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So... after you've been sick for about three weeks, you start to turn to things that are otherwise rather unorthodox. Naturally chicken soup is a big one, but I think about the only thing that does is allow you to taste something. I'm a strong believer in Vick's VaporRub. THis stuff is cool since it's very cheap, not something you have to ingest, and it just makes you feel good all night long. I hear that putting it in boiling water and inhaling it is the best way to go, but I'm more of a fan of putting a dab under the nose and some on the throat before going to sleep. If a sore throat ails you, then I recommend gargling salt water or even better, to gargle Hydrogen Peroxide. Yeah, it sounds harsh, but it works quite well to kill of whatever nasties you may have living down there. As I always say, drinking a lot of tea is good. There's just something about a hot liquid that makes you feel comfy and less craptastic. Apparently there is also some scientific proof that tea is good as well, since it boosts your anti-oxidents and that is a good thing I hear.       Beyond the very simple notion of sleep, there is this other thing on the market now called Zicam, which is supposed to help reduse the cold length and severity. It won't work with a flu, but for all things cold it is supposed to be good. I'm testing it out right now, since I don't have anything else to do as I sit around this Sunday and mull over my bad feelingness. I'm always a little wary of modern science and their attempt to thwart the common cold, but we'll see if this one works.

So, the new Apple Mini is shipping today. Let me emphasize that it is shipping and not that I've had one shipped to me. To be honest, I just don't flat out trust the things. Apples have had some pretty poor construction lately. Despite the fact that this machine is base don the old tried and true G4 (by the way, what's up with this, I thought G5's were the way of the future?!!) the compact architecture makes me queasy based on what I've seen with their iBooks and 12" PowerBooks. Hell, to be honest, you can part a Buick inside the G5 PowerMacs and they're still crap.       But, just for the sake of curiosity, I went to the Apple Store and priced out one of these things with all the parts you need to make it work since it doesn't come with a mouse, keyboards, or even enough memory to function properly. That came out to around $650. Okay, fair enough, that's more than a PC, but it's still less than most other Macs. There's one minor bit in that that's not including a monitor. You put that in there and suddenly this thing costs $800 and that's the bottom rung of the ladder to use it. Nuts, right? Oh, not just yet.       I decided to fully spec out one of these puppies and put in all the options that you could put on there, which in reality isn't very much since it's a compact platform. The net cost? $1451! Once again, that's without a screen. To put this in to perspective, you get get a G5 PowerMac for $1499 these days. Yes it needs more ram, but it has nearly everything that this $1451 Mini costs. And of course, yes, there is no screen. That's extree.       Most likely these expensive pieces of junk will probably catch on just like everything Mac, but people are brainwashed if they think they're a good deal, because they simple and without a doubt are not.

I was walking through Golden Gate Park with my moma nd brother today, on our way to the conservatory of flowers - www.conservatoryofflowers.org and as we walked through the part of the park that is near the eastern entrance we came upon a drumming circle of stoned out hippy freaks.       Now, most people would go, "Hey, what's your problem? They're not hurting anyone, they're jsut drumming." Yes, this is true, but they're doing it in a public space I walk through. It's not their space, it's all of our space. Add in to that fact, they're really bad and unable to keep anything but an untimed 4/4 rythym and that's a shaky ordeal at best. Add in this, the complete ignorance about how bad they are and that there is an international code that no matter where in the world you are, anyone in a drumming circle must be crap, you find yourself in the middle of a very unenjoyable time for the ears.       There are times, when I find the hippies to be one and the same with the yuppies. They're both these short-term thinking, "Me" people who only care about themselves. They try to pass off like they're pro environment or vegan or what have you, but most of the guys are doing this to get themselves hairy hippy women and I have not idea why the women do it. I think that my in my high-standing, money-earning way am doing a lot more for the environment with the products I choose to buy, the candidates I choose to vote for and the way I lead my life than these doofuses (note this is different from the doofus look mentioned below) who use the "free" lifestyle as an excuse to not work and be a loser and dreg to society.       Pardon the rage, but I've been subjected to a lot of drumming circles in my life and as a consumate musician who doesn't sit on a park bench playing blap-blap-blap-blap blong-blong-blong... blap, I find them to fall in a class of inanity that only they can be part of.

All right man, so I understand that losing a pet is hard and that the losss is difficult to deal with. For some time, you feel this fleeting, wanting need that isn't there. These things, these animals that we take in to our lives and personify to mean something to us. They may not understand or feel the love we put in to them, but when they're gone we feel the void of their passing.       To not know the fate of your pet is an even harder thing to deal with. Thus the reason my heart goes out to Gordon and his search for his missing cat. But I do have one thing to say to this Gordon. For the love of god, did you have to stick your missing cat note on my building with packing tape?!! That stuff is murder to get off! Best of luck in your search bud.

Another iPod horror story to toss on to the heap.       My brother insisted on getting an iPod for Christmas, so we all chipped in and got him one of the stupid things. He gets back home and goes to plug it in and of course it doesn't work. It won't work with the USB port or the FireWire port. Why you may ask? Got me. They're both up to spec and should have worked. So, after going through all of this, the iPod decides to die. No restart or reformat will help it. It's just dead.       So, we send in to Apple for a new one and after haggling with them for a long time, they finally send out a replacement iPod. At the same time, I get a USB 2.0 card for the machine just to make sure that there isn't a problem with the ports. The new iPod starts, but it won't link in to the system. Nothing we try gets it to come up. The machine is seeing the card just fine, but no tomatoes.       So, giving the machine a rest, we reboot it and then it gets stuck in an infinite loop of not coming off. It appears that there is some kind of short in the system now. In other words, not only does the iPod not work, but the system is now dead.       Way to go Apple. If you can't get people to switch manually, then destroy their systems. You jackassed, marketing-based, faulty-engineered, crap makers.

After getting our room in Split, we were introduced to our room owner's son, Juri. He first told us his name, but said it was okay if we called him "George or John, or something simple like that." Naturally, we were fine calling him by his given name. He was a funny guy. No doubt, based upon his age, he fought in the civil war, but the only sign that it had torn him up was that he had moved for some time to live in Paris.       This is the part of Juri that is the best, since he didn't like Paris and returned to his homeland, which he loved. Oh, how he loved his homeland.       Every city was beautiful.       "Zagreb is beautiful, a true cosmopolitan town. Much better than Paris." "Split... Split is beautiful. We have the Diocletian's Palace here and the water. What more could you want?" "Ah... Dubrovnik. There is nothing like it. You can travel the world and maybe you have, but you will not find anything such as that city." "Rijeka? Well, that's next o Opatija, which is beautiful and Volosko, which is heavenly. You can't ask for better towns on the Riviera."       Every island was magical.       "Hvar. Oh, how I love Hvar. The lavender in Spring is amazing. It will make you cry." "Korcula can simply not be measured. There are no words that can contain that town." You must visit this one. You must visit that one. You must see them all."       No matter what scrap or speck of Croatia you could talk about, it didn't matter, he loved ever part of it. It was he and he was it. Of course, this was really no help when trying to figure out what area to go to next, since apparently the entire country was a masterpiece of a painting wherein you could find no flaw or unfinished surface.       Of course, that isn't the case and some parts are better than others, as is the case with anywhere. If you stare at something long enough, or look at it from a different angle, you can find something you don't like. I don't doubt that Juri could find his flaws with his country and I don't doubt that he has problems with how it is run, but the beauty of his sincerity was the fact that he was in love with an evolving thing, which was changing and enveloping everyone around him into it. To Juri, Croatia wasn't just a place on the map, it was a country that had recently bled, giving birth to something new.       Luckily, we hadn't seen much of the country at that point, enabling us to agree with him on any point, simply out of blissful ignorance. And we weren't about to contradict Juri on anything he had said, since he was much, much bigger than us and his family was giving us a good price on the room.

As you can see, the quest to get the site back to heathly status is still in effect. Currently, the main page you're reading Home is fully operational. Links is fully done as well and also expanding upon from the old site, since there are quite a few things I realized I had left out the last go round. What is also back and has been update with more Hudin goodness as well as other people I have found to be related to me. If you really like me, then you can certainly Contact me since I polished out some the scratchier things in that bit of code. Now Search is suffering some growing pains because I haven't quite worked out all the technology to drive that just yet and I want to make it very useful, taking in to account I'm running MySQL 4 on this thing and can do a lot more advanced searches. However, Plan is all there is its glory with my ideas about making the world a better place someday, some how, some way. The Archive is my next big area to tackle, since I want everything to be accessible and as it sits, it currently isn't, just the current month, so that's no good. One thing that I'm very proud of is the Upgrade section where I get in to all the dirty little issues you encounter when switching over to OS X and Adobe InDesign CS with InCopy CS. For anyone dealing with this uprade, I'd highly recommend taking a peek, since the process really sucks! Lastly, Photos is still in the works. This will be a very cool interactive picture gallery that shows off some coding skills as well as some photography skills. I really can't want to get it up, but it's the last item on the list.       So, that's how it sits. Bear with me please, because I'm in the midst of an OS X upgrade at my office and consulting for an upgrade at another office. Sleep... I need sleep...

For some reason, the latest trend in fashion is for guys to look like a sloppy ass. I realize that grunge was something that happened and it was a bit on the sloppy side, but this new look basically says, "Hi there. I didn't tip my barber last time and got this hair cut this time. My razor fell apart this morning. My fat brother dared me to wear his pants. My mom gave me a gift certificate to LL Bean. And, oh yeah, I really really really really really really wanna be a DJ."       You can see this stupid look in commericials these days, such as the billboards that are around for Pillsner Urquell. You can see it it fashion magazine spreads. There's this quasi-Kutcher thing that all the designers has decided is the new hot thing.       A shining example of all this was this guy walking next to me as I was coming home from work the other day. He was a normal looking guy about my height, but then again he wasn't normal. He looked like an asshole. There were the jeans that were too big with the scruffy crap beard, bad haircut, big wannabe cowboy jacket and the big headphone cans on his ears. As I was wondering what the hell was going through the guy's head besides the "new" Fat Boy Slim, I realize that he wasn't neccessarily a doofus looking guy, he was just cultivating that look. It's such a strange thing. So much so, that I think I want to go out and get another suit just so that I make sure never to fit in with these guys.

I had an Australian wine a couple nights ago for dinner. It was a nice Shiraz that depsite the name "Scrubby Rise" was mighty tasty and a lovely wine. The only odd thing about it was that there was no cork, it was a screwcap. "Dear lord!" the wine purists say, "Where's the cork?!!" You know what, you really don't need the cork. This has been proven again and again in regards to storage and I believe that some say a capped bottle will store longer than a cork one.       It's really silly how we all get caught up on tradition because the cork has been around for so long. I'll admit that it's satisfying pulling the cork out of the bottle and hearing the pop sound, along with being able to smell the cork for tasting purposes. But really, we should probably do away with the silly things. Cork is after all something of a limited resource and they're making some corks that aren't really real cork anymore because of this, so why go through the show? Just make it a screwcap.       I suppose that it all revolves around cheap wines being screwcapped in the past. After all, it's hard for a wino to carry around a corkscrew with themselves everyone, so just make it a screwcap, right? Gallo sold a lot of Thunderbird for a lot of change by doing this and in doing so they also gave the screwcap a bad name. Somewhere down the road I'm sure we'll get over it though, but things will move faster if we all join together to drinks wines that are only screwcapped. It would be amazing to see how fast the winemakers changed their way of doing things.

I don't know the state of film in this town these days. It seems all but dead. You just don't hear about projects here like you used to. There aren't any films being shot here anymore, except for the film version of Rent, which I hear is happening on Treasure Island currently. There aren't any television shows happening here either, even if they're based here. They'll just come out and do some establishing shots and then do the rest of it in Los Angeles.       I'm seeing this after the fallout from my movie I shot - Dying in your Sleep, where of the 30 actors that were in it, 25 of them live in or moved to LA since we shot. It's nutty and no wonder film doesn't stand a chance here these days. LA seems to have such a strangle hold.       This is one of the reasons that keep doing shameless plugs for my site Cinefuse www.cinefuse.com because it is one of the only ways that we're going to be able to create things in a non-LA environment some day. Naturally, the film world is a frustrating thing, since so many people don't really want to get off their asses to make it happen. For some reason, they expect it all to come to them without having to do any work for it. I'll admit that there are the brief moments in history where this is the case, but overall, anything that anyone has ever achieved in the way of greatness has also come at the cost of a lot of work on their part.       I don't really know what to say at this point, except that San Francisco is a great place to do outside shots because we have so many overcast days which allow for great diffused lighting that takes a lot of times in a studio or in LA to reproduce.