New Donations System for Upaya.org
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.
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)
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!)
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”
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.
White noise compositions for sleeping
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
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)
168 bpm, lush strings, jazzy fun drum ‘n’ bass with a couple of deep-beat breakdowns.
Listen: