The very least McDonald's can do is bring up their contributions to match the industry average. Ideally McDonald's should be setting the example. And I'm sure McDonald's is not the only example of this, and might not even be the most egregious example.

Celebrity foundations are a completely different animal. I would not expect, for example, Boomer Esiason to fund the majority of his eponymous foundation. In the case of celebrity foundations, lending their name, image, reputation, and legacy are the biggest contributions they can make.

I have no problem with McDonald's accepting donations for RMH. I do have a problem with them taking credit for what is in fact a donation from its customers that they are merely forwarding as a third party.

For someone so brilliant and well educated, Ms. Danna did an exceptionally poor job of handling something as simple as publicity for a $3,000+ scholarship which was to be awarded from the proceeds of WordCamp Houston. If you go back to previous posts in my blog, she also botched the capacity planning for that event, telling the volunteers "we are over capacity." I refuse to believe she is as "brilliant and well educated" as you claim.

If you have hard evidence about Alan Rosen's past bad investments, I would like to see it. And Mr. Danna's record is not immaculate (note correct spelling), as he has been sued before back in 2001, in his capacity as a constable's deputy along with Jack Abercia and the Precinct 1 Constable's office.

BTW, your poor spelling and English does not help your credibility one bit.

If you're such good friends with the organizers, ask them why it's taken that same two years to award a college scholarship that they collected money for, who is the treasurer of record, and exactly how much there is. You make such a big deal about it taking two years for me to make this post, well, I feel the same way about the $3,000+ that's hopefully sitting in a bank account somewhere earning some kind of interest. That money should already have been in the hands of a college student by now and the fact is that it isn't.

This complete lack of transparency and the refusal of "admin @ wordcamphouston.com" to sign a real name to the email I received (which in itself took three months and three resends to get) is what I find so appalling.

Chris Valdez cared so little about the website as a means of communication about the scholarship fund that he let over 400 megabytes of spam get posted to a forum he set up and forgot about. That's why the website was hacked. Are you saying this is acceptable?

Erin Blatzer and the HMNS crew did a great job, that I can agree on. Monica Danna, on the other hand, can't even get capacity management right--and still to this day holds herself out as a professional event planner! This honestly makes the Houston WordPress community look bad. Are you saying this is acceptable?

If I did the same things, I know the entire community would be saying "why the hell are we letting Shawn Quinn and his friends run events like this?" So, I believe my criticism is fair and justified.

I will "get over" this event when the scholarship is awarded based on the generous time table set out above, and when the previous organizers agree to step aside. If you don't have your "stuff" together, you don't have any business collecting that kind of money for a scholarship. That is the problem. If Chris Valdez, Monica Danna, and the other organizers had awarded the scholarship in a timely fashion, this post would have been completely unnecessary. The rest of it was only added because 1) it supports my point and 2) I may only have one chance to post this, so I may as well include everything, and give those who really want it their "TL;DR".

The only reason I somewhat regret going is that I committed to this months ahead of time and shortly before the event there was another event Friday night that I really would like to have gone to in retrospect, and there was zero chance I'd be able make both.

The insufficient capacity made sure a lot of people who otherwise wanted to attend could not buy a ticket or even get in by volunteering. It didn't even take that long for the volunteer sheet to fill up.

I can see an event in Sugar Land, Katy, or Conroe, but I doubt that WordCamp Central will approve one since it's basically another Houston event and there's still nominally a Houston team in place for 2012. Spring, Bellaire, Pasadena, Pearland, etc. are definitely too close. More likely would be Beaumont or Brenham and those would more likely be a smaller event because those cities lack larger venues. With regard to the event growing, there was no WordCamp Houston for 2011.

Any of my questions regarding the scholarship fund, or any correspondence between me and the WordCamp Houston 2010 team, they have deemed acceptable to just ignore. If you agree that what they've done with the scholarship is unacceptable, let them know, and let them know you heard about this on my blog as well, and spread the word.

Agreed, though we can take some small comfort in the fact she no longer works in pharmacy at all. Another party that should be blamed in part: the idiot nurse who sent in the order for the chemotherapy several hours before it would be needed, but Eric and his techs thought the nurse sent it in because it was needed right then.

That still doesn't excuse what happened to Eric, though; he should be pardoned and get his license back because honestly, this is no different than any other medical malpractice. Doctors have people die all the time under their care, and never go to jail for it. Mistakes happen, especially in an environment that is practically set up so mistakes *will* happen.

Who's the "professional thug" you're referring to? Eric Cropp? Gary Osborne? I see no reason to refer to either of them with such a damning label. Explain your logic behind this comment, please.

I don't think we ever found out. If I do find out one way or the other, I'll post yet another followup.

Which laws do we use to decide what's illegal and has to be censored off the Internet? Let's say your Internet traffic gets routed through Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, etc even though you don't live there. Do we use their (Islamic fundamentalist) laws to decide what you can access over the Internet?

I abhor child pornography and child abuse. It's filthy and it's disgusting. But so is prior restraint of legitimate Internet traffic on the mere suspicion that it's related to child porn. Or copyright infringement. Or drug trafficking (especially if you live in a country or part of a country that has chosen to legalize certain drugs, such as marijuana).

While it is easy to twist what I have written into a defense of child porn, rest assured that is emphatically not the case. I wish those who traffic in or enable child porn a swift and decisive prosecution to the fullest extent of the law. I just don't think the rest of us should have to deal with a police state as a result of the few (.01% or so) who deal in child porn.

The truly sad thing is how many cases are out there like this, that have not actually gotten any publicity (even self-generated). I would make an educated guess that with the dozens of cases I've heard about, there are probably hundreds, maybe thousands or even tens of thousands, that I haven't.

Apparently it's not a crime to just be stupid. There would never be enough non-stupid people left over to run the jails if it were.