Sheep Guarding Llama

Chemist at NY’s Cornell University have identified the contamination in Menu Foods’ tainted pet food supply as aminopterin – a former cancer drug, abortion drug and illegal rat poison.  The wheat gluten that contained the poison was identified as coming from China.  Andre Rosowsky who is a chemist at Boston’s Dana Farber Cancer Institute speculated that a rare and highly controlled substance like this would not reasonably find its way into wheat gluten unless it was put there intentionally.  At this point it looks very likely that the pet deaths were intentional.

I managed, somehow, to wake up without an alarm at a quarter to eight this morning. Less than four hours of sleep. I didn’t feel all that great but I managed to pull myself out of bed just the same.

I had a lot of work to be done for the office this morning so I got right to work on that. I don’t have the day off today – I am just working from Geneseo. But we are bound to be more productive being here all day rather than in Newark.

Dominica slept in for several hours as she didn’t get much sleep last night either. Dad came over mid-morning and once I got a window in which I could escape from sitting directly in front of the computer we took it and all ran over to the Omega Grill for a really late breakfast or fairly normal lunch.

Between being a normal office day and having one email disaster after another to deal with I was very busy all day long. I hardly had any chance to get anything done around the house.

After lunch there was a lot of packing and work to be done.  The whole day was extremely busy as we expect all of the weekend will be.  For dinner we just ran over to the Shang Hai in Geneseo and had the buffet.

Today is email day for me. Specifically the old email that I have been working off of for the past several years is starting to experience some significant problems and the new email that I have been working on for the past few weeks isn’t totally tested yet so I am stuck switching the email over sooner than I had anticipated. That always makes for a hectic day. But at least it forces me to move forward sooner than later and keeps me from being able to procrastinate. But it is going to make tomorrow morning that much busier than I had been expecting.

I had to work a little late this evening. It was close to seven o’clock in the evening before I was able to get out of the office. I got home and Dominica packed while I did some very necessary work to prepare for the server migration this weekend. That ended up taking about two hours before we were able to load the car and leave. By this time I was really hungry as I had not had a chance to eat all day except for the Slim Fast drink that I had as I was getting into the car this morning on my way to the office.

We went to the first McDonald’s that we could get to easily and ate dinner. By the time we got off the highway, found the restaurant, ate and returned to the highway we burned enough time that effectively we did not leave until after nine thirty. Very late for a drive back to Geneseo.

The trip was pretty mundane. Kind of sad being the very last time that we will ever drive to our “home” in Geneseo. The house in Geneseo has been our home longer than anyplace else since either of us was in high school. It was actually home and not just a building.  We had lived there for three and three quarter years thinking almost the entire time that we would be keeping the house for a very long time yet.

It was around three in the morning when we pulled into Geneseo.  There was some fog on the drive and just a touch of rain but very little and nothing to write home about (technically my dad reads this so, in a way, I did write home about it.)  Dominica went pretty much straight to bed but I stayed up and worked for about an hour.  I was exhausted when I finally managed to get into bed.

For some reason Yahoo Travel has a page of pictures of hotels with a really old picture of me right in the middle of it all! The Internet is a strange place indeed.

But even better is the fact that one of my photos was used as the main picture for Come Visit Canton! My family will be very proud to know that a photo that I took when I was young is now on the visitor website for my family’s home town!

The RIAA, the lawsuit driven arm of the music recording industry, sued a woman for intentionally providing stolen music via the file sharing on her home computer.  Their evidence is based solely on IP assignment records from the woman’s ISP.  The case has been dragging on for two years and it appears that the RIAA is attempting to make it financially impossible for the woman to continue to defend herself.  Today the judge involved in the case told the RIAA that they would not be allowed to drop the case at this point – they will either have to consent to the woman’s right to trial by jury in which case the RIAA is expected to lose based on precedent or to have the trial dismissed with prejudice which means that the RIAA loses and could be counter sued in civil court and would very likely have to pay a heap of legal fees for dragging on a case and then walking away.  It would mean basically admitting that it was a trumped up charge and that they were trying to work through intimidation.  This is a huge loss for the RIAA.

The RIAA is having a really bad day as they are now taking a beating after having lost the Capital vs. Foster lawsuit where they are now being told that they have to produce a lot of records to the defendant.  And then, if it wasn’t all bad enough for the RIAA, now the University of Nebraska is suing the RIAA directly for wasting their time trying to make the university track network traffic of its transient network population.  Perhaps the RIAA should concentrate on making music instead of suing its customers.  No wonder music remains so expensive.

Not much to report today.  I worked as usual and came home.  We spent the evening at home hanging out with Oreo and watching the third season of The Facts of Life.  My textbook for my Master’s class at RIT arrived today so I had reading and homework to catch up on.  I ended up staying up until two in the morning working on that but it needed to be done.  At least I am mostly caught up at this point.  I think as long as I keep on top of it this weekend I will be okay.

Tomorrow night Dominica and I are heading for Geneseo.  We will be in Geneseo for three days doing all the packing that we possibly can as quickly as possible.  It is going to be a long, busy weekend.

Nutro, who’s low grade tainted dog food poisoned out Boston Terrier Oreo, Sophie in Pennsylvania, Rocky in Chicago and countless others is now being sued in federal court over the death of a dog from Long Island.  With the serving of the suit, Nutro is no longer claiming on their website that their food has not had any complaints against it.  Apparently the courts can still contact them even if their customers cannot.  Nutro has been accused by a writer to Dogster of sending out their account representatives to attempt to restock their tainted products in pet supply stores against the wishes of the stores in order to unload the bad food.  It is reported that pet supply store manager(s) have needed to force Nutro to leave.

So be cautious – by NO products from Nutro as we cannot be sure that they have not been sneaking contaminated foods back onto shelves and as Nutro was not disclosing the source of their ingredients previously we cannot trust their products now regardless of whether or not they are believed to be covered by the recall.  As it was Nutro held back some of their high-end brands like Nutro Ultra until after many of their customers had checked the recall list.  We are very blessed that Dominica decided to check the list again and found that Oreo’s food was not added until many days after the initial recall.