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.