After some investigation, I have decided that Blogger is the best free blogging service available. All of the others either lack or make you pay for some key feature. I'll just swallow my Yahoo! pride and use a google-owned service. Hell, it might be good for me. In fact, I may switch from Atkins to the pride-only diet.

In other news...we are getting pretty close to the 1 year until go mark. It's time to stop my phaffing about and put some real work into this project. Mike's goals for the months of June:

* Start program of inoculations
* Find the right kind of travel insurance

Those Typhoid Fever pills were pretty annoying. I had constant low-grade indigestion all week. My guts are still kinda sore.

After a disquieting amount of tomfoolery, I finally managed to get access to le Blog. I think this is an excellent format for keeping a record of our trip. Pull media is the way to go. Rather than spamming folks or sending the same thing out to a lot of people in a somewhat personalized format, better to let them come to us.

My only problem with this is that Blogger is owned by Google and I work for Yahoo and we hate those mofos. To address my loyalty issue, we could maybe move this to another Blog provider or build something ourselves. As usual, I'm leaning toward the latter, but I think I'll swallow my engineer pride this time and suggest the former.

Vaccinations. Aw, yeah.

Thursday, I went to this place called The Healthy Traveler Clinic to check up on all of the innoculations I need to get for the trip. Steve (Mom's boyfriend) took a sailing trip around the Carribbean many years ago, and he advised me to look into the vaccinations way early. So, I went.

The doctor was a pretty cool guy, and we just talked about where I was planning on going, and what I was planning on doing. My answers were "the world", and "have unprotected sex with many prostitutes, while doing intravenous drugs through my cornea", respectively. Well, I lied about one of those. Anyway, I ended up getting some shots, which actually weren't that bad. The doc had this pinching trick that made the injection barely noticeable. I guess when you do nothing but inject people with shit all day long, you get pretty good at it.

The list:
Hepatitus A (One more shot in 6 months.)
Tetanus (my arm is still sore)
Polio
Yellow Fever
Rabies (I have to do two more over the next coupla months.)

I'm also taking these pills to innoculate me against Typhoid Fever for 5 years. I need to take 4 pills over a week, and I can't drink no alcohol. Damnit. Plus, he gave me a month's worth of Malaria pills to try out once the Typhoid regimen is done. During the trip, I'll have to take them when I'm in malaria areas, so I'm trying them now to make sure there are no side effects.

The best part, though, was that all of this innoculation business isn't covered by my insurance. So, I had cough up $630. Sweet.