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I've kind of had it with the cutesy headlines that have exploded like a mushroom cloud following the aftermath of both the recent hurricanes. The one I saw today, "Texas Couldn't Hold 'em" on SF Gate is a bit much.       It seems like it is all part of the large deviation for our news sources as they try to meld with the entertainment sources that own them. And yes, I realize that sensationalism is method of attention grabbing that has been used for well over a century in this country by the media. But it would seem like with all the crap reality shows out that they would want to distinguish themselves from those sources of entertainment based in the real world and take their information based in the real world and give it a degree of respectability.       Perhaps not. The SF Chron continues with its USA Today look and feel. I guess it's good to have the NY Times and Slashdot around for when I want to get Real News.

Shopping for clothes can be tough for me. For one thing, the people who make the clothes, or at least the ones who purchase them for the stores, don't apparently think that anyone can be as tall as I am and be a trim as I am. It seems like to be 6'3" you need to weigh 250 pounds and then they'll have clothes that fit. The biggest irony in all of this is that I have the same dimensions as the models they use, yet still no clothes for moi.       But as I was shopping in Zara (which is one of the places I like these days as it doesn't have faux-PWT/Ashton clothes) I saw two girls down in the men's section trying on stuff. I'm guessing that they were a lesbian couple and that's fine and all, but why the hell are they trying on men's clothing?!! This stuff doesn't fit women right. We don't have the hips and chests that woman do as well as the fact our shoulders are broader. I've never gotten over this one. I've lesbian friends who are thrilled to get any of my old jeans to wear despite the fat they hang off them completely wrong. What is this, payback for all the male cross dressers that shop at women's stores? Let's be honest, I could go to a pet store and probably find a doggie sweater for a labrador that I could fit in to, but it's going to look like crap on me. Do I buy it just because?       Of course, after I met back up with Jenya in the women's department, I realized that maybe they were afraid of this.

It was an interesting day for chain reactions. I had a lot of errands to run, so I was out and about far more than usual and seeing more things than normal. Many of these things were actually quite far from normal and while I believe that karma exists it has a funny way of popping it's ironic little head out.       For starters as I was walking up Sutter, there was a guy and his girl eating at an outside table in front of a local restaurant. They had their pit bull chained up to the table. I suppose this was in an effort to protect their pizza, but it had a rather opposite effect because along comes up a guy with a small collie of some type. The pit bull had no patience for this other dog being on his sidewalk and immediately took an enormous lunge at the unsuspecting dog. In doing this, the pit bull managed to up-end the table and completely trash their lunch. While it was a waste of food, it seemed a just finish to someone who felt they needed such a ridiculous dog.       Then there was a guy on the Muni 7 Line I was taking out to the Haight to pick something up. He was kinda shabbily dressed, but not in a homeless way, just sloppy. He reached in to his pocket and pulled out some kind of Twinkie item, unwrapped it and proceeded to eat it. This is of course against the rules on Muni, but I could care less so long as it doesn't get out of hand. Well, it did of course as I watched him finished up the prefab snack and toss the wrapper on the floor of the bus. I nearly said something. I was ever so amazingly close and I don't know why I stopped because I'm usually much more outspoken. But, I didn't and I watched him get off, expecting karma to make him step in a large, fresh pile of dog leavings or someone to dump a bucket of trash from a 3rd story window right on his head. Such a thing didn't happen and just to further state his feelings towards all others, he spat a good, large spit right in the middle of the sidewalk while walking.       It's a mysterious thing this karma, but I suppose that's for the better. If we figured it out we'd either get ways to get around it, or get ways to package and sell it.

I got sick of the old design. It was a free thing I did about two years ago for Ludovic at Tunnel Top are something of a payment for letting me use the place to shoot my film there. It was supposed to be kind of retro, but it just sorta ended up blow-blow. Well, I take that back. it served it's purpose for its day, but that was about it. It was one page and didn't have all that much going on.       So, I redesigned it. Now that I have the time and ability to work on such things, it looks a helluva lot better. Check it out at www.tunneltop.com. There's more going on with the new design, including something of an interactive photo section as well as more info and a better presentation. You'll notice that it is designed for a much wider format screen than before. That's because I found out in my stats log that less than 5% of the people viewing it required it to be less than 800 pixels wide, so I thought, screw it, let's make something wide for once, as I'm usually playing it safe most of the time. It is San Francisco folks that are viewing this for the most part and we're pretty computer-laden here with larger screens than the general statistics. Of course, with that come about 10-15% Apple use compared to 3% nationally, so while you can stretch wide, you gotta test for Mac.

Another year has gone by on this site thing I'm doing here. That makes two years in total I've been at it since September 23, 2003. With 356 bits written and 147 photos in the image archive, the site has really come along.       It's gotten so big that I had to split off parts of it to other sites, like hudin.net where I put everything that used to be in the "Upgrade" section. That started life as a detailed and simple explanation of what I went through in an OS X Upgrade at my last job and then it spread out to cover some interesting bits (at least I think so) about the whole Adobe InDesign/InCopy system for Creative Suite 1 and Creative Suite 2. I'm pretty happy with that and hope it's a good resource to folks out there.       Then of course, my very simple page which used to be called "What" here has been moved to hudin.org where it's much, much more these days. I built up a whole database-driven family tree system that I'm really happy with because it's allow me to finally get all my family straight in my head as well as allow me to conduct more research and not lose the information in the process. So, if you came here looking for Hudins, go there and you'll get a dose of more Hudin than you ever could have dreamed of. The submission and relationship sections are both complete and running as well so that they can take additions from other Hudins out there.       On a personal level, let's see... I'm out of work again, just like when I started this site. I'm still with the same girl and that's well. I've moved only three times, but one of those was from a studio to a one bedroom on the same floor, so that doesn't really count. But not too much else has changed, which is remarkable considering how much time has passed. I suppose it was my last job that put me in to something of a holding pattern for life advances as was evidenced by the fact that I shot a feature-length film just before I started the job and have since leaving, shot and completed a short film with nothing in between the two projects. Funny how that works...       Enjoy the site and keep reading on. I'm sure I'm not going anywhere and I mean that in a good way.

In my 30 minute exposure to mainstream television I get each day at the gym, I often watch MTV or VH1. Lately both have had this new Bon Jovi song, "Have a Nice Day" in pretty heavy rotation. It's an all right song. Not ground breaking, not a deeply complex dish of sounds. It's just pop, which is really what these boys have been doing for years.       While many would say that they've really come back around and they've hit a good chord again, I don't really think that's true. Pop culture has embraced the eighties again for some damnable reason and that's why this works. I always hated the big hair, fashion, and majority of music and film that came out then. But here are Bon Jovi. They've weathered passage through the desert in the 1990's and have cranked out a power ballad wall of sound in 2005 that people seem to be going for. It's just bizarre that it's the same thing they've always been doing. I mean, there they are up on stage. The hair isn't as big, but the clothes are near the same. There's Richie Sambora with his double necked guitar at the ready for either a solo or a nice 12 string, "acoustical" bit. There's the keyboardist with a funky ass mop. The drummer looks decidely modern until he starts doing all the stick funk twirling.       It'd be nice to say that these Jersey boys are still chugging along and staying true, but I think that they, along with other dead set groups of decades past, will be coming out again and again with more power ballads than you can shake a leg wrap at. After the nice departure in to grunge and other experimental mayhem in music, it seems that we've gone back to the wall-of-sound and diva-pop choices we had in 1985. Let's see, we've replaced Bon Jovi &s; Mariah Carey with oh, Bon Jovi & Mariah Carey. How short a journey we've traveled. This leads me to believe that in the wake of piracy and the lack of a physical media for music, this is what the industry has responded with. Hmmm, I think I'll just keep downloading my Doors, Beatles, Zeppelin, and Tupac, depsite the fact that he has put out more albums after he died than when he was living.

"U tebya cho ruki iz jopi rastut?" This wonderful Russian phrase meaning, "Are your hands growing out of your ass?" for use on those that are clumsy has to be the best insult I've heard in a very, very long time.       As I was sitting around bored and looking for a good site to find swear words in Croatian, I came across Insult Monger. Perhaps this isn't a new one to most web savvy folks out there, but this was my first experience. I have to say that most of the languages out there have some decent insults, but a lot are just transposed from English versions. Then I came to the Croatian, Serbian, and Russian sections. And, wow, when these people insult, they go out for blood. A lot of the stuff in there is just flat out mean.       Browse and pronounce at your own risk. It's one thing to get beat up for saying some of this stuff. It's another to get beat up for saying it AND sounding like a fool as you say it wrong.

I just saw an ad on MTV or VH1 or whatever for a new album that was out on "CD and double disc". What happened to the audio tape? I guess I must have been napping for awhile or just been downloading too many things these days to notice that cassette tape has died a long overdue death. I always hated the format anyways and thought the record was much, much better. The fact it came about just for the sake of something portable was hilarious since any slight degree of heat and the tape would go to hell.       While I don't have the time to follow up on this recent observation (nor do I care all that much as I see the CD dying soon as well), I'm just going to run with the fact that it's true and raise my arms in a wonderous salute to the digital age. Of course, this age has come about at the cost of any rough edges being left on the albums which makes everything out there sound too slick these days. But it was a long time in coming and it seems like the record companies are embracing it--partly because they have to and partly because there may be three or four people around their offices that get how much money is saved in recording and delivery when everything is it in bits and bytes as opposed to waves and scratches.

The folks down the shaft a floor or two have started to pose something of a problem for me. While I've come to terms with the fact that their apartment is lacking most of its rooms and they live in or near their bathroom most of the time, I've started to wonder how I can know of them as more than those folks down the shaft.       It's gotten to the point of being more than a simple meet and greet. For one thing, I just don't know what they look like. Much like myself, they take the elevator to go down and I have no idea if people that I meet in the lobby are them. Then if I did actually meet them and get to know them, there would be the issue of what to say. "Hi, how are you, our bathroom windows are really close to one another." or "Oh hi, how was that restaurant I heard you leaving for the other night?" is just kind of a weird thing to get in to.       Maybe it's best left alone, although they seem like interesting people. You feel a kinship to those you get to know via their words that drift up through a conduit that was originally meant only for the passage of foul air. When we start to hijack this square tunnel of metal for other purposes, it doesn't really mean that it takes on these responsibilities with great aplomb and thusly you're left with the situation I am in. It's a great wondering as to whether these disembodied voices will ever mate with a face that I can can glibly pretend I've never met in the hall one day. Or at the very least I can maybe explain that while they may know it or not, they're the featured MC's on the inherent architectural Public Address system of our building. Ah, forget about it. Back to editing "Taste".

I freaked out. I did something really, really stupid and as such is the case whenever you do something like this, I had no backup. I deleted what are called the Style Sheets for one of my sites and unfortunately this site was very, very dependent on the information in this one file to appear on the screen. Without it, you get nothing and all my older versions of the site were previous to this redesign.       I started to sweat and started to get creative as one does in this kind of situation. Perhaps I can pull up an older version by going directly to the bit level on the server harddrive? Nope, no such luck because I actually overwrote the old file. Crap. Think creatively. Where on earth would an older version of this one particular file be? You essentially download the file when you go visit the site, so that means it could be in the cache of my web browser. Ah, how unfortunate I viewed the site in it's new, crapped out format. But wait, I hadn't viewed in in Explorer yet (I've been a Firefox for awhile now.) So let's see, if we go in to Explorer's cache... and yes, there it is, an uncontaminated form of the original file! After a short cut and paste, everything is back to where it should be.       This got me thinking about two things. First, I need to set up a script to back up my server on a regular basis and also that information really doesn't ever seem to die in this day and age. This is why companies like a friend of mine's that is an email shredder have gotten to be popular with those who don't want their information to stay around forever.       I looked through GMail and it's funny that they offer a "Delete Forever" button for messages, because even if you use it, they aren't gone because you can pull them up with searches. So, anything you send on GMail really never dies out. Great... Is it a privacy violation? No, not really because you're using their system and using it for free I might add. Would it ever possibly be used in a court of law if need be? Sure, why not. It just goes to say that the only thing really secure these days is a verbal conversation that isn't recorded. The only thing that recall that is another person even though human memory is less reliable recording technology, albeit holds more creedence in a court of law.       I guess the moral is to watch what you do. Nothing ever disappears. Even this site is being cataloged by the Internet Archive as well as the older cached versions on search engines and will never die even if I shut off my server. Do I care? Eh, not really. I'm probably already on some black/watchlist somewhere because I work in computers, have artists for parents, and have visited a former Socialist country twice.