{"id":106,"date":"2009-01-03T06:21:05","date_gmt":"2009-01-03T06:21:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dev.gregbueno.com\/wp\/vexvox\/2009\/01\/03\/ni_sen_hachi_nen\/"},"modified":"2009-01-03T06:21:05","modified_gmt":"2009-01-03T06:21:05","slug":"ni_sen_hachi_nen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/2009\/01\/03\/ni_sen_hachi_nen\/","title":{"rendered":"Ni. Sen. Hachi. Nen."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The title is a phonetic way of saying, &quot;\u4e8c\u5343\u516b\u5e74&quot;, or 2008 in Japanese. With Holidailies winding down, I thought I&#039;d <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gregbueno.com\/index.php\/vexvox\/entry\/3872\/\">reprise<\/a> the year in review.<\/p>\n<p>The big events of 2008:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>April 2008, Launched Observant Records, Shinkyoku Advocacy and Eponymous 4 as businesses<\/strong>: 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&#039;s Office and register DBAs for Eponymous 4 and Observant Records. Then I opened up some bank accounts with those DBAs. Shinkyoku Advocacy didn&#039;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.<\/li>\n<li><strong>May 2008, Trip to Hawai`i<\/strong>: My mom asked my sister in Chicago and me to come home for my dad&#039;s birthday. He had just gotten back from a doctor&#039;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.<\/li>\n<li><strong>June 2008, Release of <em>enigmatics<\/em><\/strong>: 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&#039;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&#039;s weird &#8212; I really can&#039;t get behind this particular release because I don&#039;t consider it representative of what I do. So yeah, I shot myself in the foot with this one.<\/li>\n<li><strong>August 2008, Hit weight loss plateau<\/strong>: A year after I started losing weight, I stopped. I&#039;ve kept exercising, and I still watch what I eat &#8212; although I confess, the portions are getting slightly more generous &#8212; but the weight stopped coming off. My body figured it out, and it refuses to lose any more. I&#039;d be more upset, but I haven&#039;t been 170 pounds in about nine years. That&#039;s still 15 pounds more than I need to be, but I&#039;m just enjoying the fact I&#039;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.<\/li>\n<li><strong>November 2008-present, Started migrating web sites to CodeIgniter<\/strong>: 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&#039;t really redesigned it since. It&#039;s gotten pretty bloated and unorganized, and it&#039;s not as flexible as it could be. Now that I&#039;m doing more music, I&#039;m not interested in making my code compete with the likes of Ruby on Rails or CakePHP. So I&#039;m moving to a third-party framework. CodeIgniter seemed the most flexible for moving code to a new structure, and I&#039;m so far impressed with the results. The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.eponymous4.com\/\">Eponymous 4 official site<\/a> is already using CodeIgniter.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>As evidenced by most of the posts for Holidailies, I&#039;ve gone down the rabbit hole once again. When I re-emerge, I may finally semi-officially reveal all the stuff I&#039;ve been recording for the past three years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The title is a phonetic way of saying, &quot;\u4e8c\u5343\u516b\u5e74&quot;, or 2008 in Japanese. With Holidailies winding down, I thought I&#039;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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4Bkgj-1I","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}