Lamentation

Maillardet’s Automaton

I was hoping to finish reading the book Lamentation today (I’ve got about 60 pages to go) when certain family members insisted that I read a book called The Invention of Hugo Cabret.  It’s a pretty simple read since much of the book is pictures, and I finished it in a few hours.  It was pretty captivating, full of mysteriousness that makes you want to keep reading.  By the end of it, though, I didn’t think there were any grand-revealing truths or surprising twists as I was hoping for in the back of my mind, but it was still a fun read.

What I found just as interesting (or even more interesting) than the book was a real mechanical automaton the book was somewhat inspired by: Maillardet’s Automaton.  It’s basically just a mechanical wind-up robot thing that draws pictures.  Can you imagine how complex that thing must be?  Pretty cool stuff.  Here’s a video of it drawing:

Ooooo . . . aaaahhh . . .

Anyway, my podcast The Compose Pile should now be appearing in the iTunes store. We’ll see if that helps it get anymore listeners, or if the amount of competition already on iTunes, and the general lack of public interest in composing orchestral music, and my own lack of musical skills and fame, all help it get no more listeners…

12 days left until Christmas!

By S P Hannifin, ago

Eh blither blather

Still haven’t edited that The Compose Pile podcast episode yet, mostly because of having to go to work all day. But I have off on Fridays, so hopefully it will be up by tomorrow night at the latest.

Oh, someone I know won this celebrity-autographed PSP from an online Disney giveaway. Can you read the autograph there? No, you can’t, because it’s sloppy sloppy sloppy. But that’s a Miley Cyrus autograph. *gasp* I know, like OMG! I wouldn’t mind getting a free PSP, even if it was pink and had someone’s sloppy handwriting all over it. But now the PSP is doomed to play poorly designed girly games… too bad… (and, actually, I would mind)

I’m on page 308 of Lamentation … it’s really getting exciting; I can’t wait to find out how it ends (even though it’s only the first book in a series). Only about 100 pages to go.

That’s all for now.

By S P Hannifin, ago

New music and not much else…

I created a new YouTube video for one of my latest pieces, The Secret Lullaby, another piece I’m hoping will be on my album:

Didn’t do much else today besides catch up on a couple shows on Hulu. Oh, and I’ve got about 150 pages left to read of Ken Scholes’ fantasy book Lamentation… it’s the best fiction book I’ve read this year (though I only read 2 others; it was more of a non-fiction year for me).

By S P Hannifin, ago

My website is so popular

It was another long work day, so I didn’t really get anything productive done in my free time.  Although I did seem to be having problems with my site displaying on certain mobile browsers and Google Chrome, so I edited some PHP code and fooled around with some of my site’s security settings, so hopefully my site will now load on any browser.  And with the insane amounts of traffic my site gets, that should really be helpful.  In fact, let’s check Google Analytics now and see how many visits my site has had in the past month:

772 Visits

1,493 Pageviews

1.93 Pages/Visit

Huh, that’s actually more than I thought it would be.  Still, that’s quite low compared sites that get more traffic, wouldn’t you say?  And 772 isn’t quite the number of unique visitors; sometimes the same viewer may be recounted.  Don’t ask me to explain, it’s all very complicated rocket science.  And I believe I have Analytics also counting visitors to some of my other domains, like thecomposepile.com.

Anyway, maybe I’ll get a few more visitors now that all browsers should be able to reach my sites without problems… I think.

Oh, I recently started reading the fantasy / sci-fi book called Lamentation (The Psalms of Isaak) by Ken Scholes.  So far I’m really enjoying it.  Very good writing and very engaging story.  I really need to stop checking out library books and read some of the dozens of paperbacks I have on my bookshelf, but I can’t seem to help myself…

By S P Hannifin, ago