Pretty as a Picture

By Jerry Pournelle

October 6, 2003

(Pretty as a Picture :  Page 1 of 1 )

Column 278 (Continued from the Previous Week)

Slammed

"Domain Registry of America" has hijacked one of my domains. This outfit sent me a "bill" for "renewing" my registration, and foolishly I paid it, at which point I discovered I was actually not renewing but transferring it to their registry. They had apparently seen that it was time to renew, and sent the "bill" before the actual domain registrar could do so. It looked official, I knew it was getting close to time to renew, and I simply paid the bill. They then grabbed my domain.

I have subsequently attempted to get it away from them to transfer the registration to GoDaddy where I keep all my other domains, and so far DROA refuses to let it go. Eventually I suppose they will have to, but once again let me warn you: If you get what looks like a bill for renewal of domain registration look at it closely. It may not be a bill at all. And if you do business with Domain Registry of America don't say I didn't warn you.

On the Road with Lisabetta

We took a full week trip to Washington DC in August, and I only carried one computer, Lisabetta, the Compaq Tablet PC, which had to serve as my main writing machine—I try to do some work on fiction and non-fiction every day—as well as for e-mail and maintaining my web site www.jerrypournelle.com. I use Microsoft FrontPage 2003 for the web site, and the Microsoft Office Suite 2003, including Outlook 2003, for everything else including e-mail.

In general it worked out well. The Compaq Tablet PC is a little underpowered, but in compensation it gets an honest four hours of battery life: more than enough for a cross country trip. I had just finished a novel, and used some of the flight time to do some final editing. This worked quite well: In fact, I found I can edit using the Tablet Pen. That's a little awkward if I want to rewrite whole paragraphs, so if I wanted to make any changes longer than a word or so I'd simply mark that spot and come back to it with the keyboard enabled.

 Page 1 of 1