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A friend of mine went through a crappy breakup with a longterm boyfriend about a year ago. I remember when she was somewhat rebounding from the lowest point of it, she realized that her Netflix queue was full of some rather tragic titles that probably weren't the best things to be watching given her current frame of mind. Luckily the Netflix system is pretty cool, since you can reorder it however you want and get the Care Bears Movie as your next selection if you need a little pick you up.       I've just come off of realizing the same thing with my queue. While I'm not in the depths of a funk (I'm actually in Graz, Austria :) I have realized that my film list has been pretty depressing lately. This was probably doing little to help the anxiety about leaving my trip.       So, what has my queue been? Here it is:              Million Dollar Baby       Kundun       Pollock       The Machinist       Richard III (1930's Civil War version)       Blue (not complete sadness, but no Princess Bride)       Jennifer 8              From there back it gets a bit more pleasant, but I don't know what I was thinking. Even someone giddy on ritalin and weed would have a hard time taking that list of flicks. Upon my return though, I should have some tasty films to watch though. There is definitely something to be said for the pointless, aimless, dumb movies out there which are just fun to watch.

Like yesterday's post, this one was written in advance since I don't know where I'll be exactly. Perhaps on a train between Vienna and Graz? Perhaps yucking it up with Austrian relatives? Perhaps asleep? Quite possibly it will be the later, since I'm currently 10 hours in the future of San Francisco due to folks round here changing their clocks a week before we Americans. Yes, they do this stupid time change as well. We just need to do away with it as a species-at-large.       To keep your eyes interested, you might notice the 'art' link to the left. That is there now because I've started revamping www.hudinart.com. This is most assuredly a work in progress with much database trickery and coding snafus to take care of when I'm back stateside. It is definitely a code improvement over the old site which was massiveley non-compliant. I think it's a design improvement as well, but that's a pretty subjective thing, so I'll let you think what you want to think about that.       Enjoy a glimpse in to some of the many works by those called Hudin.

As you're reading this, I may or may not be on a plane headed for Vienna. Well, that's a lie as I have to catch a connecting flight in Frankfurt to Vienna, but you get the idea. What's the meaning of this? Simple, I wanna get away for awhile and I also wanna finish up family research for the Hudin Family Tree Project. I am keeping my fingers crossed and praying that this will be the last Croatia trip needed to do this and perhaps the next time I go there, it will be solely for enjoying beaches and the islands. Why my family couldn't have settled around Dubrovnik is beyond me, but so it is and so I am going to the areas around Zagreb which are certainly nice, but definitely inland.       What will all this mean to the site? Eh, not too much. There may be days when I don't update as often as I have been, but then there may be days filled with a pile of things. It all depends on how often I can get on an "IntarWeb" enabled computer. Thankfully there are more and more of these over there as time goes on. In Croatia, it's about $5 USD an hour to use one, but that's doable, since their internet connections cost an effin' fortune over there.       So, here's to all of you who read about all of me wishing you a good time wherever you are and if I'm coming to visit you, I'll be seeing you soon!

Ever feel bad about wearing dead animals on your feet? I don't really, since we eat them and I like the fact we use the whole animal, but there are those who take issue with this.       For some reason I bumped in to Moo Shoes the other day. Cruelty free footwear, which for some reason has what appears to be a pig in a martini glass, doing some kind of salute to One from the Heart. The image I'm referring to is here. I don't get it, but it is kinda funny.       Anyways, just thought I'd pass that along for those not in the know.

This one's technical, but don't worry, there's another, completely non-technical one today as well, just to balance things out.       It's always been a true pain in the assular region when I got up a form on a website and it looks great in all the browser there are and then I test it in Explorer for Windows. Suddenly, an extra line break appears. It's like there's an additional break tag or something. I never was able to put my finger on the problem until I did some searching around and found the solution. It's simple, just put form { margin: 0px; } somewhere in your style sheet definitions. Suddenly, the problem vanishes. Hoorah, hoorah!       Don't ask my why Microsoft decided that we needed an extra bit of marginal padding on the ourtside of a form, but they decided we did. The best part about this solution is is for some reason they do ever standardize Explorer (ha, ha...) this won't screw anything up all of the sudden. Ya gotta love solutions that go obsolete gracefully.

I went shopping at Macy's a couple days ago and it was horrifying. This trend of beat up looking clothes continues. Not only that, these beat up clothes are coming in brighter colors and more clashing looks. It was scary. All I wanted was some simple, clean sweaters or other such items to wear on my upcoming trip. This was easier said than done, since the few things I found that even came near that were exorbitant in price and not really worth it.       Has that day come when I'm just an old guy who needs to go shopping at stores which sell casual European men's wear? I wonder. But, wait, not more than three years ago, I was will finding clothes I liked and wore well, so I'm going to keep my fingers crossed that this is just a trend and the utter crap they're selling will vanish someday soon. Afterall, I can't go to Europe everytime I need a new pair of pants. Or can I? In the meantime, I'm sure saving a lot on clothes, because all I buy are new t-shirts, underwear, and socks. Most of that I even get for Christmas.

Has that dachshund puppy in the lower left corner always been there? Am I only seeing him now? And if so, why?       Naturally, he is new and as to why I put him in there, the simple answer is, "Get yer own website." The more complex answer is that with this stripped-down design, things were a tad sparse. Yeah, it was really XHTML compliant and that was good, but at some point, you just gotta have some images, so there you have it. As to why I put him in the lower left, it's because I wanted him there all the time, staring at you and I felt that space was not really utilized very well.       He may change at some point, but for now, his beady little eyes will be watching your every move, so nothing dirty while you're on my site. The puppy sees all.

To the right has to be one of the more hideous things ever created by the hand of man. Apparently (and written about first at What Would Tyler Durden Do?) this weird, deformed entity is supposed to be Britney Spears giving birth. It is at the Capla Kesting poo hole of a gallery somewhere in New York. I've never been there, but the fact they show something so incredibly horrid and the fact they're making a big deal about it being Pro-Life art, probably says I never want to go there. Much like people with MFA's that won't display my photos in even small galleries because I don't have a "theme" or a "message" or a... I lost my thought focus. That always happens when thinking about graduate degrees in art. Oh yeah right, this is crap. We need to ditch the thought that somehow because there is an accompanying paragraph with a work that in some way it's art with some form of staying power. It's not. It's headed straight for the basement, once the schmoozers who got it noticed in the first place have their backs turned.       I don't think that a birthing Britney grabbing on to a bear's head will stay around unless they start making knock-off coffee tables modelled on this hunk of junk and even then, they'd absolutely need to have a glass top so that you could properly do coke on them.       Doesn't Pro-Life get it, that they aren't artists? They have no creativity. They are vapid consumers cast adrift in a world of materialistic pointlessness. They do exactly what their figureheads tell them and they all agree, "Yes, we must think for ourselves."       Argh, I just looked at that crappy thing again! Shivers.

Okay, I really don't know a damned thing when it comes to dating. Really, I don't. Despite the complete player look and feel that I exude on this site, I ain't got no game to roll. So, when surrounded by a circle of my peers, I gladly go in to sponge mode and absorb anything I can glean from either sex in regards to relationships in general and especially dating.       Last Wednesday was one such time where I was the pupil and others the teacher. Yeah, I was schooled, but it was for the better, although I had nearly learned the lessons already at that point, which revolved around the first date when you're doing the online dating thing. Oh and by the way, as to how online compares to offline dating, basically with online you have a lot of quantity and general disappointment as compared to offline where you have fewer dates with general disappointed and you get to know what the other person smells like from the get-go.       So, as it sits with the first date, it apparently comes down to the one who asks out the other on the first date as being the one who is expected to pay. This generally sucks as guy because you're 99.9% of the time the one doing the initial asking, thus the paying. I was rather taken aback at this because I was thinking that since both parties are taking a risk on this first date, both should pay. Such is not the case I guess and even if the girl offers, you are simply not to accept the money and pay for the entire date.       Some reading this are probably sitting there going, "Duh, where have you been man?" I guess raised in an egalitarian world which simply does not exist. But, I'm sorta alright with this now that I know. It appears that if the girl doesn't pick up some or pay for the second date though, that's something of a sign that things aren't going in a good direction. You've got yourself a leech and she should be plucked as soon as possible.       It was rather shocking to find out from the girls in this impromptu discussion that guys seem to still just be seen as a bankroll for these activities, depsite the fact there were many girls in the group who make considerably more money than I do. It is also a sympathetic shock that the girls are pissed that when a guy pays for the whole night out that he expects a kiss for the evening, let alone sex. To this I reply, well, then pay for some of it and actually really pay for it, don't rattle your wallet in empty gestures.       A lot of this really stems from the fact that I hate dating and if a girl doesn't feel like it's going somewhere with me, then why should I pay for failure? Just because I have testes? It was her idea as well! But there I go again with the utopia where dating doesn't exist and we all sleep on fluffy pillows made of cotton candy, while drinking from the non-fattening milkshake fountain in the center of Dream On City. Oh look, here come the pink kitten butlers with my quarter past the hour lowball of Jack Daniels Single Barrel...

I've been reading up a bit on tagging and differing opinions to see if there is any real reason to implement it on my sites. To be honest, it doesn't make too much sense on any of them except for a revamp of Cinefuse where I've never liked any of the ways I've come up with classifying and typing items. All of them are functional, yet always lacking. An organic system like user-based tagging tied in with some form of pre-fab, "suggested" tags could work very, very well.       I find it interesting how it seems news websites are taking advantage of these types of systems, but it makes sense. They record so much data that I don't care how intelligent your free text search is, it's not going to find what you really want. In many ways, this seems to function well, such as on sites like BBC News where their related articles section is superb and I always find myself clicking through bits that are in there to discover more news. Obviously there must be some degree of human interaction with this system and I doubt it's fully automated. But, without some kind of internal tagging scheme, there wouldn't be anyway for them to find the related bits at the speed they need for a such a massive (and excellent) news publication.       Then, there are times when this doesn't work. Ironically, one of these was yesterday on SF Gate where a related article for the headline, "Suspect Dies After Chase" was "Check Traffic". Sure, this seems factually relevant, but at the same time ridiculously callous, self-serving, and just sorta off. My only guess is that there was some degree of automation which wasn't really checked all that closely. And this isn't the first time I've seen such oddities pop up on SF Gate. It's funny that a site in London, such as BBC would have a better system than one in San Francisco, which is the navel and frontal lobes of the web. Such it is I suppose.