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The SF Chronicle has been taking to a new format lately. It's only been for the last three months or so, but it appears that they think they're some kind of magazine and not the newspaper we've all been used to. They have large pictures, big headlines and stories that seem to get smaller everyday. This new look was pretty ridiculous for awhile, but it seemed to be fading as time went on and then all of the sudden they brought it back with a fury.       It's irksome to me because it looks like a lot of papers have been trying this lately. The SF Examiner switched to a format that is much like this some time ago and with the running of their "Bastards!" headline on September 12, 2001, I pretty much wrote them off as any kind of legitimate news source. They also do garbage like have headlines reading, "Schools Lose Money" and then the subtext says, "Over the next 15 years if the economy stays the course." I never read this paper anymore and I fear that the Chronicle is heading the same way.       In addition to the graphic format change, I've notice that the Chron has been having articles in it that seem out of place. They don't read like newspaper article. They read more like a magazine, but it's out of place in the "just the facts" kind of delivery I've grown to expect from a paper. Also, some of them just aren't good depsite the fact they've already been printed in other publications.       It's as if the newspaper world has woken up, realized that the web is here to stay, and that they don't really know their place anymore. This is all very true, but I don't really feel that they're approaching this the way they should. Trying to make themselves more like another print medium doesn't seem to me as if it would be the way to go. It seems like it's a cop out to try and grab more real estate in the print market, which seems to be ever shrinking. But they don't get that most magazines out there, whether they be big names like W, Maxim, Sunset, Time or small, regional lifestyle magazines like San Francisco, Angeleno, Dallas, or Boston have less and less content each issue. They make nearly all of their money through ad revenue. This revenue is solely based in print delivery and online systems are really poorly understood by them. I mean, they usually just give away their online ad space as an "added value" component for a print sale. Someday when print is completely dead or has just started to shrink in a massive way, this kind of cash flow will be gone.       So, what I'm getting at is that I don't know what the Chron is getting at. It's like they're kicking a dead horse while trying to sell it a new pair of shoes and saddle it at the same time. Someone somewhere along the chain of command came up with this "brilliant" format change, people went with it and I don't think they have a long term goal as to where they're going with it. They keep trying different things, while at the same time, forgetting in their core that they are just a newspaper. One that like most of the papers out there is doing a poor job of reporting the news. We have a traitor in the White House (Rove), a president who started a war, an economy that's getting squashed, and any other manner of bad things going on, but they don't report this anymore. Just small mentions somewhere that get lost very quickly.       For them to move in to a system/format that makes sense for electronic delivery or the future in general, they have a lot of thinking to do. It would be nice if they could pull it together soon before someone gets the bright idea to... well, I don't know what. I haven't seen a truly bright idea out of that lot for some time.

It appears there is a fashion I have suddenly missed out. It's the latest and greatest in home decor tricks and it revolves around not putting a shade on your lights. Like it is some kind of Zeitgeist funk thing to allow for complete and unadulterated access to the light in your home.       I've only noticed this because two recent move-ins to the building across the street, who either can't afford proper floor lamps or just prefer this manner of illumination, are blasting away all shades of the night in their studios this way. I don't see how it can be pleasant to be in the pressence of that, as it provides so much light for me that I can pretty much leave my main room lights off at night.       This one girl in the middle apartment has gone a bit ballistic on the whole thing though and she has what looks like about 500 watts of daylight glory flooding her studio. From the angle she's perched it at, it comes through my blinds and shines right on my face when I lay in bed. Thankfully she's taken to putting her blinds down as well, which lessens the impact of the beam. If she hadn't, I would have been tempted to go out and get a small 2000 watt spot light and shine it back her way to get the point across.

I had a couple of goals I wanted to get out of the way as soon as possible once I was "work-free" or "funemployed" or whatever else people who are out of work call it so that it doesn't sound so bad that their income has been readically reduced. The first goal was to complete www.hudin.com and I got that done the week before last. My next goal was to finish up the suggestion and contact areas for this site which I did shortly after. Next was the onerous project of getting pagination working for photos which I just did a couple of days ago as well as adding about another 60 images in there! You should take a look if you haven't already.       So, with those out of the way, I was pretty happy, yet there was one big goal that remained, which was to get the search function up and running, which I'm happy to say I've just finished today. There may be a couple of bugs in it and I'm not thrilled about the lack of modularity with the code, but for now, it's done. And with that, I've gotten a lot of items out of the way in just about two weeks. Is my life complete as the title of this bit infers? Well, not really. I have a lot more things to do. A big one is to get www.hudin.org all fired up to be the new site for the Hudin Family Tree. That's one site that I'm going to have to think about for awhile though. It's complex and very involved. It also has other problems like not being able to use Unix timestamps like I've been using everywhere else because they only go back to 1970 (on Microsoft) and 1900 (on Linux) servers, which is a bit of a problem as a good many people in my family were born a very long time ago.       Then there's the movies, the job hunt, and about 32,234,112 other things that I'm working on at the moment. I have no idea how I did this when I was gone for 12 hours a day. I suppose I fit it in as I could or was just waiting until I had the time to work up everything properly like this. Anyways, search to your heart's content now and tell me what I shoudl write about dammit!

It's pretty bizarre the things you hear in the city sometimes. The fact that you live within 20 feet of about 50 people is still a strange concept for me. For instance, this morning, I heard a cell phone ringing. Not new for the city, but a new one for me because it sounded like it was in the same room. I walked around and around trying to figure out if someone had forgotten their phone when they were last over, but it constantly elluded me. I suppose it must have been coming from street level, which means it must have been attached to a car stereo for me to hear it six stories up.       Then of course there is the air duct, these things that runs up through the building to give some ventilation for the bathrooms. I'm happy to have them, but you hear the strangest things. In my old bathroom, I believe that there was a gay French couple who lived a couple floors down as I heard French all the time and smelled French cigarettes coming up the duct. In the new one, there is a couple, or maybe a threesome as it's always three voices I hear who moved in and basically live in their bathroom. There is always one of them in there talking to the others and you can hear pretty much everything. Sometimes the conversations are funny. Sometimes bizarre. But, they are always there. It's not that you mean to listen, but if you're in the bathroom taking care of your needs, you'll hear them like they're in there with you. What's really goofy is when I get woken up in the middle of the night with it sounding like someone has come in to the apartment in a drunken stupor only to realize that I've left the door to the bathroom open and it's this threesome having some kind of an after party in their bathroom.       I've heard from Jenya that everything important that happened in Russia always took place in the kitchen--household decisions, marraige proposals, what to make for dinner, etc. I'm curious if there are places in the world where everything important takes place in the bathroom. World leaders should keep it in mind if they get handed a treaty written on toilet paper with an eyeliner pencil, and sealed with melted soap.

We've all heard the stories of how everything went belly up in 2000. This is not news, in fact most would go so far as to say that it's ancient history, yet saying that would be something of a over statement I've found out lately.       For those of us that were around, it was quite a time to behold. It was nuts in San Francisco then. The rent on my (currently) $1350 a month apartment was a staggering $2700 a month and people were happy to pay it! Salaries were nuts. The future was nuts. You get the idea.       Once it all came down, things got a tad more normal. You could get in to restaurants again. Starbucks weren't popping up every two blocks. Rents became affordable only in the sense that they weren't higher than New York City. And of course the job market seemed to stop shedding jobs.       It's this last point that is most important because it effects we, the common people the most. It is true that we're not seeing the wild layoffs and company closures that we saw in the first couple of years after the fall. One interesting thing is that Red Herring is publishing again, which was such a dot-com magazine that I thought it would never get a second wind. But here it is, putting itself out in a weekly format now. Other companies that floundered remade themselves and some were bought out by bigger companies such as keen.com by Ingenio, homewarehouse.com by Walmart, even Red Herring by Dasar.       It seems that despite all the leveling off and the grand movement towards some kind of solidification in SF we're still in a very odd state. This was shown recently to me by a client I was initially going to freelance for. I asked three different people what they did and I got three different answers. I realize that the days of everyone (including a four person family) needing a mission statement are gone, but isn't it good for a company to have some kind of focus? Then it hit me. They don't have a focus. They go wherever the money is. They'll hire whomever they need to hire to do a job if they manage to win the bid on it. Needless to say, I decided not to get involved with them.       This may seem like a free market economy at it's most virile, but in the same notion, it's the sign that the craziness of the dot-com era hasn't really ended. Instead of people finding funding from Venture Capitalists by doing a song and dance for them, they do that same show for whatever client is willing to pay the price of admission. This has ended up creating a lot of companies in town with the name "Data Architects", "Information Experience", or just a generic title to the business that does nothing to allude to what they actually do. Why pigeon hole yourself in to one area of expertise when you can meander through them all and kill yourself to make a living.       This is the point that I think a lot of people are missing. They don't want to settle down in to one area because they're afraid that in an "ever changing new economy" nothing is going to stay around long enough for them to be able to support themselves in the long term. That is the dot-com still doing the talking though. You can work in publising, or systems, or data management and pick a certain area, yet be sure of work years from now. I know people that are still programming in COBAL and that language has not been the "it" language for many, many years. We are going through a lot of changes now with the digital age reforming audio, film, and many other previously staid forms of media, but I think if people found a niche they could carve out, they would find stability. I wonder though if people are still able to do that or if that spirit has faded with the vapid, senseless era of the dot-com which has long past by?

I went to a freelance gig the other day and have a new item to ponder in my life. You see, there are several buses that go through the main part of Chinatown in San Francisco. The 30 and 45 lines both have the same route when they reach that point and terminate down at the Caltrain station. I use them often and it never ceases to amaze me how full with Chinese they are. I mean, it is something you would expect seeing as how they go right through Chinatown, but they're always packed. It doesn't matter what time of the day, evening, or night you hop on, they're always packed full, standing room only with Chinese. This is extremely weird seeing as how there is a bus every five minutes or so. How many Chinese people live there and why do they all need to take this route? This however is not the mystery at hand.       What has been plaguing me with oddness is that you can pick just about any time of the day to catch these buses and when you get on you'll see a great number of ederly Chinese. The kids and adults don't seem to ride it all that much. These large groups will nearly all get off at Market and 4th. While that makes some sense seeing as how it is downtown, if you go the opposite way, you'll see them nearly all get off at Stockton and Columbus which is mighty weird seeing as how there are several stops before that which are much more central to Chinatown.       So, why are there all these ederly Chinese people riding from one stop to another at any point in the day? They're retired right? Why do they all go at these different times and yet the bus is always freakin' full?!! Do they have nothing else to do except ride from one end of Chinatown, down to Market and then get back on and ride up there again? I tell you, I'm at a loss. There are for certain some who have food in bags that isn't quite to my, uh... olfactory palate which I'm glad to see get off as soon as they can, but for the most part, they're very calm and just ride the bus.       The crowding is something to behold because some of them are pretty small and yet they fill up the whole bus. So weird.

I've finally gotten around to completing www.hudin.net Needless to say, it was a labor of love and something that was much needed so that I could have a professional site to point people to, instead of this one, which can, at times be a bit too much "me". With that in mind, I've also moved the whole document I wrote about the OS X Upgrade over there at www.hudin.net/resource/8/. It's all still there and intact, but now broken down in to separate pages which will probably make viewing a bit more easy for people. After all, it's a 15 page document in Word! There are some other articles there that are worth a read if you have the time or the problems, so take a look.       Beyond that, it's soon to be go-time for some of the work I have to do to this site like getting the Search function up and running as well as a Suggestion box for new sites to check out.

It's good for hair when done in moderation. It's tasty when done with complexity and depth in food. But, as I sat praying to the almighty pulldown bar at the gym and hearing Kelly Clarkson's new single on the radio, it suddenly dawned on me that layering is a horrid, overused thing that has pretty much crapped pop music out for the forseable future.       I blame it all on the mid-1990's when digital technology started to make its way in to music production. There were hold outs to using any kind of digital system, such as Soundgarden, but then there were those that embraced it with great fervor and love. Such was the case with a Motley Crue (sorry, I could care less about the umlat) album that came out around that time which was about as good as eating a crepe off a Parisian sidewalk. Upon release, I read an interview with the guitarist who said that he recorded something like 23 guitar tracks that were then mixed down in to one to get the "sound" he was looking for. I don't know about everyone else, but I couldn't hear it. All I could make out was an overly-processed wall of sound that did little to tickle my ears when I heard it.       This kind of thing has become commonplace these days as with the advent of multitrack recording on a computer, you can basically record as many tracks as you want ad infinitum as long as your computer has the space, which pretty much anything these days does. The result of this was far worse than the simple doubling of voices that had been going on for a long time prior. James Hetfield for instance simply recorded his voice twice on Metallica's black album to smooth out any bumps that there may have been. But now a singer could record again and again to make sure and patch up any crusty vocal work that might give some kind of edge or spark to otherwise underwhelming music.       Case in point, listen a New Kids on the Block song from the 1980's (yes, it's painful but play along) and then listen to a Backstreet Boys song from anywhere post-2000. They're both crappy, of-the-moment pop music, but you can physically hear the depth they've gone to on the later recordings to even out the vocals. Another one I've noticed the change on is Madonna. Honestly, I find her to have a horrible singing voice, but once again, listen to her early work and then her current work. You'll hear the over-processed, digitally enhanced blah that permeates pretty much everything we listen to.       I'm using vocals as an example because it's easier for people to understand what I'm talking about, but this applies to the instruments as well and I believe it is having the net effect of completely pulverizing music in this country. Imagine what would have happened if Led Zeppelin had done this. Well, actually, I guess you can imagine that with the Coverdale Page album that, while somewhat okay to listen sounds like any originality has been pressed between a velvet liner, covered in bubble wrap, and then sealed in styrofoam.       A good band I've recently heard called The Killers is a good current example of too much layering, because their single playing on MTV is a good song, but it is overly done and overtly unoriginal sounding. I wish it had been done in a more raw style like rock was supposed to be and then we'd have something enjoyable. I find it unfortunate that there will probably not be another "Blood, Sugar, Sex, Magic" (raw, slightly flawed, and beautiful) again for a long time if ever. Maybe some group will break free from this and suddenly explode with their "raw" sound. One can only hope as I've going out of my mind with what's playing these days. Oh, and to the Kelly Clarkson song, piss off, you might as well be Kelly Osbourne for all I can hear.

Like most sys admins out there, we have yet to see a good reason why there these groups who seem to be hell bent on creating phony link referrals to sites. I'm not sure if it's the same one, as the address 64.4.195.62 comes up quite a bit on reverse lookups of the sites that act like they're linking to you and this is indeed a blacklisted site. But, they're not all from there and it's just flat out weird.       Quite simply, for the last couple of months, I've noticed that there are link referrals in my logs (the "from" address where people click to get to your site) that don't actually link to my site. I've checked the originating pages and have never found any link to my site, but yet, there they are and they've kept growing for quite some time. Ultimately I don't think that anything evil will happen from this, except that it looks like www.diet-pills-gambling-jackblackwonker.com is linking to you when they're not and it makes it hard to keep track of valid referrals.       Here's the other thing that's strange in that this only happens to one site and not the others that I own, nor did I notice it start to happen with my previous company and they got considerably higher visits than I do to this site. It does seem to coincide about the same time that a security hole was discovered in AWStats (which I use) and I may not have patched it in time to avoid something getting recorded somewhere which is causing this problem. Once again, it doesn't seem like a malicious problem, just very, very annoying.       I ended up finding some ways around it. One is to just use 'deny from' and then the IP for the crappy sites, but I think they're faking their headers and thus getting around this fix. The other method, which seems to work is to set up 'SetEnvIfNoCase Referer' in your conf file for Apache when then uses another 'deny from' to block people if they refer from a certain site. This has really been a pain, as you need to enter one for each offending site, but it does seem to stop them in the end. Maybe they'll get the clue that I'm not in to this and cut it out.       Other than that, burying the page where you see your stats and password protecting it are a good idea as well. Also, whatever you do, don't click on the links that appear, as they'll get the location of your stats and probably try to take advantage of the hole in AWStats, which I'm sure you patched, yes?

When I was in Croatia in 2004, I had this tea that I found to be their version of Lipton, called Franck. It was terrible and I've ranted about it before. I didn't really think it could get any worse, but as of my last trip, I've discovered Cedevita, which seems to be a company that got encouraged by the fact Franck could sell such a horrible product and thusly looked to out do them.       Bad is pretty much a compliment with this stuff. It's something akin to drinking slightly flavored sawdust in a bag. Naturally it doesn't help that the Croatians are more in to coffee and you usually don't get hot enough water to brew with, but even when properly prepared, this stuff is foul.       I found it funny that I ran in to it for the first time up in Zagreb. It's probably because they have what appears to be a manufacturer plant on the outskirts of town (you can see it on the train from Zagreb to Ljubljana.) But it may also be just because it's cheap. Whatever the case, it should not exist and honestly it's surprising that it does as I've had tea that, while I don't recognize the brand, is good tea in Zagreb. It seems that they've been catering to the more western palates there for awhile and where this bastard tea came from remains a mystery.