BLOG

I know... I've been slacking a little bit with the ole blogger here for the last two weeks. It's certainly not due to a lack of anything to say as those who know me would attest to, but more the fact I was feeling pretty chunky last week with Revenge of the Cold. This thing that was dogging me, literally all of November came back the minute I tried to do some exercise. Real bugger.       It also happens that I was out of San Francisco and in my hometown, Oroville. I'll probably get some pics up from the recent trip, but it was a nice time despite the constant rain. Everything is so lush and green up there now. It's really mu favorite time of year. I guess I should move to Ireland if I like green lands all the time.       It's also funny that I've notice how much the traffic has gone up on this site. Partly that's from a link off Wikipedia for Bay to Breakers photos, but it's also due to the new tagging feature. It's amazing how much Google done likes those tags. I'm really kinda shocked to see how much of the search traffic links to a tag page. And I just did it to make things easier to find! Google seems to agree that yes, things are most definitely easier to find and they'll send plenty of folks my way because of it. I can only imagine what might happen if I was to tag all 750+ articles, instead of the just the 50 or so that have it now!       Well, anyways, off to another week and getting ready for my Croatian final... Just remember, Never Get Drowned After Visiting Long Island when you need to remember Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative, Vocative, Locative, and Instrumental for the Croatian/Bosnian/Serbian case structure. Just the bit of Slavic knowledge you needed for the day, right?!! Right...

Nothing really new here to be honest. It was just something that I wanted to set up and it didn't take all the long. Well, that's not true, since I had to rewrite the way that articles are displayed, but it was worth it cos now it's mo better.       So, you can now click on the tags and pull up articles that share those themes. Yeah, I know, whoohoo. It's really something you do for the search engines more than anything else.       But, even so, I had a specific purpose in mind. I wanted to start tagging articles because the state of consumerism in this country sucks. Musing about that led me to want to recount little stories here and there where I made a conscious effort to not purchase cheaply made goods just to save a buck. It's an effort to not bow to the all-consuming attitude that seems to have gripped this country. It's also because after watching various documentaries on sweatshops that run outside the US, I simply can't buy products made in those factories.       Many would say that you don't have much of a choice and on some fronts this is somewhat true. Really though, you always have a choice and from now on, I'm going to tag articles with "Better Buying" if I feel that what I write about could point people in the direction that is opposite to what seems to be the general state of mind right now.       Yeah, I know, you're sitting there wondering, "Has Hudin gotten preachy?" Kinda, but not really. I'll still talk about whackos walking around with frozen turkeys when the opportunity arises.