Monthly Archives: December 2007

Articles/Editorials

Hershey’s Organic Chocolate

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I love chocolate and always have, but of course as I grew up I became a bit more sensitive to ‘good’ chocolate and was always willing to try something new.  Pretty much every kid likes chocolate and knows the name Hershey and has their fair share of Hershey Chocolate Bars.

Personally the original Hershey bar isn’t my thing, it’s ok, but I’d rather not eat one… but ever since I can remember I’ve loved the Hershey’s Special Dark Chocolate Bars and I remember as a kid eating all of the miniature Special  Dark bars out of the assortment bags my Grandma would buy.

So I went shopping at Toy ‘R Us last week to get stuff for my kids for Christmas and I looked around for something for myself also and really couldn’t find anything I wanted.. imagine that, out of all those toys I couldn’t find something for me!

Anyway on my way to check out I came across a candy display and the Hershey’s Organic Chocolate bars caught my eye, of course being something new I had to grab them both, the Dark and Milk Chocolate varieties.

 

Oddly though when I went to look these up on the Hershey’s website they aren’t there anywhere… and I searched quite a bit more and really found nothing listed about them really anywhere, just a gift basket with mini Organic Chocolate bars in it on the Hershey’s site.

In my research though I found that Hershey’s recently purchased  Dagoba Organic Chocolate (press release here) and my guess is that these bars I picked up are somehow related to that. On the packaged it says they are made in Germany, but that’s about it.

The chocolate comes wrapped in thick paper, almost cardboard covering with the actual chocolate wrapped in foil inside.

 

The Milk chocolate bar was a bit beaten up, but the Dark chocolate was in perfect shape:

 

As I said I like Dark chocolate very much, but not this one… it’s very acidic and leaves a nasty aftertaste in your mouth, unlike other dark chocolate bars I’ve tried. I’ve tried many, many types of chocolate with varying degrees of cacao percentages, I think 80% was the highest I’ve tried so far. This bar does not mention the percentage of cacao, but it can’t be that much if it’s not mentioned right? Overall I’d stay away from this bar of chocolate even if you’re curious as I was…

The Milk chocolate Organic bar on the other hand though was very, very good, making me wish I had bought two of those. It has a nice creamy texture with hints of fruit and a slight coffee taste as well, but not very sweet either, it’s as close to a perfect Milk Chocolate bar as I’ve tried in a long time.

Product Previews/Reviews

TNGames 3rd Space Gaming Vest and a bit more

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It’s been a while since I’ve posted any product previews for DSM, but I’ve got a bunch of stuff and always more on the way!

Just arrives today was the TNGames 3rdSpace Gaming Vest, this thing it cool.. I was playing with it a bit tonight actually.. It comes with their own game called Incursion, but there’s also mods for Doom3 and Quake4 as well and it is supposed to work with COD2 as well.

also arrived today was the new Noctua NH-U12P CPU Cooler (I love their stuff) and their new thermal compound as well!

and this week also brought the new SteelSeries 5l hybrid mousepad, this thing is nice, I like it quite a bit.. I’ve only been using it for a few hours but so far I like what I see and feel!

This week I’ll be posting my review of the OCZ SLI DDR2 PC26400 ram as well, this is some great stuff if you run SLI and even if you don’t it’s pretty damn good!

Speaking of SLI, next week I’ll be posting my review of the two EVGA 8600GTS cards that I’ve got as well… they’re pretty good cards for a budget system, and they’re very quiet even under load which is something I like the most about them

and I’ve got my review of Nero8 Ultra coming up as well, I love Nero software, some people complain it’s all bloated etc, but I’ve never had a problem with it, I like having the ability to do pretty much any damn thing I want with one suite of software at a relatively low price, especially considering what you get

Of course I’ve got quite a bit more as well, and Tom has a few products also getting reviewed for us!

Articles/Editorials, Rants!

GoDaddy Sucks!

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So, I decided to give it a few days and see what was going on with this GoDaddy hosting problem I’ve been having, and it hasn’t gone away… it is just stupid slow.

Using FTP or just http into the back-end of my site is just entirely much slower than it used to be and I’ve also noticed a major drop in traffic as well since this has all happened.

I’ll tell you what though I can’t say too many good things about BlueFur though, FTP’ing into it is like blazing fast, it’s just amazing, and the entire site is just so snappy and quick to load, I love this host, I need to move all of my sites to BlueFur like now I think…  but that’s for something after Christmas… get all my ducks in a row as it were and move everything over then! Sounds like a plan!

Articles/Editorials, Rants!, SEO/Traffic

Hosting Companies, I don’t like GoDaddy anymore and shopping for a new webhost

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So Bluefur was offering a special this month for 1year of hosting for $10, I figured why not go for it, I’ve been meaning to set up another site for sometime now and I thought that would be perfect for it… it’s another techie blog, not quite finished yet though… not sure if I’m happy with it.

I found the special over at JohnChow.com his post about the special is HERE and I see there are only 63 packages left as of writing this post.

But I just wanted to say that Bluefur is really cool, especially compared to GoDaddy… obviously I transfer all the information via FTP, pictures etc to my DragonSteelMods and this account. If you have a WordPress or any website you do this as well most likely.

Transferring stuff to my new site via FTP on Bluefur was amazingly fast, I was shocked by how fast it was, the site itself is very snappy and fast also. My GoDaddy accounts are slow to do this, originally I just though it was my internet service that was slow for uploading, but as I can see now that’s not the case it’s GoDaddy that is slow.

Bluefur also has some great customer support as well, I was thinking of just migrating this blog over to them before I decided to create the new site and I had numerous questions about the migration process and other questions as well. They answered all of my questions quickly and actually answered them.

I’ve been thinking about moving DragonSteelMods for some time now to a new hosting service and I’ve been looking into many of them, emailing my questions and seeing what kind of support I can get.

Some companies haven’t even responded yet! How can you not respond to an email from a prospective new client or customer?

I had another company (media temple) who just quoted my the things that were on there website and never really answered my questions. I even went so far as to point this out to them, that they didn’t answer my questions and they just quoted me from their website, I got back a response that was yet another quote from their website…

If you can’t answer simple questions for a prospective customer then how can you expect that customer to give you their business? If that’s what I can expect from support there is no way I’ll be working with them…

Another reason I need to leave GoDaddy is that they recently migrated my website to god know where, and now it’s much slower than it was before, and I’ve noticed a drop in traffic as well since this migration occurred.

This is the reason my account was migrated:

Your hosting account, dragonsteelmods.com, is being migrated to
a new server within the next 24 hours.

So that we may continue providing the highest quality of service
to all of our customers, we are working to reduce the Java server
capacity being used by hosting accounts that are not utilizing
JSP/Servlets functionality.

I’m not by any means an expert or even a knowledgeable person when it come so to the hosting end of websites so I have no clue what that means exactly… Can anyone tell me?

but since the site has become slower that means it really is time to move on to a new webhost, and that isn’t going to be easy at all with my site. At the moment it takes about 6 hours to download for backup, my site via FTP, I’ve got some 19 thousand pages, and thousands and thousands of pictures stored there. It’s gonna be fun but I do believe that I’ll be moving to Bluefur!