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Damn you Onion! I knew that one day you would find me and spoof me up good.       It pretty much all revolves around the article about a fellow they call "Fancy Man". You can read it and if you know me, you're bound to see some similarities. The most poignant being that the guy in the article is a web designer and he likes tea. Oh yeah, he also happens to be 29, when I'm 30. Oh yeah, there's also the "hoity-toity copper-bottomed tea kettle" that he uses and I admit, I'm rather in to the one I've got since yes, it does make a difference to nuke it or boil it. Microwaves do strange things to food and beverage. It's the last bits in the article that stray from me. Oh yeah, they also make no mention of a blog, although I'm guessing that would be implied.       I suppose that the really disturbing thing about this is not that I feel someone who knows me, spoofed me. I'm just not that cool. It's more the fact that there are apparently more of me out there in such great numbers that The Onion could write a whole article about. That my friends, is by far more disturbing.

Well, the moment that was bound to happen has finally happened. This, right here and now, is the site's 1,000th article. Yeah, I know, some might say, "Astounding!", "How'd you do it?", "Zads!", or "Where's the the naked pictures?" Obviously the most important thing to say at moments like these are that the naked pictures are in the Bay to Breakers sections: 2006 and 2007, as well as the Folsom Street Fair.       With cheap thrills out of the way, it's probably time to look at where the site is now, which is what I feel to be in a good shape. As mentioned before and probably will be mentioned again, there are 1,000 articles. I'm guessing that there are about 10% that are really good, 20% that are decent, 30% that are something to read if you're bored, and then 40% that are pretty bad. I tip my hat to those that have been with me the whole time. I looked back at some of the older articles and they're nothing more than my blatherings. In fact, I have been going back to re-tag older articles, and have been adding in ramblings as a tag. I might even make it so that some point in the future, if you prefer to only read the writings that I feel are prime, you could stop seeing these. And yes, I know that reading posts about the Academy of Art or how much I don't like certain haircuts can get old.       Despite all this, there were a few articles that I really liked, which if you are in an office somewhere, stuck in middle management, you might enjoy wasting some time to read:       Hey, what's up with the pole?       Dubrovnik, Dubrovnik Re-Visited, and Dubrovnik Re-Re-Visited       Balkan Buses Love to Die       Everything on Praving       How Do Budget Airlines Make Money?       Seven Rules for Contract Web Developers       That's probably enough to choke anyone. As you'll see in this list, most of these articles are relatively recent. There is a reason for this and it is my Number 1 Fan who challenges me to write articles that are more substantive and interesting. Without her, there would undoubtedly be more "80 Year Old Man" posts and really, the world of the blog needs no more of those.              Beyond the articles though, it appears that I've posted 1630 photos to the site. This is something of a bigger deal than the articles because a) I think my photos are a lot better and b) I've only been putting them up for the last two years with most of that focused on the last year and a half when I made the switch to a proper SLR.       Much like the articles, my shots have been readily improving with time. I must admit that while the vast bulk of these shots are mine, there are some from Number 1 Fan in there as well, since we travel and do just about everything together. So, if you see a wide shot that's particularly cool, that's most likely going to be hers. But, looking over all of these, I originally thought that my favorite gallery as of late was going to be Sarajevo. I do like that gallery a lot, but the one that I think is the most interesting is Belgrade. Both are wild places, but the haphazard collision of multiple empires in Belgrade really made for some interesting shots.              Well, enough of all this. Back to my day job that allows the stories to unfold. (That happens to be recounted in The Sometimes Office from time to time...) Oh, and leave a comment, so I know who is out there! People hardly ever comment and that makes me feel sad.

Almost two weeks ago, my brother had my family's first grandchild, this making me officially an uncle. Of course he and his girlfriend were taking care of three other kids from a previous relationship of hers, so this little guy rounds it out for an even four, if four is an even kind of thing.       Dylan Christopher Cole Hudin is a cute little guy, but at just a few days old when I saw him, who knows where he's headed. Will he get his mother's red hair, or my brother's generally clueless look? Sorry Chris, cheap shot, but I am the older brother.       The thing is, little babies just sleep I found out. And here the whole family came up to see him, when all he really is, is a little poo machine at this point. Man can those kids pump it out. But, that's about it: eat, poo, cry sometimes, pee on someone sometimes, and then sleep a lot.       I have a feeling that the uncle duties really start to kick in once they can walk and they want someone to watch the little guy or take him to the park or go hiking or something. We'll see. Thankfully he has three older siblings than I can test these things out on first to see how I stack up as an uncle.

Ugh, I hate it when I find little things like this. I hate to admit it, but apparently the reason I've gotten no hate mail for awhile is because there was no way to send me hate mail. I go and post the contact links all over the site, but due to changing the site oh... three months ago when I was first in Spain, I never updated the sending mechanism for email. Idiot!       So, that's fixed now, as well as a few other things, so that everyone who was happy to tell me what an idiot I am for my white dreadlock rants can send me said rants again. I'm sure this will come as a big relief.       Oh one other thing, since that if you feel like you've been missing out on new comments to posts that you comment on, you can subscribe to receive updates whenever someone posts. I just hope it will encourage more comments, since I really like getting those!       Here's to version 6.1.3. Let's hope it's a good one.              Oh yeah, one last thing in that I'm going to try and balance out any techie posts with more general interest posts, because if there's one thing I've learned these last three months, it's that people like to be much more generally interested in things.

So, for anyone who follows my blog with any regularity, you will notice that my posts have been a bit sporadic. There is a good reason for this; I'm in The Europe. This is much like the normal Europe that a great many people go to, but the key difference is that I'm in it and using unneeded articles of speech when trying to talk in other languages.       But, in between all of this, I have managed to redesign the whole website. That's actually a bit of a lie as there are still large chunks of this that need to be dealt with, but I mainly wanted to pull all of this together so that I could upload something of a new version of the site while leapfrogging between major cities in the Mediterranean. Currently, I'm in Barcelona and loving it. Great city. Far too many tourists, but such is generally the case for great places. Hopefully I'll be able to knock out some blog posts that talk about this more than just patting myself on the back for rebuilding my website.

Upon browsing the log statistics for this site (which is possible my fourth favorite hobby), I was happy to see that the percentage of Internet Explorer 6 users sits at about 41% of total traffic for March. For those who don't know, IE6 is crap. It's broken. It's bug-prone. It's a security hazard. And well, just get Firefox. Firefox is by far and away the best browser out there right now and naturally, it's free! It also happens to be the case that 21% of total traffic to the site uses Firefox. An unfortunate 6% are using Safari which is really just IE6's slightly less inbred cousin for the Mac.       But hey, I realize that not everyone wants to use Firefox (despite it's awesomeness) so I won't fault a person for using Internet Explorer 7 on Windows. This browser is much better than version 6. I'm still convinced that Microsoft bought Opera's codebase from them because so many bugs are similar between the two, but whatever the case, it's an improvement. It's the fact that 20% of the users of this site are on IE7 that I'm pretty sure that Hudin fans are smarter than most others.       Compared to other sites, these statistics are amazing. I've seen IE6 usage around 55-60% on other big sites, which is just sad. I know that upgrading can be a real pain, especially if you're on a slower connection, but if you can, get Firefox! Hudin salutes you :)

Yeah, things kinda look a little different right now. No, it's not goofed up, I'm just trying to accommodate having photos that are 600 pixels wide instead of 400. If you haven't ventured there yet, take a look, they's a bigger and I have to say, definitely better.       So, what's a web geek to do when you want a bigger image? Shift the whole site around of course. It's a bit of a work in progress and I might change things here and there because I'm not quite sold on it just yet. This would be about version 5.2 or something of the site which is now prominently displayed there now because you gotta know if I've effed something up and when it was better. The real deal will be when I get version six up and running and someday I really need to work more on that design. It will work a lot better with the bigger photos format which is admittedly shoehorned in there at present time. Still mighty big though!       Unfortunately because I don't really have time to deal with properly reformatting all the pictures that came before, I've done a very hacky, very Old Web thing and re-rendered photos that had already been rendered. So, anything that's a bit older does not look as good as it could. Someday or perhaps just as I find time, I'll work backwards and fix up all of the old stuff. It is pretty funny to look through it as I go back and see some of my old photos. Nice to see that at least one art form in my life is still making some progress.

How in the hell you've got kids now, I don't understand, but I wish you a great 27th. I don't really know what else to say and I'm kinda terrified to really say anything else that can get you mad, seeing as how you can beat up your big brother now which just isn't right on so many levels, but I'll have to accept I suppose since going to the gym ain't helping me keep up.

While being a five in real life means that at best, through alcohol you might get to be a seven at a bar, in the web world, it means that you're pretty kick ass. For those who don't know, PageRank (oddly this is a better article than anything on Google) is the system by which Google uses to determine the "worth" of a web page when ranking their searches. They use a great number of other means to rank, but this is the one that probably gets the msot press because people can look it up.       Every so often they update their rankings. This site was a three for the longest time. That's not too shabby, but not particularly amazing. A few days ago, it appears that they did a revision of all the PageRanks and suddenly, this site is a five. That may not seem like much on a one to ten scale, but it's a very sloped scale. For instance, to be a one, I think you just need to have a site people can find, which isn't too hard. To be a ten, you need to have a massive, extremely useful site. Google is a ten and just a few others. The list gets very narrow as you get closer to the top. There's some kind of X and Y squared graph I could do about this, but really, I can't anymore.       So booyah, welcome to the upper half of the web, www.hudin.com and www.hudin.net (also a five now). I've worked damn hard to get here.

There are times when you forget about basic things. One such instance involves the history of this site. You see, this first started out as www.hudin.net because when I went to go register this name, hudin.com, some turd was squatting on it thinking that the now defunct HUman DIgital Network in Japan was going to want to buy the name. Thankfully, that didn't happen, the registration expired, I got it and now here we are.       Well, I was being kinda stupid since I thought that having hudin.com, hudin.net, and hudin.org was all that I needed and I was king of a dorky ass world. Then it dawned on me that maybe I should register www.michaelhudin.com. I'm sure as hell not famous, but it's one of those that if I ever did get famous, I'd be kicking myself for not registering it when I had the chance.       So there you have it. I'm all registered up and that name doesn't really do anything but point to here, so it's not all that exciting. Just something I knew I should have done forever and ago.