April 07, 2005

No Pants Day 2005 is May 6th

As a person working from home, it gave me great pleasure to discover that No Pants Day 2005 is May 6th.

In case you were wondering....

   No Pants Day 2005 is on May 6th. 29 days left until No Pants Day!

Do make sure to check out the website: it has some hilarious pictures...

February 15, 2005

Ooh, Pretty!

After a long wait, the Six Apart corporate website has finally gotten a new look.  Besides being much prettier ("ooh! shiny things!"), it also makes it much easier to find what you are looking for.  Best thing of all: it is almost entirely composed of weblogs!  You have to love template-based systems...

Also the sections about TypePad, Movable Type and LiveJournal have been revamped.  Dutch versions probably to follow soon(ish) ;-)

August 17, 2004

OGM numbers...

Amid hectic work to get TypePad's Dutch version completed, I've been looking at alternate payment methods to offer in Belgium and the Netherlands, besides credit cards.

In Belgium, it seems, it is possible to add an OGM number as message to a bank transfer. This is a specially formatted number that is associated with an invoice. This means that a big organisation that has to send out a lot of invoices probably just generates a bunch of these numbers, assigns them to the various bills and when the payments come in it is just a question of automatically linking the numbers in the bank statements to the various invoices to keep track of who paid and who didn't.

And the number itself seems to consist of ten digits followed by a two digit security code consisting of the modulo 97 of the first ten digits. At least that's what some website I came accros said.

So far, this solution seems perfect for TypePad: we generate a number whenever a bill needs paying, and the user puts this number on a bank transfer statement. We then get a nice list from the bank with the numbers of all paid bills, and act accordingly. The only question is, in what format can we get bank statements? XML would be nice, but CSV or plain text would do nicely too. Paper is no option, unfortunately.

Anybody here with practical experience of this system? I'm looking for all available info, all hints or tips appreciated...

June 29, 2004

That Didn't Take Long...

I've only been working at home for two days, and already I'm sitting in bed as I type this... No, it's not what you think: discipline hasn't slipped yet, and I did get up at a reasonable hour, even had breakfast and all. But what do you do when your wife has visitors and they need the office couch? That's right, you move upstairs to the bedroom...

Buttons