“Nothing says I love you like 6 times the mobile backhaul capacity…”

Shaun Sullivan parodied himself as Locutus of Borg. This was in response to a half-joking comment I made about Blackbaud’s tendency to gobble up the competition.

Well, at least Shaun can have a good laugh about it. I don’t know about the rest of the industry (hehe).

UPDATE (8/13/2008 11:15 EDT): The post seems to have been taken down. I can’t find it. Apparently, humor is fleeting over at Blackbaud Labs.

Incredible donations — the Onion strikes again! I swear, the Onion does great parodies of philanthropy sites… I wonder how many of the people there were in the nonprofit sector at one point. They seem to have the tone down and some of the language as well.

The Onion shows us what happens if you don’t do ROI analysis on your program budgets or don’t have any good governance standards worth speaking of.

From the university that brought you berkelium, BSD UNIX, and the frisbee (just kidding there), I now present the geekiest marching band in the world!!! In the video below, you will see the band play out scenes from classic video games like Pong, Super Mario and Zelda complete of course, with the music.

All you Berkeley alums out there (ahem — Holly and Carnet), now you know why we’re such geeks. We can blame it on the environment. The only thing wrong with this video is that it’s upside down.Go Bears! RAHR!

Please go to this new site and start submitting your pics — http://www.lolnptech.org/

I’m part of the unholy trinity that helped to spawn this but I swear I didn’t know it would go this far. Myself, Jeff Tuller, my partner in all things startuppy and Deborah Finn were in a Boston hotel noodling around and I decided to show them a ridiculous site http://icanhascheezburger.com/ just for fun. Deborah riffed on it the other night and Jeff decided to grab the domain. I didn’t think much of it until I just saw it… hence the title of this post.

I just read the funniest blog post I’ve seen in a while:

We’ve all heard the “official conspiracy theory” of the Death Star attack. We all know about Luke Skywalker and his ragtag bunch of rebels, how they mounted a foolhardy attack on the most powerful, well-defended battle station ever built. And we’ve all seen the video over, and over, and over, of the one-in-a-million shot that resulted in a massive chain reaction that not just damaged, but completely obliterated that massive technological wonder.

Like many Americans, I was fed this story when I was growing up. But as I watched the video, I began to realize that all was not as it seemed. And the more I questioned the official story, the deeper into the rabbit hole I went.

Grassroots Enterprise is offering hugs to all Convio clients. Here’s what they’re saying:

“We realize that the next several months will be trying times for GetActive and Convio clients, and we want to help,” said Arvind Rajan, President and CEO of Grassroots Enterprise. “And while we can, of course, offer better service, better technology, better strategy and better responsiveness, sometimes what really helps most…is a nice, warm, hug.”

“Oh Blackbaud, I remember the flowers you sent me especially when we were still dating. It was wonderful back then. You held my hands through the migration. You trained me. You said that I was the only one. So when you asked for a yearly fee, I didn’t mind. I thought it would cement the relationship we had.

But you get so jealous, Blackbaud. You didn’t want me to talk to my accountant. You kept saying that you had another one you wanted me to use. Then when I started talking to that guy who kept showing me websites, you wanted to me to talk to your website builder. And then, when I wanted YOU to talk to my new friends, you kept saying, ‘No way! It’s not secure’. So I’m left a little hurt, a little sad and sometimes I just want to tell you ‘I love you’ but only if you open up and search your feelings on the inside… Can you do that, Blackbaud? Please don’t make me choose between my friends and you.”

It looks like Blogbaud’s Cason White is actually mulling over the way customer feedback about Blackbaud products is handled by Blackbaud. And there’s a small group of vociferous Raiser’s Edge users (Peter Gulka and Paul Morriss are both frequent commenters here) there looking to grind some old axes…

The one thing that I do like to read from his post is that “there are no more excuses…. There are no excuses for not talking to us and there are no excuses for not listening to us.” Yes, and this is why many of us nonprofit techie types were not exactly pleased by Blackbaud CTO Shaun Sullivan’s remarks during the Open API debate. We would have preferred instead that he proclaim his new love of open APIs, security issues be damned.

So uh Blackbaud… show us the love. Open up that API. Will you, please? I promise that if you do, I’ll never mention salesforce.com’s use of Crispynews ever again.