Dear Al:
Jason Aquilino is an associate of Clif McCann's (our
longtime Intellectual
Property Attorney) and has been working on American Mensa's behalf. We are
very interested in working with you to resolve this as soon as possible. To
that matter, Jason will be calling you to arrange transfer of the
registration.
Pam Donahoo
-----Original Message-----
From: Al Heigl [mailto:webmaster@minnesotamensa.org]
Sent: Friday, January 28, 2005 11:34 AM
To: Pamela L. Donahoo
Cc: Leigh Ann Tredinnick
Subject: Minnesota Mensa website
Importance: High
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/