beginning
Miquel is the Catalan spelling of my Croatian name. Hudin is Croatian. Balsa is Portuguese. Of course, I was born in Oroville, CA in the later part of the mid 1970's. These were not my formative years. People thought I was smart, but this was only due to being the first grandchild in my family. One can't plan a better trick if one planned it, which I actually hadn't.
early years
I stayed in Butte County for about 21 years, enjoying hot, 40C+ summers and cold, 2C- winters. In the seasons between, there was public school, which proved frustrating. After what ended up being my last year in high school, I managed to be a student in a new program called College Connections which got me out of high school and in to college.
Gratuitous self portrait on the Buda side of Budapest.
when it appeared life began
I ended up graduating from the University of California at Berkeley and ultimately earning a degree in English Literature which is only useful when I want to talk about what cads Chaucer and Milton were. During college, I was also working for American Zoetrope, which is the film company of Francis Coppola and after graduation, I continued to work there full time until getting laid off in 2002 due to the dot-com fallout and recession. Frustration with the US's lack of adopting the Metric system and unemployed boredom set in, so I moved in to San Francisco in 2003, where I have lived ever since on the edge of Nob Hill which affords me first hand experience with spoiled art students and well as the most lovely transvestite hookers one would ever hope to meet down at Sutter and Larkin.
when life actually began
In 2003, I took my first trip to Europe, which was followed by a trip the year after that and the year after that and so on until traveling slowly took over more and more of my life, as well as photography, and complete immersion in the web. It appears that when the mixture was just right and these hobbies were needing some kind of cohesion, I met my future wife. Together we are working on some large projects that involve traveling to far off places and taking photos of us holding indigenous children so that we can use said photos at conferences in Powerpoint slideshows to show how much good we do. In a non-sarcastic "mission statement", we're actually working on Maneno, a massively multilingual, communication and blogging platform for Sub-Saharan Africa.
my digital gas
If for some reason you've read this far and are thinking, "Gosh, I just haven't had enough of this Hudin yet. How can I get some more?", you're so, so in luck. I meander a lot and you can see my goings on at sites like, Twitter, Dopplr, Facebook, Linked In, Virtual Tourist, and my other blog on Africa-related items, Subsaharska.
