Another one of those ‘getting to know you’ type meme things from Mike
What time did you get up this morning?
Around 0615
What did you do yesterday?
Wrote up a couple of reports for equipment surveys, a bit of running around doing miscellaneous crap. Then it was home to get the dog and go to the dog park, followed by a trip to PetSmart for some dog food.
What was the last film you saw at the cinema?
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
Searching for a new dog food
Since the end of December 2005, we’ve been hunting around for a new dog food for Nala. Most people would think "dog food, simple. Just pick up a bag of dog chow at the grocery store". Sure, if you want to feed your dog junk food and crap. Most people don’t think to look at the ingredients of the dog food they buy though, and is something most people should give more consideration to.
Choosing a Dog Food: Guidelines
Understanding Commercial Dog Foods
We’d been feeding her Diamond Large breed Lamb & Rice up to then, and decided to switch to something else until the recalled food problem blew over.
Nala’s breeders had switched to Premium Edge Skin & Coat (a salmon/sweet potato based food) and recommended it to us to try, so we started her on that at the beginning of January. She was doing pretty well on it up until we got to the end of the bag, when her poop started to get really soft and runny (all dog owners seem to eventually turn into hard core poop monitors). Vet said everything looked ok; no worms or anything like that, and she was otherwise normal. So we switched to Wellness Fish & Potato to see if maybe it was the salmon. No change in her poop, so I think maybe Nala’s just not a fish food kind of dog. It’s a shame, because both foods have a really good looking list of ingredients, and her coat was looking really fantastic on the fish based foods too. Adding fibre to her food helped firm up the poop, so I suppose we could have gone that route and stayed on the Premium Edge or Wellness.
We decided to switch Nala back to lamb & rice and try a new food we saw at PetSmart, Blue Adult Lamb & Rice from a company called Blue Buffalo. I was really impressed with the list of ingredients, with lamb and lamb meal as the first two (like with people food, dog food ingredients are listed in order of their amount in the food). Whole grains fill out the last three ingredients in the top 5, which should provide plenty of fibre for nice firm poops. Hopefully Nala will do well on this food (I think she will). It’s a little pricier than the Diamond L&R, but considering a month’s supply costs about as much as we might spend on dinner at a restaurant, it’s not bad. At 442 calories/cup, we might have to add more high fibre veggies to her food just to fill her up stomach though!
Digital camera artifact
A strange looking artifact started showing up on the wife’s digital camera (a Sony DSC-W5) yesterday. In regular non-zoom mode, it just shows up as a small dark fuzzy patch in the lower left corner of the image. At full optical zoom it becomes a slightly more defined small rectangular patch:
It’s not anything on the surface of the lens, and it doesn’t move when the optical zoom is adjusted so I’m thinking it must be something on the CCD. With a flashlight and some image enhancement using GIMP I managed to get these images:
Not entirely sure what to make of it. The striations possibly suggest something spring-like. A few hours later, it migrated a little bit higher to the left middle of the screen (perhaps in response to some soft thumping I gave it). Looks like I’ll have to send it in to have it looked at.
Four words that are never good to hear
“We’ve had a misadministration”
As a diagnostic medical physicist, you don’t hear those words very often (unless you’re talking to a therapy physicist), nor do you want to hear them very often. Not because something really really bad has happened, but mostly because it involves a lot of paperwork and calculating and almost always happen when you’re in the middle of doing other things that need to be done yesterday.
A vile despicible act
The people responsible for this act should be made to die a slow painful death.
From the MSNBC story:
The Drug Enforcement Administration arrested 22 Colombian nationals for smuggling heroin into the United States via various methods, including surgically implanting the drug into puppies, officials said Wednesday.
The Colombian organization brought more than 20 kilograms of heroin into the United States, concealing some of it by slitting open purebred puppies, according to John P. Gilbride, the DEA’s New York Field Division special agent-in-charge, in a news release.
At least three puppies died from having liquid heroin packets placed inside them and then being stitched back up, DEA spokesman David Ausiello said.
Just reading about it and seeing some of the pictures makes my stomach turn.