Jabs for South-East Asia

According to Fit For Travel this is the list of vaccines/medications I should get on top of tetanus/typhoid/hepatitis A/diphtheria to travel to South East Asia:

• Malaria tablets
• Hepatitis B 
  • Engerix 3 injections: now, 1 month, 6 months
• Japanese encephalitis 
  • IXARIO 2 injections. Day 0, Day 28 
• Rabies 
  • Rabbies Vaccine BP:  3 injections. Day 0, Day 7, Day 28 
• Tick-born encephalitis 
  • Ticovac: 3 injections. now, 1 month, 5 months 
• Cholera
  • Dukoral: 2 oral doses. now, 1-6 weeks.

Fit For Travel recommends going to my GP but that's going to take years. There is a place called the Travel Clinic where you can make appointments even at the weekend.

Classic vaccines are free but exotic ones are about £50 a shot (see prices) and for each vaccine you need between 2 and 3 shots. This is the list of vaccines paid for by the NHS.

To get an appointment with my GP, all I need to do is go there in person and ask for a travel vaccination appointment (can’t be that specific on the phone).

More resources: NaTHNac

Learning plan for a 6-month break

If you were taking a 6-month break off work, what would you start learning?

This is what I put on my plate:

• CSS\Javascript\HTML5

I haven’t touched CSS and HTML in a while. It’s about time to have a refresh. Microsoft now has certifications for those.

• One CMS (Wordpress or Drupal)

…because my blog looks quite boring in Blogger.

• One no-SQL technology

…because I worked with Relational Data Models for too long…

• MSDN Certifications
  • MCSD Web Applications
  • SQL Server 2012 MCSA
  • Business intelligence MCSE
  • MCDS Windows Store Apps

…sometimes it’s good to learn about Microsoft technologies independently of a project. The material for certifications –without making you proficient- gives you a healthy overview of everything that’s available. So when you’re back on projects, you know what tools to consider.

• C++ 11

…to lose old habits and re-learn new ones.

• Risk calculation in finance

Some financial calculations basics: statistics, value at risk, options valuation, portfolio valuation… I will prepare the FRM exam to write it in May.

And those will be mostly for fun….

• iPad + iPhone development
• High Frequency Trading

 

That could be too many things to learn for 6 months, it’s likely I am biting more than I can chew. I will see in 1 month how much I’ve done and I might review the list.

The most exciting novels I've read in years

Very very gripping books, don’t read on if you’d rather avoid spoilers…

WIFI WPA hacks, phone tracking, drones, armies of self-driving cars, hypersonic weapons, plasma weapons, distributed software able to kill people remotely, GPS-enabled glasses with augmented reality overlay controlled by motion-detection gloves… Stealth processes running on unreachable servers in China scanning RSS feeds for a text pattern and sending instructions when a match is found, therefore reacting to events in real-time... People and machines controlled using basic AI available in computer games, a bit like a giant SimCity or a lethal MMORPG where the player is a program and characters are actual people… Encrypted APIs allowing whoever decrypts it to wipe out a company’s entire data backup just by passing the company name as a function argument… entire companies fall under the control of an unstoppable distributed computer program whose mad creator died before triggering it. It recruits people through coercion at first until it grows powerful enough to be the best employer in a country ravaged by 25% unemployment. It’s a computer program that kills spammers, hedge fund managers and anything that gets in its way and simultaneously builds self-sufficient communities based on renewable energy and sustainable farming…

What makes this book powerful is that everything is based on technology available now. There is little that the author made up, it all exists. You end up thinking: that could happen if someone smart with unlimited funds decided to put his mind to it (Eric Schmidt maybe?). Of course a lot of the tech in the book works a little too well. Suarez’ technique consists in taking a bunch of technologies currently in the R&D stage and imagine what would happen if they actually were fully developed. This is the kind of sci-fi I like: grounded, realistic, credible and very very close to us. 

You could make such a good film out of this plot… There is enough material to build a very cool tech action-thriller trilogy.