On the AW site it's come to our attention that PublishAmerica is now an Inc. instead of an LLLP and they've done some re-work on their site. Some suspect that the change to Inc. was, among other things, to get Publish America a clean slate with the BBB in Maryland and, indeed, if you check them out on the BBB they are now listed as "satisfactory" with a membership date of April 2005. PA had been given an unsatisfactory rating which is discussed on the AW boards. The BBB should be ashamed they're facilitating this attempt to misguide people into thinking that Publish America hasn't had any complaints. LLLP or Inc, it's still PA. Putting lipstick on a pig doesn't turn it into a fashion model.
The site re-work includes a 'news clips' page that excerpts lines from the negative articles (if you go upthread to May 4th I list all of the articles and other links in the 'continue reading' portion of the post) and re-casts them as good press. I hope that folks do their homework, somehow find the whole article being quoted and aren't fooled by the out of context snippets.
I mean does anyone really believe the movie reviews that begin and end and have multiple ellipsis throughout? "...great...time...at this...movie" could be "I was greatly pained at having to waste my time staring unbelievingly at this poor excuse of a movie". If you don't buy that load of happy crappy then you shouldn't buy the trash PA is selling on their press pages either.
In personal news I ran Rudy the Roomba again last night and watched him for probably half an hour. Yeah, sounds insane but I was very interested in seeing if it was 'learning' the layout of the living room or if it was just following some random patterns based on whatever it bumped into. Towards the end it seemed to have learned about the coffee table and was just circling it without any trouble. I think if we run it again it will do a more efficient pattern. This is completely enchanting to my inner geekette. When I was much younger (say 11 or 12) and reading the robot stories by Asimov I don't think I ever believed that I'd own a robot. Well it's not very sophisticated but it's a robot and I own it. So cool.
Posted by Dawno at May 10, 2005 06:45 PM