.
Saw lots of good looking labs parading through the ring for all the different classes
There were lots of really neat things being raffled away by the club
and some really good BBQ for lunch on Saturday from what I heard (I had to leave early so I missed the food, darn it)
It was another good weekend and we had a great time up there hanging out and watching the dogs.