2 Ex-Teammates of Lance Armstrong Admit Drug Use
The motivation to come clean seems suspect. Why would these two cyclists all of a sudden bring this to light long after the fact and drag their reputations down? Perhaps they were pressed to do so by cycling governing bodies or the like. »
Memri Films
“A documentary film about the Arab and Iranian reaction to 9-11…” »
Fantastic Mac tips
I’m most amused with the invert screen trick. »
fringeNYC encores
Audience favorites from the fringe festival are coming back on for a few more shows. Excellent. »
Inspirational quote for the month of September from a desktop calendar. »
Gothamist: What's Fresh: Tomatoes
An article dedicated to my favorite fruit. I’m a fan of the heirloom variety. »
I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass
Matador tries its hands on “viral marketing” with Yo La Tengo’s latest album with said title. »
Evan Dando on Regis and Kathie Lee
And this is why we have YouTube.
“Now how did you arrive at the Lemon.. heads?” – Regis
Regis and Kathie Lee ask Evan some dumb questions.
More Lemonheads videos here. »
Authorize.net’s SecureSource will kill your web service
Having spent more time than I would’ve liked with Authorize.net support on the phone over the last week, it’s clear to me that our current account with them will simply not work with our hosted service products.
Should you be looking to buy a gateway + merchant account package from Authorize.net, DO NOT GET THE SECURESOURCE PACKAGE. The third-party merchant account for this package is WellsFargo (none of this was disclosed to me as I was signing up btw). They sound like a decent bank, but with this package, you have NO CONTROL over your acceptance of credit card orders. You want to turn Address Verification Services (AVS) off? Nope, can’t do it (even though the Authorize.net payment gateway interface lets you check off those little boxes–it actually doesn’t do anything). You want to be more lenient on accepting international orders? Not if WellsFargo isn’t comfortable with that too, you don’t.
Our nightmare with Authorize.net started when a few of our customers’ credit card transactions started being declined, and we couldn’t figure out why this was the case. We kept receiving a “general decline” message from our “payment processor” aka WellsFargo. After a few calls to figure out the problem, we find out that it’s a simple case where we have no control over what we accept as valid orders. They were being declined for possible AVS issues. Now when you run a web service, the rate of credit card fraud amongst your customers is going to be extremely low, especially if it’s a business tool. People are not going to jeopardize their business data by putting in a hokey card to save a few bucks a month. So we have reason to be very lienient with our credit card processing parameters.
We are now left with no choice but to move our recurring payments over to another processing setup. Authorize.net is already hinting at the need for me to go through their usual sales channel (i.e. pay another set up fee?–no thanks). In any case, I’m glad this problem has surfaced now rather than later and I hope you, dear reader, will be wary of Authorize.net’s package products which you have no control over. »
Poster Hangers
Clean, minimalistic alternative to framing posters for display. »