Friday, May 8, 2015

Queen for a Day, Or For Forever

I was impressed by the royal coverage in today’s San Jose Mercury News. No, it wasn’t on either Prince William, Princess Catherine, nor their adorable children, Prince George or Princess Charlotte, nor on William’s grandmother, Queen Elizabeth. However, there were other queens mentioned.

On page A6, it was reported that Sister Roma accused Facebook of not recognizing that as a drag queen, Sister Roma is the name she prefers,  and not her legal name,  Michael Williams.  She is quoted as saying, “My name is Roma. How dare Facebook say that’s not authentic and take away 30 years of existence with one click.”  A protest is scheduled at Facebook headquarters  in June, and thus far more than 400 people had signed up. The reporter of this story was Queenie Wong.

Does anyone remember Jack Bailey?


A King-Pin Was Arrested
In an unrelated story on page A11, police raided a pizza restaurant, who had discovered that they served pizzas with or without pepperoni during the day, and cocaine at night. The restaurant, The Cucino a Modo Mio (I Cook It My Way), was located in the New York borough of Queens.

A Royal Pain
On May 6, I received a request from GoDaddy, my domain name provider, that I check to be sure that all four of my domain’s contact information was current. They all were, and I confirmed that in a return email.

On May 8, I received an email notifying me that one my sites was expiring, and could easily be renewed for $75 for a year, but I needed to do so my May 12.

This didn’t jibe with the earlier notification, so I called my domain provider, who has a non-800 phone number. I spoke with Lou, and after explaining the situation to him, he said it was a scammer. He also said that there are many such scammers out there preying on the naïve ones. They go to domain listings in public records, find ones to prey upon, and send them a phony billing, in the hope that the recipient will hit the “Secure Online Payment” icon.

This is the first time this scam has been directed at me, so I asked Lou for a suggestion to prevent this from happening again. He told me that his company can make all my domain registrations private and protect me from all such abusive intrusions.  Ah, but there’s a price to pay of $8 per year per domain. He quickly figured out that to protect all four domains until they expire, would only cost me $37.12, and added that he has fifty domains protected for a mere $400 a year.

Although this whole episode was a royal pain, Lou was a prince of a guy to make the offer, however I said that I’ll protect my kingdom on my own.