The title is a phonetic way of saying, "二千八年", or 2008 in Japanese. With Holidailies winding down, I thought I'd reprise the year in review.
The big events of 2008:
- April 2008, Launched Observant Records, Shinkyoku Advocacy and Eponymous 4 as businesses: On my birthday, I had the compulsion to join ASCAP as a songwriter and a publisher. Once I did that, I figured I may as well head down to the County Clerk's Office and register DBAs for Eponymous 4 and Observant Records. Then I opened up some bank accounts with those DBAs. Shinkyoku Advocacy didn't actually launch till May 2008, after ASCAP accepted my company name. But with these entities in place, I decided it was time to experiment with releasing an actual CD.
- May 2008, Trip to Hawai`i: My mom asked my sister in Chicago and me to come home for my dad's birthday. He had just gotten back from a doctor's appointment, where a suspicious growth on his lung was found. It would turn out to be no big deal, but at the time, we thought a small family reunion would be appropriate. My sister and I visit home, she more frequently than I, but the last time we both were there was 2003. This time, I had no diversion to Maui.
- June 2008, Release of enigmatics: The process of manufacturing a CD seems pretty straight-forward. I registered the songs and the recording with the Copyright Office. I sent a CD-R off to Mixonic for duplication. I bought a barcode from CDBaby and signed up for their digital distribution. I established an Amazon Advantage account to sell the CD. And I launched a new website. I've sold only 10 copies so far, most of them to family. While making a CD is easy, promoting the damn thing is where the real work lies. And it's weird — I really can't get behind this particular release because I don't consider it representative of what I do. So yeah, I shot myself in the foot with this one.
- August 2008, Hit weight loss plateau: A year after I started losing weight, I stopped. I've kept exercising, and I still watch what I eat — although I confess, the portions are getting slightly more generous — but the weight stopped coming off. My body figured it out, and it refuses to lose any more. I'd be more upset, but I haven't been 170 pounds in about nine years. That's still 15 pounds more than I need to be, but I'm just enjoying the fact I've already gone down one jean size and may need to go down again soon. I would like the scale to show me some new numbers, though.
- November 2008-present, Started migrating web sites to CodeIgniter: On the surface, this event looks pretty dull. Again with recoding all my websites? I seem to do that every couple of months. But the underlying code that runs my sites was hammered out in 2003, and I haven't really redesigned it since. It's gotten pretty bloated and unorganized, and it's not as flexible as it could be. Now that I'm doing more music, I'm not interested in making my code compete with the likes of Ruby on Rails or CakePHP. So I'm moving to a third-party framework. CodeIgniter seemed the most flexible for moving code to a new structure, and I'm so far impressed with the results. The Eponymous 4 official site is already using CodeIgniter.
As evidenced by most of the posts for Holidailies, I've gone down the rabbit hole once again. When I re-emerge, I may finally semi-officially reveal all the stuff I've been recording for the past three years.