Why would you want to even taste this?

A gourmet coffee blended from animal droppings is being sold at a London department store for £50 per cup.

Jamaican Blue Mountain and the Kopi Luwak bean are used to create Caffe Raro which is thought to be the most expensive cup of coffee in the world.

Kopi Luwak beans are eaten, then passed, by the cat-like Asian palm civet, and sell for £324 a kilogram.

All profits from sales of the coffee at Peter Jones in Sloane Square in April will go to Macmillan Cancer Support.

Ripest berries

Asian palm civets, which live in the foliage of plantations across south-east Asia, are said to pick the best and ripest coffee berries.

Enzymes in their digestive system break down the flesh of the fruit before the animals expel the bean.

The beans are then collected from the plantation floor by workers who wash away the dung and roast them.

David Cooper, who created the blend, said: "These rare coffees have been slowly hand roasted for around 12 minutes to ensure that we maximise the potential of each coffee.

"The final roast colour is quite dark to ensure that the espresso is perfect for a smooth latte or cappuccino."

And finally for those who think this is a joke, visit the site of the store, that sells them http://www.peterjones.co.uk

Fattest Day of the year

I had something worth while to read today morning. Usually the morning journeys to work are pretty boring, as the news papers are just verbose elaboration of what I watched on BBC breakfast while enjoying my porridge. Most of the time though, I am seriously not interested in the news, the reason most of the time is the British way of representing the news.
But today morning one headline caught my attention. The metro said statistically today "the second day of the April" is the fattest day of the year! I was compelled to read further. The reasons stated for so called results were

• Christmas is well past, and you no longer feel the guilt of stashing up those calories during the feasts.
• Summer days are still couple of months away, and hence you dont really visualize yourself in the beach gear, and hence dont mind the delay in getting rid of those fats.
• The financial year is just past, and most of us has received some kind of bonus or appraisals.

Well for me the reasons, seems to be quite justified, but are not encouraging for people like me, who seriously are keeping up with the health regime. I also found couple of more reasons not quoted in the article, which are as follows.

• All the gym offers usually run through until end of march, so this is the period, when the membership fees rise for those really interested in keeping the fitness schedule on the road.
• The financial year just commences, and hence those who did not get better appraisals, or the more aspirational lot of the office venture into greener pastures, so hell lot of leaving lunches and leaving drinks.
• The clocks have just gone an hour early, so body clock is still confused, and you dont really get up early to get yourself healthy pack-lunch, and survive on whatever junk food you can place your hand on during the buzy lunch hours.
• This is the time of year, when I have most of the marriages to attend, so almost every weekend, I have a wedding to attend , and not to mention those calory ladden Indian dishes to savour (by the way this implies to all those Indian friends).
• If you carefully look around, most of the superstores have fantastic offers going around especially chocolates, which they didnt manage to sell during easter, or if the easter is not yet arrived they have promotions for easter eggs and lots of chocolates.

So I do not blame on any individual, for quitting their efforts on this day. By the way is it a co-incidence, that I missed my shopping turn yesterday, and hence did not have anything to make my lunch today. So think am going to have a pub lunch today! But before you write me off, I am going to burn those calories in the gym tonight definitely!

And I thought my name "Rasesh" is quite unique

I used to believe that I have quite a unique name, untill today. Since my school days, I only knew of one person apart from me who had the same name, and he was a chap who lived near my place, and fortunately he did not have exactly the same name. His name was "Rasesh Shah" and mine "Rasesh Dave".

Today morning just out of curiosity, I googled my name trying to find where exactly my baby site, and my blog fares. Surprisingly, even the query "Rasesh Dave London" did not get my sites or blog on the first page of the results, although all the entries that came as a result were either my posts on other blogs, or my contact details on the social networking sites. This prompted me to further trim down the query to just "Rasesh Dave". Again this resulted in my site coming at about 9th position.

Quite content with the result, the final blow came when I typed in just "Rasesh". Wow, I did not find a single mention of me in the first 13 pages! Google statistics suggest, that people do not go beyond 3rd page for the organic search results, so I pretty much can imagine now, the trouble my friends might be facing to locate me in the world wide web!

So I have tried to increase the chances of my name coming a bit further up that previous results, by keyword spamming in this blog. I just hope it works!

By the way for all those of you who are new to the field of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), this might serve as a classic example of how to enhance the site ratings with keyword spamming, which is not necessarily same as keyword littering. Also if you think of helping me improve the ratings, please give me a link on your blog to my site "http://www.web-geeks.co.uk", and I will reciprocate the favour!

Back to Internet, and Back to blogging!

This has been an eternal wait, it seems. Even though it just took 10 days (10 working days; to be specific) for the O2 to start the broadband services, it did seem ages.
So I received the email from them that my services have been started, so all I need to do is go home, plug in the router/modem they have sent me in, run a CD and it should be ready to roll out!
So the next blog post would be coming out from the new O2 broadband service! Meanwhile don't forget to hit my upcoming site http://www.web-geeks.co.uk.
Any suggestions are welcome, and will try to keep on improving the contents and lay out for the site.

Life without internet!

Well, don't get shocked with the title, it's actually living in a house with no internet access!

It started down last week, when I was thinking of shopping around for a better deal in broadband, and the best deal I could have got was from o2, my mobile provider. When I rang them up, they said, I need to have a BT line in order to access their broadband services, and hence I had to transfer my telephone line as well.

Just out of curiosity, I asked, how long it takes to port over the broadband, and they said, 4-5 working days! Well, that should not be a problem for guy like me, who has internet access in the office (apart from certain sites :P though). Then I contacted BT, that I need to port my telephone line from Bulldog DSL back to BT, to which they said that it will take about 11 days to port over. This is to provide the existing provider substantial amount of notice, wherein they can pretend, they have better service, by offering the customer discounts, or freebies. Bulldog did exactly the same, and they offered me a straight 30% off on my existing invoice amount, if I stayed with them.

But because I will be having a better deal from my new provider, and have been facing blackouts from Bulldog, I just decided not to accept the offer. Then I called up O2, to inform them that my telephone line will be taken over by BT on 13th of this month, so I would like them to kick start my new services sometime then. I was expecting that they take the early notice, to minimize the down time and may be able to provide me the broadband asap.

Now comes the tricky bit. O2 can only start the process, after they see that the line is a BT line on their system, which would not have been the case till 13th of March! So they asked me to call back on 13th of march. I called up on 13th just to know, that their system sometimes takes time to get updated, and it might take upto 24 hours to get the fresh(!) date from BT.

So called up on 14th, and the gentleman kindly did take all the details off me, and placed my order. The estimated date for the start of my broadband service was given as 25th of March! What???

The reason given by the O2 support staff was as follows. Basically they need to pull out the network cable from the BT router and plug it in the O2 router at the local telephone exchange, which astonishingly is about 5 minutes walk from my place! To do this job of say 1 minute maximum, they need to apply for the appointment with the BT exchange support manager. He will give a tentative slots of appointments, which needs to be matched with availability of the O2 network engineers. This date has also to take into consideration the time it takes for the O2 to ship the free Wireless router (which I was ready to sacrifice, for getting an earlier date).
So this comes down to about 12 days of internet blackout at my place, and hence all my schedules of making the site live by the end of March are shattered to pieces!

I just imagine, what did people do before internet?

Richest Man in the world

They say United we stand, Divided we fall; this proverb has to be believed now, as the list of richest man on the earth is set to roll out by Forbes. Going through the list, I saw the huge amount of injustice prevailing in the world. I dont say, that people must not be rich, nor do I support communism, but just a thought crossed my mind, that if all these people in the top, adopted a small country, in Africa, Latin America, or any other small poor community, and work for the betterment of the society, will the world not be a better place to live.
I mean, I have been seeing the ads from the charity organisation saying £5 given to them goes a long way to improve the life of someone in the third world, and here we sit talking in billions. I do acknowledge that the people on the top are working with charities, and donating millions of $$, but something is wrong somewhere, as the life stays the same for the poor, and the rich.
If you eradicate the poverty from the African states, the violence would automatically stop, and that would result in reduced threats to the so called civilized world. That would be money well spent, I guess!
I would be editing the post tomorrow, as I have a day off into the week end, so check back for some serious stuff as well.

Blu-ray Discs are here to stay!

This weekend saw speculations in the international market, that the HD-DVD giant Toshiba is planning to scrap the production of the HD DVD format.

The firm has said that it was still reviewing its business strategy, and there have been absolutely no decision about the format, but the market specialist claims, after the defection of major hollywood studios to back the blu-ray format, the decision has to be made; sooner or later!

It all started last month just after christmas, when Warner Brothers decided to join the blu-ray wagon, for its future productions. So if you think of the business, there are only two significant names Universal Pictures and Paramount Pictures who patronise HD DVD. But with the market moving away, they will apparantely have to switch as well!

So to sum it up, Blu-Ray is here to stay!