Dan Wright

If you requested a payment from the Perl Foundation recently, you may have noticed a little bit of lag in receiving your check. Or, a very few of you were even unfortunate enough to have received a check and then asked not to cash it. Here's what happened...

Last week was a short week for me because I was doing a lot of work up at camp for the Scouts. So here's a two-week update:

TPF:

• I've been learning a lot about "Level 2" and "Level 3" credit card transactions.   It turns out that when you start handling corporate and government issue credit cards through your gateway, the rules change.   And, if you don't comply with those rules, you end up paying a lot of money!
• That prompted me to check into how much money we're paying in transaction fees, and I manage to get the bank to drop those rates for us.   JT Smith has also been checking around with other gateways to try to find us an even better rate.
• The Perl 5 Core Grant fund now has 5 donors that have set up monthly recurring donations via donor.com.   So far, we've collected about $1,200 from non-corporate donations.

• Things are really coming together now.  Several sponsors have sent in their money recently, and we now have enough talks to put on an event.  By the time this blog is published, I hope to have the schedule published.

TPF

• Our 2010 tax return has been completed and is now available for review.  We reported a $43,000 lost, which was mostly due to Ian Hague grant payments.   Major grant recipients for the year were Patrick Michaud ($7,716) and Dave Mitchell ($17,083).   Our only major sponsor in 2010 was cPannel, who donated $10,000 each for YAPC 2010 and YAPC 2011.  I began transitioning in as Treasurer around April of 2010.   That transition lasted most of the year.
• Working with donor.com to address some complaints we've received about the donation process.   There are several legitimate issues that can be improved right now.   While I wish donor's UI was better, I believe the current system provides significant advantages in terms of security and flexibility over the previous system for both the donor and TPF.   While I'm open to the idea of a third option, I really don't have the tuits to work on that currently.
• The checks from YAPC are finally being deposited!   The envelope had apparently arrived at the bank this Monday with two different postmarks on it, which tells me it must have been delivered incorrectly and then redirected.   If you wrote a check during YAPC, you should see it clearing the bank very soon.   I do regret the delay, but there was very little I could have done about it.

• Only two months left until PPW starts.
• Received two more sponsorship commitments this week.   Working with those sponsors to make sure they are happy.   We're close to being at the comfortable point.  One or two more could put us in the black for sure.
  

• Still not liking OS X Lion.   I posted one of my issues on the Apple support forum.  It appears to have become a very hot issue and has been attracting Apple's attention.  Will Apple improve it, or just call it "not a bug"?
• Converting from screen to tmux.   Way more configuration options and more aesthetics.  Plus, scrollback works by default in the Lion version of Mac Terminal.