Canton Becker

New Donations System for Upaya.org

Canton — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 18:02:31 +0000

The Challenge: The Upaya Institute relies on donations to support a variety of projects, and using PayPal for donations has turned out to be expensive and difficult to track. Upaya needs to be able quickly manage and prioritize a list of funds, and make it easier for donors to make contributions.

The Solution: We decided to replace Upaya’s PayPal donation button with a dynamic funds editor that deposits donations straight into a bank account. Donors can specify what funds they want to support, and Upaya’s accountant can easily see what donations have been made each day. Try it out on upaya.org.

[See post to watch Flash video]

This is a 3.5 minute tour of the public side of this system (for making donations) and the administrative side (for managing donation campaigns and retrieving results.)

Serious Song (Drum ‘n’ Bass)

Canton — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 04:59:52 +0000

Wow this song was a long time in the making. 12+ months? Not sure if it’s done yet — this mix feels a little thick and awkward at times — but it’s done enough to let me move on to some other tracks in the near term.

174 BPM d’n'b, growly nasty bassline, occasional explosive speaker-ripping kicks, and an acid synth line that snuck in from my techno personality.

The “This song is a serious song, isn’t it?” sample is from this very silly record.

Listen here:

Flickr Photo Updates (Finally!)

Canton — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 18:03:20 +0000

I hadn’t touched my Flickr account in a very long time. I think I’m still bummed out that Yahoo! bought Flickr. But there were a few fun photos I wanted to share, including this one:

“Ocean: 1 Tank: 0″

Found on a beach in Culebra, Puerto Rico. The US military used Culebra island for practice-bombing from 1901 through to 1975. Leah and I had some great snorkeling adventures there, though it was a bit strange to explore this underwater world where you were as likely to encounter a manta ray as you were a bomb casing…

Ottmar’s “Scent of Light”

Canton — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 23:36:10 +0000

Long-time client and friend Ottmar Liebert just released a beautiful new album of guitar music. It hits stores next week, but the music can be previewed and downloaded as of today from the ListeningLounge — a custom-built mp3 store I set up for him a couple of years ago.

Each of these ten instrumentals draws a picture, and each picture tells a story. It’s music as a smell that triggers unexpected memories. India, 1978… Granada, 1992… each track has a strong atmosphere of time and place, like the journal of an itinerant poet or painter.

More from Ottmar’s diary…

White noise compositions for sleeping

Canton — Fri, 23 May 2008 22:29:13 +0000

I made these sounds and this web page after a rather frustrating time searching the Internet for free MP3s of ambient white-noise stuff — things to help my baby boy sleep.

I was amazed when I found no high quality long playing mp3s free of charge.

Click here to start snoozing:

White Noise Sleepy Sounds >

Dance Dance Revolution

Canton — Tue, 20 May 2008 21:03:25 +0000

Does anyone have a Xbox 360 I can borrow?

A while back I was hired to compose two songs for Konami’s DDR UltraMix 4, and they sent me some free copies of the game… but I don’t have a console to play on (or stomp on or whatever it’s called when you do the blinky-light DDR thing.)

They bought all-out rights to the songs I made so I can’t post the DDR editions here. However one of the songs was a remix of an older drum ‘n’ bass tune I wrote called “Indian Summer” which I can reproduce in full here:

Stringy (Drum ‘n’ Bass)

Canton — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 22:20:34 +0000

168 bpm, lush strings, jazzy fun drum ‘n’ bass with a couple of deep-beat breakdowns.

Listen: