#debz0rz

Husband's reply to this: Basically all of them have downsides. He uses Raiser's Edge at his current job but he calls it "clunky" because there are too many data points. It beats the hell out of his previous university which (until recently) used an in-house developed database system which was a huge pain the ass to use and almost never merged properly with Excel (that's personal experience, I interned in a different department while I finished college).

Yeah, that’s the problem -- intuitive and easy to use generally means removing a bunch of functionality, and the more complex systems are almost be their very nature difficult to use and navigate. It’s a question of managing a shitload of data and it’s just not easy to do that simply and effectively, especially when you’re selling to nonprofits on a shoestring budget. 

debz0rz replied to your post “39thyear replied to your photo “My new office is in the throes of a...”

I'm the salesforce admin at my nonprofit, and I really like it, actually. Not sure what others are running into with it, though.  To be clear, we don't do donor development like we should (we're hiring for a development associate for the first time) so I have no idea about development stuff with it.

I haven’t used the CRM side of Salesforce at all -- mostly what seems to be the problem is that they are looking at a lot of implementation headaches just getting it set up and then getting the data into it. I’ve also heard not-great things about its reporting, but that’s all been third-hand. Apparently at my old workplace it was simply the best of a set of bad options. Very few CRMs are powerful enough to handle what that office was going to demand in the way of reporting/analytics, so they were basically restricted to Blackbaud or Salesforce, and only Salesforce could interface with other software they used.  

You broke a bone???

debz0rz replied to your chat  “my reaction to injuries this week”

You broke a bone?!?

a) the symmetry here is hilarious

Well, I'd imagine R'Freelander means within the URJ in the US as well, as he used to be the VP of the URJ.

It exists as a URJ guideline. However, not all Reform synagogues and Rabbis follow URJ guidelines as they are. For example, while the URJ does recognize patrilineal Jews who were raised Jewish as being Jewish, there's one Reform synagogue in Canada which I'm close to the clergy (I won't name which synagogue that is — although some people close to me know which one it is —, because of concerns re: speech), and this specific Reform synagogue rejects patrilineal descent. 

Is the bartment a play on bat-apartment, or a hawkeye reference or something else?

It’s a Hawkeye reference -- I realized from what we could see of Hawkeye’s apartment in the Aja-Fraction comic it looked very similar to the layout of mine, just with the bedroom above the kitchen instead of next to it. :D 

 voyagebootsreplied to your post “Hi Sam! Any holiday fic ideas floating around in your brain or just...”

Bring back the Happy Lights!

That wasn’t me! That was @lightshadowverisimilitude who wrote the Happy Lights stories, much as I wish I could take credit :D But the first one was written for me so it’s an easy mixup. 

 debz0rz replied to your post “alovecraft replied to your post “newerdealwithit replied to your...”

Specifically round challah this time of year!

Thank goodness because that’s all Trader Joe’s had :D 

 niennanir replied to your post “newerdealwithit replied to your post “totallyfaboo replied to your...”

I think it bears mentioning that the admonishment is strictly "Don't go petering the dead with your BS, they've had enough, cut them a break" But that listening to the dead if they're actively hitting you up for a solid doesn't seem to be a problem.

...my mother taught me multiplication tables for 1 up to 12 before I was in kindergarten? oh my god I cannot actually think of an activity I did as a child with my parents. i can't even remember if they read me books at night which makes me suspect they didn't. aside from maybe religious festivals...oh my god. this explains so much about my life. oh! i think one or two summers my mother sister and I would go to see movies at the local movie theatre chain for two bucks a person?

I mean, if it helps, you aren’t alone in that experience. My grandmother was a great woman and she was very engaged with us when she was older, but she was also suffering from severe depression and in a deeply unhappy marriage when she was raising my mother. My mum had a similar experience to yours -- it’s why she was heavily invested in making sure my siblings and I didn’t grow up with childhood memories primarily of the television and other peoples’ parents the way she did. And the way a lot of my peers did too, honestly. We were really lucky that she was able to do that. 

amy-vic replied to your post “Hey Sam, as a kid what was your favorite game or family activity?”

My grandparents had boxes and boxes of family slides, and we'd watch them probably 3x a year. Man, I'd forgotten how much I like the 'dim room/noises from the projector' sensory combo...thanks for bringing that back :)

And the smell of the dust on the lightbulb burning! :D Yeah, it’s a good sense memory. 

ignescent replied to your post “Congratulations on your fall cleaning, mine has involved rubber ducks,...”

I don't know why, but an unexpected bin of stuffed animal stuffing reads as ominous to me. Like, will the stuffed animals you make be possessed by whomever left you the craft supplies? Possibly I'm still bitter about my house spirits stealing all of my silk leaves...

Maybe Ghost left it! I should sew a little ghost for some of it. 

bootleg-garrison-keillor replied to your post “Sam I have an important Chicago question: just north of the DuSable...”

Correction: Johnson is from the family that founded Johnson & Johnson, not SCJ. There's a difference and no relation.

Good catch! I’ve changed it in the original. If I were SC Johnson I certainly wouldn’t want to be affiliated against my will :D 

lucifel-lurks mentioned you on a post “The Meowstro Sings — Guster’s Keep It Together is an album created by...”

@copperbadge​ It's flooding. Madonna used to do this. You release 3000 seeds of the cat album and maybe a person pirating releases 30. The person who wants to download now only has a 1/300 chance of getting what they're actually looking for so they give up.

Yeah, thinking about it, with Kazaa that would be much more effective than with modern day torrent downloading. Still not entirely so, but probably helpful. And also...

debz0rz replied to your photo “ultrafacts: The Meowstro Sings — Guster’s Keep It Together is an...”

I would totally guess that Guster was trolling and being ridiculous - I'm pretty sure they made some live recordings of their shows available for free. They're generally pretty chill, it seems.

...there’s this explanation. I do think they must have had fun with it :D 

njelruch replied to your post “If you don't want to open this jar of annelids, I won't blame you at...”

I think the issue was further complicated by the nature of the land purchase. The reason the Catholic Church was selling its property in the first place was to pay for reparations to victims of church-related sexual abuse. A lot of Burlington's donors were pissed that money they had earmarked to "help students" was going into the Church's coffers instead. I am not an expert, but I think someone dropped the ball wrt PR.

Yeah, I can see that, especially if most of the donors were alumni of that particular institution. I can’t imagine they had especially friendly feelings for the Catholic church, particularly in a case where their money was going to help the church pay sex-abuse reparations. Though by all accounts they got the land for a STEAL, so with good spin they could have handled it better. 

I actually ran this story past a couple of colleagues at work -- it’s not something that was super well-covered nationally so most of us only had the barest understanding of it -- and most of them agreed with me that a) they should never have run a capital campaign and b) probably the misrepresentation to the bank was equal parts “crazy NFP bookkeeping” and “Letting the bank think we had more pledges than we did”. 

adventures-in-asexuality replied to your post “If you don't want to open this jar of annelids, I won't blame you at...”

is that twice-yearly payments of $10K or $100K? (and if the former, how does that work, or can I just not do maths all of a sudden?)

Ah, that’s $100K, not $10K. You can see why I don’t do pledge structuring :D 

hellenhighwater replied to your post “awriter314 replied to your photo “Early morning pretzel bites, so I...”

I did not even know that honey existed in that form, and now I gotta get my grubby little hands on some. I need honey in every form!

Spreadable honey in particular is pretty great. I started researching seed honey because Trader Joe’s has a “three ingredient” peppermint patty where the filling is literally just mint flavoring and seed honey. It was pretty easy to make in the end -- I just dug some crystallized honey out of the bottom of a bottle, whipped it until it was smooth, then carefully whipped in non-crystallized honey, and it crystallized beautifully. I’ve got a tupperware tub of it in my kitchen, I save it for when I’m feeling Fancy. 

nightshadezombie replied to your post “molly-ren replied to your link “Hurricane Harvey Grants Roundup” ...”

Well, in my HeadCanonIsh world, (in which Civil War never happened) Tony probably made Steve a trustee. He says it's because Steve is great fundraiser, but really, its because if he has to go 4 galas a year, and ALL those Trustee meetings, well, he's not gonna be alone in his misery.

If under "send mail as" you have "treat as an alias" checked, it shows your gmail this way. If you uncheck it doesn't!

AHA. I suspect that wasn’t an option (I looked for something like it) when I was setting it up. I will investigate! 

tyrannosaurus-trainwreck replied to your post “adventures-in-asexuality replied to your post: ...”

There are settings you can tweak to make it stop doing that, but also if your concern is security, I wouldn't trust those settings to stay tweaked or always work right. Google's track record on stuff like that is spotty at best.

AHAHAHAHA i can't imagine a world in which you aren't comfortable writing smut, shell. haven't you been writing smut for like....12 years? which is not to say that readers new to you would know that necessarily but the concept was hilarious to me

i can’t believe u would expose me like this

I love this!!! Thank you for always doing the Jewish stuff well - I've noticed it peppered throughout your stuff for many years and I have always really really appreciated it.