Orville Redenbacher's Popping & Topping review

Popping & Topping is a butter-flavored condiment for popcorn. It is a colored and flavored vegetable oil that can be poured over popcorn at room temperature much like the stuff at a movie theater. It has been a great substitute for melting butter or using a cold liquid spread. It isn't salty, so you can salt to preference, and it isn't quite as good as butter though it's easier to apply. I will make a regular item in my pantry next to the popcorn that I make in air popper.

Host Gator Review

Host Gator provides a lot of features for cheap, but it is a lesson in getting what you pay for. I have an account with them, and my website got hacked. Although they have telephone support, they assigned the ticket to their abuse department, and those people absolutely refuse to take any phone calls according their internal rules. Unfortunately, the abuse department personnel are not all capable of communicating clearly, and my ticket went to the bottom of the queue when I had to ask questions for clarification.

The ticket system is very badly designed. Updating a ticket requeues it, which makes no sense at all, and that delays anyone working on it. My ticket was also assigned to someone on a night shift, and he never worked on it, but the system kept it assigned to him after his shift and would have stayed in his file had I not called the next morning and had someone manually reassign it.

It is true that the performance on my server improved over time, which means some of their monitoring and security measures improved over time. However, customer service is another part of the picture, and they have failed at that. Host Gator should not be used for business purposes, but its use may be acceptable for hobby purposes like mine.

Coca-Cola Blak review

Coca-Cola Blak is an interesting idea. My first swig of the beverage was interesting, and I thought I might like it. After a couple of bottles, though, it didn't wake up to its potential. It has an earthy coffee flavor but is a little too bitter and bland to be refreshing or invigorating. The sharpness and sweetness of the Coke flavor was overwhelmed by the coffee flavor, and the coffee flavor was muddled by the Coke flavor.

This product will see less success than Coke II. It is grossly overpriced; it should be at a price similar to ordinary Coke products rather than priced as a specialty drink.

Yahoo! Mail Review

With the most incredible vehemence I do not recommend Yahoo! Mail in either free or paid form. I have been a paying Yahoo! Mail Plus customer, but I have been subject to an anti-spam feature. Yahoo! screens your outgoing mail messages that you type just as if it were an incoming message that a spam filter was sorting. If it looks like spam, the system presents you with a CAPTCHA text verification screen -- how annoying! One user wrote that when he failed to decode correctly that his message was deleted. And I have been paying for this? The text graphic is very, very hard to read.

This feature is quite unnecessary since Yahoo! Mail has outgoing sending limits, something that has annoyed me once but I was prepared to live with. This isn't really going to fight spam, except in the context of sophisticated robots that sign up for multiple accounts and send outgoing mail (each under the sending limit, of course). It will only statistically reduce the spam sent by abusive users.

For people like me, though, this restriction is an insult. I have provided my legitimate contact information with a working credit card to prove it. I wrote to their customer service, but they said they cannot disable the feature for individual accounts. I wrote back, "You just lost a customer. Congratulations."

This has been quite annoying because I was committed to Yahoo! Mail. It had the best spam filter and most uptime out of all the services that I had tried. However, with the possibility of having my outgoing personal or professional messages challenged or deleted, I cannot use this service.

Yahoo! Domains Internet domain name registrar review

I do not recommend the Yahoo! Domains domain name registration service. Yahoo! Domains requires advance cancellation of your domain in order to avoid advance billing for the next year of registration. The real problem is that once you cancel early your immediate control of that domain is cancelled, though presumably the existing DNS settings and registration will remain undisturbed until the end of the current year's registration.