Goodsol Solitaire Blog

Pet Food Recall Update: Cause Found?

Rat Poison Believed to be the Source of Pet Food Contamination

Pet Food Recall

Most people should have heard about this by now, but over the weekend there was a massive pet food recall.  Nearly 100 brands of dog and cat food are affected.  The best source of information about it is here.

Our cats eat primarily dry food (which is not affected), but they also eat some wet food each day.  Fortunately, our main brand of wet food, Fancy Feast, is not affected by the recall.  We did have some cans of wet Iams.  I found a few cans from the factory involved, but they were dated from before the problem.  I threw them out anyway.  I'm probably going to throw the rest of the wet Iams out also, as it turns out all Iams wet food is made by Menu Foods.

The scale of this is much greater than what is being reported in the regular media.  One pet related blog has created a database and is taking reports from pet owners whose pets have been sick or have died from the food.  This one blog is reporting 241 pet deaths.  One of my sister's cats died yesterday, I don't know yet whether it was because of this food, but it would be rather a coincidence if it was not.

Unbelievably, another blog is reporting that the plant that makes this "food" is still operational.

They think that the problem is a contamination of wheat gluten.  Apparently Menu Foods switched to a new supplier of wheat gluten in December.  They claim to have dropped that supplier, but no one is naming what company that supplier is.  A google search on wheat gluten turned up a number of companies that manufacture wheat gluten.  The largest and most recognizable to me was ADM, which is located in my hometown.  Of course, right now there is no way to know whether ADM was involved, or whether they were the company switched to or switched from.

I also discovered that there are apparently a number of flavors of Fancy Feast that contain no wheat gluten.  A web site lists them here.  Some of these flavors are among our cats favorites, so I expect to increase using these particular flavors. 

I'm also looking to change their dry food, even though dry food is not affected by this recall.  One of the  things this recall reveals is that expensive cat foods such as Iams are made at the same factory as cheap store brands.  I've been feeding them Iams, because it is a premium cat food that is supposed to be good. But the wet Iams turns out to be the same as the cheap stuff, so Iams has lost all their brand identity to me. I'm not going to feed them Iams anymore. 

I've been researching what brands of dry food might be the healthiest.  Apparently Innova and Natural Balance are good, but very expensive.  The Purina products were unaffected by the recall, but have mixed reputations.  Does anybody have any good dry cat food recommendations?

Computer Problems Continued

Update on our computer problems:

Yesterday I went out and bought a new hard drive and a hard drive enclosure, as mentioned in one of the comments to the previous post.

Removing the old hard drive and installing the new one turned out to be easy -  it took longer to figure out how to get the case open and clean out the dust than to swap out the drive. Unfortunately, I then ran into a new problem.  The new drive formatted fine and then when installing WinXP I got an error in the install.

Guess which was more useful in figuring out the cause of the error:

A)  A call to Microsoft technical support.

B) A Google search on the error message.

If you said B, you win the cookie.

The net result is that there is probably a problem with the WinXP CD I was using - I'll be trying again with a different CD.

On the other front, I took the old drive and put it in the USB hard drive enclosure, which is just a device that you can put an internet hard drive into, connect the cable and power supply, and then you can plug it in to a USB port as an external drive.  These hard drive enclosures are the neatest little devices since the bread slicer.  I connected the old hard drive up on another computer and I'm running data recovery software on it.  I'm hopeful that I'll be able to recover some or all of the data.

Computer Problems

For the last couple of days I have been dealing with some annoying computer problems.

First, yesterday Anne's computer froze up during a virus scan (after it had discovered a couple of viruses) and she had to shut it off and restart.  WinXP would not boot when she restarted.  Nothing worked - safe mode, reverting to a previous configuration, nothing would boot up XP.  I went into the Windows Recovery Console and tried all sorts of things there (fixboot, fixmbr, etc) and nothing works.  When I try to do a DIR on the hard drive I get "An error occurred during directory enumeration".  CHKDSK has been running all day, it's stuck at 63%.  I can't tell if it is hung up or not.  Clearly something is terribly corrupted on the hard drive. 

We have a reasonably recent backup of the critical data on that computer (which is the order processing computer, so the data is primarily customer data and emails).  The orders processed since the last backup can simply be reprocessed into the database, although that's going to be a pain in the butt.  WinXP won't let me reinstall without reformatting the hard drive.  I'd prefer not to do that, though, unless it's clear that there is no way to retrieve the data.  I've basically tried everything I can think of to do, unless the CHKDSK winds up working.

So in the process of getting Anne set up to work on her laptop, I've run into other problems (her laptop is what we use when we are out of town, so it is already mostly set up).  Every time I tried to dial out on the laptop, I got an "error 50.  The request is not supported".  After some research on Google, I tried a fix, but it involved first uninstalling the modem driver from Device Manager.  I did this without a problem and went thru the rest of the fix, and then reinstalled the modem driver in Device Manager.  But when I try to create a new dial up networking entry, it says that the modem device is unavailable.   This is very annoying.

Of course, I wouldn't need to use dialup if I could get the wireless networking on her laptop working.  Whenever her laptop connects to the house wireless network, it knocks my desktop off with an IP address error.   I can connect to the wireless network fine with my laptop, but her laptop knocks everything else out (my desktop is actually connected to the wireless router via hardwire, but apparently her laptop causes some kind of IP conflict).

All this is making it difficult to get any actual work done.  Anybody have any experience with any of these problems?