Namesecure are they the worst domain name registrar?

I have several domains registered with Namessecure.com, including heartandmind.org, eidors.org, and sarahlionheart.com. I wonder if they are the worst place to register or host a domain? A few years ago when my friend Rick Booth recommended them they were good value and easy to use. Over the last year or two the service has degraded, especially email forwarding. This has been extremely inconvenient for my wife Sarah as she relies on the email address for business.

I am currently trying to move heartandmind.org to a UK hosting company fasthosts.co.uk. I selected them from several economically priced hosting services as they had a human being who answered the phone, in an accent I could understand (slightly West Country I think, and that fits as their address is Gloucester), and who could reply intelligently to my questions. We will see how it goes, my problem now is to actually get the ironically named namesecure to actually do their part to transfer the domain. Google threw up a litany of complaints from other namesecure customers and former customers, including someone who lost the domain completely while trying to transfer it out of namesecure!

Here are some examples of complaints

• namesecure not answering phone for 4 weeks
  
• Mail forwarding not working
  
• This press release by namesecure is followed by a long list of user complaints about their service, including "
  VERY BAD CUSTOMER SERVICE !! I have been using NameSecure since 2000. However their customer service is practically non-existent" and "Ron Lautmann wrote:
  Namesecure is a fraud. They refused to transfer my domain before it expired and then when it expired they say it can't be transferred until I renew. Catch 22? My advice, don't use Namesecure. "
  

Anyone else out there care to share their experience about namesecure? Has anyone managed to contact customer services? Do you have a phone or fax number for them? Has anyone managed to transfer their domain out, or recover their losses? Please add a comment below.

(Added 7/2009 They seem to have got alot better recently, letting you transfer the domain from the "Dashboard". Maybe they are under new management)

Yogafont

My wife Sarah Lionheart is a yoga teacher and she has been on the look out for pictures she could use in her handouts to illustrates sequences of yoga ansas (poses). Yogafont provides the answer. Simply a TrueType font where each character is a simple picture of a person in each pose. Its creator Bill Grainger has made the font freely available, with with windows and Mac versions. Both are zip files, but the windows one extracts to and exe file. So for Linux I unzipped the Mac version, and then changed yogafont.TTF to yogafont.ttf. If was then easy (at least in Mandriva 2006) to import the font for use in Linux by going to MandrivaControl centre, chooseing "system", "Manage add.. etc ...fonts", "Import" then navigate to where I had unzipped the font. It worked fine in OpenOffice writer.