Vaccinations Complete After rewriting all of my plans in April I am finally on track and what a day today has been I quit my job turned in all of my corporate security and will now be working as a remote contractor henceforth I cashed in some investments I then got my vaccinations for hepatitis A hepatitis B tetanus diphtheria pertussis and typhoid I also had all of my blood work run too Needless to say I was a pin cushion for a few hours It hurt As it turns out they actually provide pills for both typhoid malaria The typhoid pills are a live culture that will actually provide a vaccination against the disease for about 5 years to come The malaria pills are intended to be taken before entering a location whereby malaria is highly prevalent like pretty much all of SE Asia photo 625599 627205 0 center Just the needle piercing into my vein photo br style clear both My round the world adventure starts next Sunday starting with the Midwest of the US followed by SE Asia then Spain and northern Africa then the Middle East then Nepal and India After than I ll plan Europe South America and remote islands around the world I am excitedly hoping to do about 10 months of travel with stints off for holidays Little Atti will be joining me on some of it br style clear both photo 625433 627205 0 center These lovely nurses made my day that much better photo

Final Round of Shots In preparation for my adventures around the world I unfortunately had to go back to the travel clinic to get my final round of shots In addition to the typhoid vaccine that I have already been taking orally I had to double up on the hepatitis a and hepatitis b vaccination Unlike the first time this one really hurt In order for them to use the two in one formula it s required that they inject an entire 1ml into the muscle tissue Additionally with my arms already being sore from the previous round of shots well it just hurt photo 629524 740 0 center A little photo montage of the nurse giving me the final injections You can see I m not especially happy with the icepack on my right arm photo br style clear both I whined a bit when the nurse was doing it and so she offered me an ice pack If you find yourself getting these types of vaccinations and one is not offered to you it does really help a lot and I would highly recommend it To be clear the needle didn t bother me in the slightest the liquid formula seeping deep into my muscle tissue did hurt a lot

Updating the Database As a small technical note for my blog I ve been busy writing a ton of code to fix some of the issues that have recently come up I d been working on this over the past several months but took a bit of a break in January while tending to other things I ve written about this rather extensively before but most of the problems stem from Apple stupidly reorganizing the way they store photos within the iPhoto app While they used to keep a tight directory structure on your photos disk making it extremely easy to RSync to one s personal server they are now using some kind of hex based directory structure and simply add all of the photos into these folders using 0 through F eg 0 1 F Worse still is that they include the photos in the directories seemingly at random This makes it extremely difficult to find your new files and move them where they need to go Yes you can use the export feature but this is SUCH a slow process and makes absolutely no sense for storing your own photos on your own system It s absolutely bonkers that they ve adopted this new structure Of course this is all in line with Apple taking the blue ribbon for most evil tech company They re quite clearly doing this to make it more and more difficult for people to use software outside of the Apple realm thus ensuring that people stick with iPhoto and much more insidiously their Cloud services I ve been writing about this for nearly 20 years now and this is just the latest example of it This required me writing code that would look at the MD5 checksum for every single file and then compare those to the files that I already had on my server The ones that were missing were copied into one of the new directories and processed I still have a ton of photos needing to be sorted but it s coming along in my spare time

Tuesday Flight 413ES While Dustin was preparing for one of our flights with Garrett in 413ES, I was busy going around taking snapshots. I think this was the first time that I actually managed to get our fearless instructor, Garrett Wilner, on camera.

Graham Rehearsal Dinner The night before Sunni and Preston's wedding was the night of their rehearsal dinner. Seeing on how I was one of the groomsmen, I first had to partake in the actual rehearsal before the dinner. I had jokingly asked Preston and Sunni if I could dress casually to the event, and for the sake of keeping the mood light, they not only said I could but suggested that I do. So with their blessing, you might notice that I am 'slightly' under dressed in the photos (hence can be seen wearing a colorful Hawaiian shirt).

Mussell Baby Shower The Mussell's were in full gear for little Aiden and as is the popular thing to do these days, they had a couples baby shower. The Crockett's hosted the event and much like a number of the other baby showers I have been to, it wasn't particularly interesting. We handed over a bunch of baby stuff, played some games, drank some cocktails, and otherwise just roamed around wondering what we were doing. Please note that my cynicism isn't being directed at the Mussells as I always have a fun time hanging out with them, but rather to all baby showers around the world! =]

Double Nickel Bison Ranch Tracy and I followed her family out towards Lampassas where her uncle (her dad's brother) owns a fairly sizable buffalo ranch. I had a great time out there, even for the short while we were there, and have since been wanting to go back so that I can help do some work out in the pasture. We would have stayed for the rest of the day but I had already been committed to a [album=282]performance[/album] at the Waldorf School with Sonora Lee.

Vegas Trip 2005 One of the many Vegas trips that I've made, this one was organized mostly by Dreux. Emerson and I had the pleasure of being roommates in the MGM. We met up with a bunch of Dreux's friends from various parts of the country.

Tisa at Westslope Just some random pictures that I took of Tisa in my room at Westslope. It appears by the first picture that she is sitting in a bra, but I can assure you she was wearing a full top (as picture two in the gallery will show). I'm not exactly sure what I was doing with a land line as I know I had a cell phone then.

Sandcastle Competition Right after Tisa and I got back from New Zealand, we visited my parents in Corpus Christi with Dave and checked out the annual sandcastle competition. While these things are most definitely impressive, I did learn that they are allowed to use glue to help hold the sand together.