Category: Blog News

Quick update on the family.

We’ve had the last few days off and have been doing an impromptu spring cleaning as well as visiting Paradisio, much to the delight of Tom who insisted we see the aquarium twice !

Sam is getting to be a strong boy. Only just 11 months he already has 6 teeth plus the showings of two others. Crawling is for babies, so he prefers standing up and shouting his joy at the world. Lately he’s been walking around the table keeping in contact with one hand all the time. He’s certaily a happy baby.
Soon he’ll be walking around, so we’ll have to start putting all the small things away out of reach.

Tom is growing fine, although he has problems with his flat feet. He wears soles, and after a day of playing wakes up at night with nagging pain in his feet. Hopefully it is just growing pains and it will pass. He has suffered two or three heavy colds and probably a bit of the flue, and at the moment is easely tired. We got him his first bike recently, and he favors that above walking.

A collegue of mine has an extremely happy 2-year old son.

Not anything special to write about you would say, except that this child was born with some hip problems that created more problems, including having several operations when still a baby.

To correct these hip problems his legs were operated to point right-angles outward (like this : _|_ ) and this for several months. As a result of these operations, his bladder was damaged/reconstructed, so he can no longer use the normal way to pee.

So I’m very happy for my very brave collegue and her very brave and happy child that this might be a option for him. I hope with all my heart (because I’m a big softy when it comes to kids and their ailments) that it will help him to lead an (even more) normal life !
Life sometimes gets this rosy glow…

Just a quick heads-up to let you know of the existence of a free new e-book from the very good SF author Charles Stross. He has just released Accelerando as a free download.

The book is available in the shops as well, but Charles believes that all the people who download it will be feeling cramped reading it on a screen, and will go out an buy the book. Plus tell their friends and collegues about it (hey! That’s what I’m doing !).

Dear reader (whoever that lone soul may be),

Remember my ranting about CardSystems Solutions ? The credit card processing company that, due to gross incompetence, managed to make 40 million credit card numbers and their details available on the net ?

Seems that the fat lady sang and the sigar was smoked after all – when you check their website out, the only text you can see is that the assets of CSS have been bought by ‘Pay By Touch Payment Solutions’.

Pay By Touch is the global leader of biometric authentication, loyalty, membership, and payment solutions. The privately held company is dedicated to being the preeminent global authentication and payments network, providing the most secure, convenient, and cost-effective electronic transaction solutions for businesses and consumers around the world.

So CardSystems is a goner, no longer to be seen. Or is it ?

When you click on the link on the CSS website, you are redirected to a new website : Pay By Touch Payment Solutions. There you can read the news section, including a press release dated december 9, 2005, where PBT has bought over CCS (for stock and some cash.

Since it’s a press release, I’ve been so bold as to quote it here almost entirely.
Notice the subtitle ! Underlined parts are added by me.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

PAY BY TOUCH COMPLETES ACQUISITION OF CARDSYSTEMS SOLUTIONS
Pay By Touch payment processing products to become more robust

SAN FRANCISCO – (December 9, 2005) –Pay By Touch TM, the leading provider of biometric authentication, loyalty, membership, and payment solutions, today announced it has completed the acquisition of substantially all the assets of CardSystems Solutions, Inc., a leading end-to-end payment processing provider with approximately 120,000 merchants to which Pay By Touch will have immediate access.

To complement the acquisition, Pay By Touch also announced that several industry-leading executives from CardSystems have been appointed to lead Pay By Touch Payment Solutions, a newly named business unit with responsibility for the Pay By Touch payment-processing unit (formerly known as iPAY) and the new
CardSystems assets.

“CardSystems’ assets complement Pay By Touch’s existing payment-related products and services and provide a ready-made path to reaching more merchants and banks to further realize our vision to change the way the world pays,” said John Rogers, founder, chairman and CEO of Pay By Touch. “To that end, the acquisition
allows us to provide a richer and more comprehensive suite of end-to-end payment processing solutions.”

Under the terms of the deal, Pay By Touch will assume responsibility for all CardSystems Solutions, Inc. assets and for payment relationships with 120,000 small and medium-sized merchants. The deal was completed primarily for stock and some cash. CardSystems provides integrated payment solutions to associations,
financial institutions and independent sales organizations (ISOs), and retail merchants. Through these payment solutions, CardSystems processes more than $18 billion in Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, online debit, and EBT transactions annually.

So if I understand their press release correctly, the beast lives on. Not just the feet and the body, but lots of the braincells have been recuperated as well – it just received a new name, that’s all.

I hope that Pay By Touch has the sense to do thorough security checks at irregular intervals and make certain that their new business unit has a tad more security added to it’s system than the previous incarnation.
And that they are honest enough to cough up to the fact if or when something happens…

I am really, REALLY looking forward to the summer.

Sam and Tom have been keeping us busy these last few weeks, and on-and-off during the last few months draining snot from nostrils. I’m going to enjoy the spring / summer more knowing that during that period we don’t have to clean runny noses anymore.

Sam is not letting this keep him down however. He only wants to stand now, and this weekend, at 9.5 months old, we bought him his first pair of shoes. He is now very proudly bumbling around the living room, with his parents holding him up of cours (which is hell for the lower back !).
We’ve booked our summer vacation – Bulgaria, it is !