Jeroens blog

I finally received my first Google Summer of Code payment.

This payment was in the form of a prepaid card send to me via mail, together with 2 GSoC stickers and a Google notebook – YAY! Getting the money from the card proved to be quite an ordeal though.

The first step required to getting the money from the card was registering on the citiprepaid website. To do this all GSoC students needed to fill in a form with your name, email and other info. You also had to enter your phone number. This is where it got funny. The form contains 3 fields to enter different parts of your phone number into, but only 2 of these are visible -> WTF??!! Since the phone number is required and must be valid, no one can submit the form without a workaround provided by another GSoC student: using the FireFox plugin Web Developer to display detailed form information, which would then also reveal the hidden field. Another issue here, although considerably smaller, is that only US numbers will be accepted, which forces all non-us residents participating in GSoC to enter a wrong number.

By making it impossible for non-geeks to successfully submit the registration form, citiprepaid now joins Argenta on my list of banks that try to fuck up their websites.

Anyway, I got my €350 from the card (although it took me at least 3 hours to get all the damned stuff fixed), so I’m happy