Dear Pam,
This is in
response to your written letter dated December 27, 2004.
Actually, your letter was set aside for about three
weeks, unopened,
because it looked, well, phony.
It was obviously
not mailed from your office, and the envelope most
closely resembled a grade-school craft project, looking like it was done
by someone without access to a postage meter, or, apparently, a post
office.
You can see a scan of the envelope at
http://www.millcityrecords.com/mndensa/pld-env.htm,
together with a scan
of an envelope I received previously. Between the stamps and the
postmark, I trust it's obvious which one looks legitimate and conveys a
appropriate image of Mensa.
At any rate, I was
going through some papers last week and decided to
open the envelope, just in case it was legitimate. I compared your
signature against the certificate you sent me in December 2001
(recognizing my ten years of continuous membership), as well as your
recent letter thanking me for my latest 3-year membership renewal.
The signature looks legit, and my inference is that you
had signed it
and then forwarded it to our current LocSec DeDe Tredinnick, who was the
one who actually mailed it.
I will refrain from
speculating on who pasted on all the stamps, but I
would respectfully suggest that in future, where you have something
requiring other signatures, that you send it out first for other signing
and have them return it to you so you can ascertain that the signatures
are in the correct places, then run the envelope through the Neopost
yourself and mail it from Arlington.
As for your
request, I won't get into some of the disputable assertions
you made, but it has always been my intention to show Minnesota Mensa as
the owner of its website.
While I would have
preferred to wait until the underlying situation
affecting this issue is satisfactorily resolved (it's currently under
lengthy investigation by the Minnesota Mensa Ombudsman), I am willing to
make that ownership name update as a good-faith gesture on my part.
Unfortunately, it appears that some clown in Washington,
D.C. has been
interfering with my efforts to do so. When I went to our registrar's
website, I was unable to access the domain management page for our
domain. Some preliminary investigation informed me that this was due to
something called a "WIPO dispute".
I don't know
anything about that, but I did notice that "WIPO" also
appeared in the subject line of two malformed e-mails I received a week
ago from a Jason Aquilino, so I am postulating that there may be a
connection.
In each of these malformed e-mails,
here was no proper salutation;
rather, each started with two paragraphs of boldfaced junk about
"urn:schemas" and "microsoft-com" etc., and I cannot make any sense of
them.
Those were followed by a large three-part
black rectangle.
These e-mails also tried to
load some sort of unknown outside content
and hung at 24% with a JavaScript error. While I am invited to "Type
'javascript' into Location for details", there is no "Location" field in
an e-mail client.
I have posted a PrtScn screen
capture on the Internet -- you can see it
at:
http://www.millcityrecords.com/mndensa/emails/venable03_ps.htm
As you might expect, when I saw all of this stuff, I
immediately clicked
out of that folder rather than scrolling down to see what other horrors
might await me.
So I don't have the slightest
idea of what this guy may have been trying
to communicate to me, or whether these e-mails may have just been loaded
with a virus to harass me.
Each of these e-mails
came with a substantial attachment of over 115
KiloBytes.
To briefly quote from one of
thousands of similar pages on the Web:
"... follow this rule: Never open an attachment unless you know the
person who sent the file and know what the file is – and, most
importantly, never open it unless you asked the person to send it."
(http://aroundcny.com/technofile/texts/bit080101.html)
I, like most experienced Internet users, follow this rule
absolutely;
given the malformed nature of the containing e-mails, there is no way
I'll ever open those attachments.
So I am writing you to let you know that I have read your letter of
12/27/04, but it appears that I have been temporarily stymied in
responding to it by this fellow who has sent me two inept or malignant
e-mails.
I have already written to him, but if
*you* know of this Jason Aquilino
guy, perhaps you can get word to him to leave us alone.
Sincerely,
Al Heigl
Webmaster,
Minnesota Mensa
--
Alan Heigl
Mill City Records
P.O. Box 177
Northfield Minnesota 55057-0177
507-663-6090
(Professional Proofreading,
Web Site Work using FrontPage 2003)
http://www.millcityrecords.com/webwork/