Archive for October 11th, 2009

Our Noni Is the Original Noni

October 11th, 2009

It might sound crazy but you cannot live a healthy lifestyle by accident. You have to make great choices and include a balanced diet and exercise in your daily life.

The South Pacific Islanders have a long standing relationship with the Noni trees and their fruits. Morinda Citrifolia as it has been named in our century is light green, very lumpy and is unbelievably unpleasant to smell when ripe. The Noni’s health benefits far exceed the strong smell it gives off when ripe. Traditionally it was a part of the rather effective healing practices. Of course today we study it in fancy laboratories but often the advice of a Tahitian elder will confirm the findings and send the researchers off in new directions.

Proper nutrition and a balanced diet should be everybody’s daily goal. Our recommendation for a healthy daily lifestyle is to include our Tahitian Noni International Noni products.

For over two thousand years, the people of Tahiti and other Polynesian cultures have considered the Noni fruit a secret to good health. Its widespread use in traditional cultures is well documented. TAHITIAN NONI Juice, our Noni juice is made the same way with the added benefit of modern pasteurisation.

As written at the bottom of all our web pages, these statements have not been evaluated by the US FDA and these products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Our website has the details and ordering information.

My First Mini Dell Experience

October 11th, 2009

Having been amongst the first to purchase the Dell 910 Mini I wanted to share my experience with others that might be thinking about acquiring this item or one of the other sub-notebook or ‘netbooks’ as they have become known. I manage a web design agency and I’ve been contemplating the idea of getting a more modern laptop as my old Dell Inspiron from 2003 is as heavy as a brick.

Shortly after having retired the old Dell to my girlfriends house (I couldn’t face lugging it back and forwards any longer so it just lives there now, I might well do the same with myself one of these days soon!) it stopped charging and wouldn’t run from the mains, so eventually when I gave it to my tech to repair he found out that it was one of the known faulty models, the 5150 which developed a problem with the motherboard overheating after prolonged use, this I found out about 2 years after they stopped replacing them as part of a class action lawsuit, shame I’m two years too late to get it replaced for free!

Ah well what’s 150 quid for a factory refurbished Motherboard off ebay, compared with years of loyal service in spite of being dropped a couple of times, spat on repeatedly, eaten over and all manner of other not recommended usage styles! I even used to have it hooked up to my TV via the onboard S-VHS port and watch films on it, so it has seen some action, oh yes!Not that I download movies off the internet you understand of course, oh no that would just be wrong, and illegal and I wouldn’t want to risk getting my broadband disconnected!

However, this was all instigated by my step dad who just took delivery of top of the range Toshiba Portege at around £1,200, but he’s at that time in life where 1,200 quid is affordable, where as I’m still in financial recovery from my last divorce (yes there was more than one!)! So I happened across the Dell Inspiron 910 Mini on the Dell site whilst looking at specs of notebooks for a client, and there it was £299 inc VAT and delivery. What a bargain I thought! (If you are reading this three years after I wrote it and they are now giving them away free on the front of Corn Flake packets then I will be even more gutted, or maybe I’ll just get one for all the family!)

Anyway there I was credit card at the ready, wrist twitching ready to buy, but hang on I thought, why am I buying this, do I really need it? No, I don’t NEED it I just WANT ONE ! So then some sensibility came over me and I put my credit card away, feeling all pleased with myself at having managed to resist an impulse purchase!

However, the following day my step Dad needs me to investigate his new Toshiba because he can’t get the printer to work with Vista and can’t get it to see the other computers that are on our network (this job for me, comes with the territory!) So I have to genuinely work on this ultra lightweight Toshiba , wow I’m amazed at how light it is, especially compared to my old Dell 5150! I wish I had cash spare to invest in one of these I thought! I noticed he didn’t have my recommended security software installed though.I installed my recommended computer security software: Avast Anti Virus and Spybot Search & Destroy, these two packages make up my standard protection for all my PC’s, and they’re free for home use.

The next day I had to go to a client’s and as the appointement was first thing in the morning I went straight there from my girlfriends house and took the old laptop with me (which gives me a great excuse to call in on my way back and drop it off, coincidentally around about lunchtime when there might be the chance of a ham, cheese and salad sandwich on the go! Yum, she is soooo good to me!) So anyway, I about put my back out trying to put this incredibly heavy laptop in the car passenger foot well whilst sitting in the drivers’ seat! So having experienced the new lightweight machines first hand, and realised I do have a genuine NEED for the new Dell Inspiron mini after all, weighing in at around 1kg, you know I planned to get that credit card out again as soon as I was able!

So as I had a management meeting that afternoon I informed my Finance Manager I would be ordering one and that was that. It was Friday October 3rd when I placed the order on the Dell website, and on the 8th I got back from a client meeting to find a tiny cardboard box on my desk with the Dell log on the side, I thought it couldn’t possibly be the new mini as the confirmation email I got said it would be delivered on or around the 20th October, but sure enough it really had arrived!

So I’m like a kid in a sweet shop thinking “best day ever” (See Heroes Season 3), I was ecstatic and carefully unpacked it, tossing instructions and disks to one side, “read those later” I thought. I got it out and started setting it up straight away, you know remove McAfee Security Centre and all the other junk software these things come with these days.

As it has an integrated web cam I also downloaded Windows Live Messenger and had a short video call with my fiancée whilst she was doing her house work, fantastic!So next I Googled ‘mobile broadband suppliers’ and toyed with ordering the USB dongle from Three, as their 5GB monthly allowance is only 15 quid a month so the best looking deal, providing those coverage stories you hear about Three Mobile are not really true! (Update: Yes the coverage is lousy in all the areas I want to use it, even at my desk I have to connect the dongle to a USB cable and hang it from my roof to get 1 bar signal strength, buy another brand!)

Anyway, it was soon time to go and get my daughter from school so I thought yeah I’ll take it with me and even though I don’t have the mobile broadband USB Modem yet I can continue configuring it in car park if I’m early. I was early, so I turned it on, it said:

Windows could not start because of an error in the software.

Please report this problem as :

load needed DLLs for kernel.

Please contact your support person to report this problem

As we say in England from the popular Catherine Tate sketch “Computer says no…”

Ah dear, it was great fun whilst it lasted, all of about 2 and a half minutes!Then followed a two and a half hour telethon with Dell support in India :-( Apparently they were so quick to ship the laptop to me that my service tag isn’t on their system yet.

In my opinion good support is simple, it’s not like we’re dealing with complicated server virtualisation here. It’s a Dell 910 mini laptop, which has an error on the screen when you try to start it up, every time, send a replacement! “We don’t’ know what the service tag is so we can’t do that”, I was absolutely livid. In spite of insisting to speak to the supervisor, I got absolutely nowhere, and they probably thought they had handled that call in the appropriate manner!)

They suggested I called back in 24-48 hours, well I told them exactly what I thought of their suggestion as I’m sure you can image, but to no avail. I did indeed have to call back today and they have agreed to send me a replacement unit as it is within 7 days of delivery.

I hope the replacement arrives as promptly as the original unit did…

So conclusion? Apart from the fact it doesn’t work (a faulty drive in my opinion) and for the life of me I can’t get it to boot from an external drive or USB key (it doesn’t have a CD or DVD drive you know) it feels really solid, looks lovely, and is nice to handle (sounds a bit like the ideal partner to an i-phone 2.0 doesn’t it!).

Like most reviewers have experienced, the keys are small (but blackberry users manage and they are larger than those keys) and the right shift key is tiny and means you can’t type an @ in the usual fashion. But the screen is nice, 3 USB slots, a monitor connector, Ethernet and earphones and mic connectors although it has both speakers and mic internally so you can Live Messenger without having to plug anything in.

On the whole, I would recommend it, providing you get one that works ! I am also yet to try it with LogMeIn which is my preferred way of dealing with how to access emails, lots of passwords, specialist software and all that kind of thing when you are out and about. Possibly the screen is going to be too small to be able to work with for extended periods of time, but I’ll let you know when the replacement arrives and I have had chance to give it a proper testing, assuming that one doesn’t break on me as soon as I start urm ‘configuring’ it!

Further Update: So I have had the Dell Mini for about erm, wow nearly a year now! It would never work with LogMeIn over the 3 dongle. To be fair 3 were very helpful, until we took the dongle out and used it in another one of my machines and were able to connect on LogMeIn without any problems, at this point they referred me to Dell, at which point I lost interest!

It is all to do with one of the browser settings, not remembering itself when you tick the check box and hit Apply. I can’t remember which one it was now, and maybe ie 8 will have fixed the problem or it might work on Firefox browser instead, I just never got round to trying to sort it out again and tend to use the Mini more now to read the news in bed with my cup of tea in the morning.

It is too small to use for really extended periods but it is great for checking your email when you’re out and about, or for a quick impulse surf when you can’t be bothered to turn the main pc on and you want to remind yourself what other films that actor or actress was in for example!I suppose if you have it hooked up to one of those large lcd monitors it would work just as well as any PC.

It’s a cracking little machine though and also works quite well down the pub, because I can even fit it in the pocket of my big coat, and that is proper cool, except it doesn’t like beer puddles much so I tend to avoid taking it most of the time, unless I know I’m going to need to log on, but then the pub has got a sexy new Mac which is already covered in beer so I prefer to use that (any excuse to get behind the bar really!)

In summary though it has not had any hardware problems since the initial replacement was received. On the whole I have found that Dell kit tends to be pretty reliable anyway, especially when you are dealing with the more business based items whereas this is obviously more consumer oriented. With a Dell or most new PC’s if they are going to go wrong they will usually do so within the first six months of use and generally after that they will keep going until they reach their recommended service intervals such as changing the disks after a couple of years and that kind of thing.

It should be pointed out though that these mini Dell laptops/netbooks, call them what you will, do not having a regular hard disk drive inside them. A normal hard drive has a disk inside it that physically spins round and a ‘head’ which moves backwards and forwards over the sectors quite like the relationship between the stylus and the tracks on an old fashion vinyl record !

The storage within the Dell mini, and other netbooks too I should image, are solid state, that is to say they are rather like USB flash drives or memory keys. In fact I think from a picture I saw they look more like RAM memory chips all joined together than a single physical device. The advantage of using solid state memory over traditional hard drives is that they use less power, they are not as heavy and they are quieter. Much quieter. If you’re like me you will have noticed how computers have got a lot noisier over the last 10 years, as they have got more powerful.

My Dell Mini is blissfully quiet in comparison to any of my other computers, desktops or laptops. Although if you are super-sensitive to noise like I am then you can notice a very slight hum or whine when you request a program that requires it to access the hard drive. Most people probably won’t notice this but if you are familiar with the faint hum from your mobile phone charger or other devices of that ilk that transform power from one state to another then you might know what I am talking about. It certainly isn’t a problem though, although the power adapter for the machine itself does make some odd noises if you listen to it closely. It is similar to a mobile phone charger though, not like a traditional laptop power adapter, and this makes the whole thing much more portable.

My favourite aspect of this machine is that in some it elicits the same response as having a small puppy or kitten out and about with you, especially down the pub where if you get it out to a bunch of girls you can hear the ooh and ahhh’s of girls who think something is cute! That is priceless!

Kiev City Profile

October 11th, 2009

Despite numerous invasions and devastating destruction, the Ukrainian capital of Kiev is still one of the most beautiful cities of Eastern Europe. The Communist period, which lasted barely seventy years, did it little harm. On the contrary, the new potentates of the post-WW-II era built parks and created green spaces, along with the inevitable television tower found in every former Soviet city.

Cradle of the Slavs.
The earliest mention of Kiev dates to the early sixth century. Three brothers founded it as a fortress, naming it the “City of Kyi” (Kyjiw) after the eldest brother. Over the course of many centuries Kiev has been the administrative, political and religious centre for numerous different rulers and empires One of these was the medieval state Kievan Rus, which included parts of what are now Russia, the Ukraine and Belarus. In light of this, Kiev has justifiably been called the cradle of the Slays.

A Russian culture.
Kiev was one of the great centres of medieval Europe in its ninth, and tenth-century golden age under the leadership of the grand dukes Sviatoslav, Vladimir and Yaroslay. Through its valuable commercial agreements with Constantinople, Kiev was always in close contact with the Byzantine Empire. This led, in 988, to the conversion of Kievan Rus to the Orthodox faith. This brought not only new sacred structures, but also an influx of Russian culture.

This influence continued during the Middle Ages when nearly all of south-eastern Europe was under the yoke of the Mongol invasion (12401569). In 1667, Russia annexed Kiev, the “mother city of Russia”, which in the meantime had been reduced to a simple provincial capital. Following its annexation, Kiev quickly made up for lost time, becoming the commercial and cultural centre of the Ukraine and, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. in 1991, the capital city of an independent Ukrainian state.

The cave cloister.
Currently, Kiev is the undisputed centre of Ukrainian life, with its theatres and museums defining the cultural landscape. Kiev is also home to a number of sites that relate to its long history. The old city includes buildings and other structures built over a period of 1,500 years.

The greatest of these is probably the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra (Monastery of the Assumption of the Holy Virgin), built in the year 1050 by immigrant monks who dug caves into the Dneiper escarpments. Eventually, the monastery was expanded to include a complex of churches and cloisters both above and below ground.

This spiritual and cultural centre of the early Kieven Rus Empire is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In 1991, St. Sophia Cathedral was also added to the UNESCO World Heritage List. Begun in the eleventh century, the expansion and decoration of this exceptionally ornate church with its opulent frescoes and mosaics was completed in the seventeenth century. The cathedral was a focal point of cultural and political life during the early years of the Russian State.

Kreschatik.
In comparison to Kiev’s many magnificently decorated historical facades, those along Kiev’s main thoroughfare, the Khreschatyk, are no less impressive despite their more recent vintage. Completely destroyed during World War II and rebuilt since, many of the newer buildings, while conspicuously Stalinist in style, are somehow less staid, and perhaps more southern, than buildings from this period elsewhere in Eastern Europe. The street is lined with sidewalk cafes where young and old gather to share a drink and some conversation. Kiev’s own particular variety of joie de vivre is most palpable along the Khreschatyk, and one even runs into the occasional tourist.

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