Our sincerest apologies to our readers...

__ Interesting how no one notices when we do something good, but if we do just one thing bad, the whole world lets us know.
__ A slew of letters condemning us for our "Loading Dock Bundles" page layout suggests we need to apologize:

We apologize for our totally rude
layout in the 'Loading Dock'.

__ We wouldn't have normally done this. In fact, we'd rather not sell anything at all. But marketing statistics show billion$$$ of dollars worth of products are sold each year via mail order by using uncool layouts just like this one. Those rude mail order company catalogs (that arrive in your mailbox by the handful) are very, very successful, so we thought it must take that kind of in-your-face rudeness in order to get consumers to buy something.
__ It is our sincere belief that tasteful, clean, spam-free design is the way to present a newsletter and run a web site... that it should work with intelligent people.
__ However the bulk of highly successful companies, and web sites are proving us wrong. It saddens us that SPAM seems to equal Profits.
__ Since we need to support the Design & Publishing Center, yet maintain our Spam-Free philosophy, we're presented with a huge dilemma.

How do we sell without spamming???

__ Obviously the intelligent method of providing a cleanly designed, high value, content-rich product at a low price doesn't work. If it did, we wouldn't be doing this. A couple of thousand paid subscribers would be all we need to continue providing this free (but less content-rich) service to the other of the hundred-thousand or so visitors each month who feel that they should do nothing in return for it. Face it... we all love free stuff. However we need to remember that eventhough it's free, it is still usually at someone's expense. Contrary to popular belief all this content doesn't appear here by magic.
__ So, forgive us, but we're compelled to at least try this 'in your face' loading dock concept in an attempt to improve our condition here. We promise to keep the Spam level down in the rest of the site as long as we can hold out. Hello? Are you still there?

Enough... back to where you were.