How to be Rich on the market!

Yes, www.howtoberich.co.uk is on the domain name market. If you'd like to share the secret of 'How to be Rich' then please forward this post on!

3 tips for a longer lifespan!

1. Don't smoke.
2. Exercise.
3. Eat a balanced healthy diet.

Think that says it all! Not that i personally adhere - i'm a big fan of Indian food, Guinness and red wine - sometimes at the one sitting.

However i do own www.longerlifespan.co.uk which is now available to purchase.

Love Bluray- buy www.lovebluray.com

If you are a blu-ray buyer, bluray movie fanatic or have a website for a blu ray review then

www.lovebluray.com

would be a perfect domain name for your website. You could develop a site for bluray reviews, top 10 blu ray players or a shop for bluray buyers. If you really love www.lovebluray.com then please get in touch.

English Biofuels -at what cost?

Last year when i first noticed commodity prices increasing i repeatedly came across the term 'biofuels'. I had a vague notion of what they were and also realised that they drew both condemnation and positive sounding vibes from different camps. I did however see the requirement for a domain name that would describe this industry on a geographical basis hence my purchase of www.englishbiofuels.com

I think this is a very good name as it could be used as the domain for both an information website on English Biofuels or as the name for a company website distributing English Biofuels. If this is of interest please get in touch.

Scotsman selling English Wines!

I don't normally sell wine as i'm far too fond of consuming it myself (Virgin Wine Club keep delivering a box every month) however i've a very good domain name that may sparkle for an English Wine lover.

www.english-wines.com

Saudi Tourism - yes or no?

It's not a country you automatically think of as a vacation destination but the Saudi monarchy are keen to follow the lead of Dubai and recreate Saudi Arabia as a holiday destination. Although over 3 million pilgrims make the journey to Mecca each year, western tourism hasn't really taken off. Prince Sultan bin Salman is keen to make Saudi Arabia one of the most favoured travel destinations in the world.

If the Sultan or a tour company are interested i have the following domain name for sale:-

www.saudiarabiantourism.com
and

www.saudi-holidays.com

Please see article from Arab News

Sultan outlines Kingdom’s tourism goals
Ghazanfar Ali Khan | Arab News

RIYADH: Prince Sultan bin Salman, secretary-general of the General Commission for Tourism and Antiquities (GCTA), said yesterday that the commission aims to make Saudi Arabia one of the most-favored tourism destinations in the region.

Prince Sultan was speaking at a luncheon meeting organized to launch GCTA’s summer tourism program. The tourism plan, Prince Sultan said, has details of the events, fun and frolics, traditional arts, folklore skits and sporting events that will be organized by local companies and tourism organizations in cooperation with the GCTA in different parts of the Kingdom this year.

“Our aim is to ensure sustainable growth of tourism sector and to offer the best tourism products and services with an aim to promote domestic tourism,” Prince Sultan said. “We are striving hard to make this country one of the three most favored tourism destinations of this region,” said the GCTA chief while giving an overview of the GCTA’s operations.

“There is a lot for tourists to do in Saudi Arabia and we have a lot to offer,” Prince Sultan said.

The summer events will be organized in staggered schedules across the Kingdom until the end of August. The details of the events can be seen on GCTA website event.sct.gov.sa/View.html.

A series of folklore events, sporting activities, shopping events with raffle draws and stunt shows have been lined up for this summer, he noted.

A tourist, either a citizen or a foreign tourist, will have the chance to discover the hidden treasures of Saudi Arabia, such as the remains of the Hijaz Railway, which was built in early 20th century for the use of pilgrims traveling to the holy cities of Makkah and Madinah from other parts of the world. Mountains abundant with vegetation and wildlife offer a verdant contrast to sprawling desert expanses. Scuba diving in the Red Sea is another attraction for visitors.

Prince Sultan said that the commission is working to model itself on the best world tourism bodies.

“In order to ensure this, we recently sent a number of mayors, municipality chairmen and university professors to different foreign countries to preview the urban heritage sites and to interact with tourism officials of those countries,” said the prince, while referring to the familiarization trips made by municipal and academic officials to Italy, France and Spain.

Prince Sultan said the program seeks to coordinate and unify the efforts of officials, investors, local communities, provincial authorities and municipalities. The program also seeks to support efforts of the private sector in planning, developing and operating tourism projects in the most efficient way. “This program with all our partners is yielding positive results,” said the tourism chief.

All government agencies are exerting efforts to help the tourism sector to grow, he said.

The Council of Ministers recently approved a strategic plan to boost Saudi Arabia’s growing tourism sector by making use of its Red Sea coast.

According to a report, the plan aims to tackle the problems that obstruct optimum and sustained use of the Red Sea’s tourism potentials, especially in economic, environmental and heritage areas.

According to the report, plans have been made to establish a large number of tourism projects along the Red Sea at a cost of nearly SR150 billion. The new resorts will be established in Arrayes in Yanbu, Ras Muhaisen in Makkah region, Haridha in Asir region, Fursan in Jizan, and Ras Humaid, Sharma, Qayyal and Dhaffat Al-Wajh in the Tabuk region. The plan is in line with the government strategy to increase tourism industry’s share in the country’s gross domestic product from six to 16 per cent by 2020. The tourism sector, including Haj and Umrah, currently contributes six per cent to the Kingdom’s GDP or SR55 billion.

http://www.arabnews.com/?page=1§ion=0&article=111123&d=22&m=6&y=2008&pix=kingdom.jpg&category=Kingdom

Hi Def Cams for sale!

I hope you agree that the following domain is a good one -

www.hidefcams.co.uk

Hi definition is becoming more popular and this domain would suit anyone selling hi defintion cameras. On a related note can anyone recommend a good hi def camcorder? Feel like i should get in on the youtube vibe albeit 2 years after everyone else. Any tips would be much appreciated.

Passiv Haus or Passive Housing?

A well written article explaining what Passive Housing is shown below (link in title)
I have two domains that have just become available for purchase that are the definitive domain names for a Passive Housing construction company.

www.passivehousing.com
www.passivehousing.co.uk

Warm homes without heating systems?
Submitted by: MikeC (Admin) on 02-Sep-07 08:37:37 PM

Back in the nineties sometime, I had occasion to visit a home in North Wales that was (the owner claimed) "imported" from, I believe, Switzerland. I don't recall anything externally that distinguished the property from others - it was dark - but inside there was a definite stereotypical swiss kind of look and feel to the place... think log cabin/sauna!

If you have such a house then you obviously provoke conversation. What I was told has always remained with me because, to my UK way of thinking, it was hard to get my head around... this was a home that had no heating system, whatsoever.

And yet, there I was, in the middle of winter, sitting quite comfortably in this spacious airy home... How does it work, was my next obvious question.

What I remember of the explanation given to me, can be summarised like this:

Incoming fresh air enters the building at some specific point.
Outgoing warm air "passes over" the incoming fresh air.
Through heat exchange, the outgoing warm air heats up the incoming fresh air thus maintaining a fairly constant ambient temperature.
Wow! Over the years since that revelation - largely because of the suspension of belief I had in what I was being told - I have spoken to various people in the building trade - including heating engineers - and not one of them had heard of such a system... nor could they quite get their head around how it would work.

But it is indeed out there and known as Passive Housing.

What is Passive Housing?
The property is built to a very high specification of airtightness - This is key since we want internal air to maintain its temperature.

Consequently, incoming and outgoing air occurs at only one point in the property, which makes sense if we are to maximise the effectiveness of heat exchange.

From what I can gather, incoming air is ventilated to specific parts of the building first (typically the coolest parts), and "extracted" from the typical "wet" areas of the property last (such as the kitchen, bathroom, laundry room etc...). These areas are typically the warmest which means that by extracting this warm air last, we get maximum heat at the heat exchanger.

And so completes the cycle.

It seems there are various methods in which incoming air can be routed into the property - In Ireland, MosArt have built a passive house which uses underground ducting to funnel air into the property. They claim that through heat exchange with the soil, fresh air is preheated to above 5°C (41°F), even on cold winter days.

Add to all this, triple glazed windows and solar panels for hot water, and you begin to see the significant benefits of passive housing.

I have to say that I thought the owner of this "imported" swiss home was probably a tad eccentric and would likely discover later that he'd been sold an expensive duff.

Turns out he was well ahead of current thinking... as is so often the case with eccentrics.

Scottish Ecotourism

Excellent article in the Sunday Herald last week regarding Scottish Eco-tourism. If ecotourism becomes more popular in Scotland i have a domain name that would be perfect for a company offering ecotours.

www.scottishecotourism.com

On The Road To Nowhere
Why Scotland’s missing the bus on eco-tourism
SPECIAL REPORT BY PETER JOHN MEIKLEM

TOP RESTAURATEUR SHIRLEY Spear can't talk for long about the impact "inadequate" public transport links are having on her business - she has to head off on a 50-mile car journey to pick up a trainee chef.

The co-owner of Skye's The Three Chimneys - widely regarded as one of Scotland's finest restaurants - Spear knows transport links on the island are so poor that if she wants the new chef to try his hand in her famous kitchen, then there is no alternative but to give him a birl in her Audi estate.

If she asked him to get the bus, the trainee may have had to wait a very long time. In fact, he would have had to wait for the morning school bus, but bunking down in the heather around Portree is hardly the ideal preparation for a job trial.

This situation in one of Scotland's top tourist draws outside of the central belt is just one example of the problems that industry body the Scottish Tourism Forum has warned will "wither" the industry unless more is done, and quickly.

According to recent research by VisitScotland, 40% of visitors now consider environmental impact when organising their holiday. The number of visitors actually using buses in Scotland has grown too - from 31% in 2005 to 38% last year.

With petrol prices continuing to soar, and the credit crunch giving would-be tourists all the excuses they need to stay at home, a meeting of many of the industry's key players last week warned that much of rural Scotland is "cut off" from the rest of the UK by the poor quality of the transport links.

Although the state and size of some of Scotland's main roads - such as the A75, the A9 and the A82 among others - is also considered a major impediment to growth, the public transport question is fast rising up the tourism industry's agenda.

Chris Harvie, the SNP MSP, says the Scottish parliament's economy, energy and tourism committee - of which he is a member - is looking at the issue with increasing urgency. The committee is due to report on the prospects for growth in the tourism industry in July and Harvie says concrete recommendations on improving public transport links for businesses will be made.

The government-funded tourism marketing body VisitScotland may still have "aspirations" that tourism spend will grow by 50% by 2015, but small operators across Scotland believe the chances of hitting that ambitious target are being undercut by the difficulty of getting around Scotland without a car.

Says Spear: "We are seeing an increased number of enquiries from people who want to get here without a car. They want to travel but they still want to be eco-friendly. We are sorely lacking in any kind of public transport to meet their needs."

Next year, the SNP government launches the Homecoming Scotland 2009. Ostensibly a celebration of the 250th birthday of Scotland's national poet Robert Burns, the homecoming is being used to market Scotland across the world, in the hope of harvesting a bumper year for the tourism trade. Spear, among others, feels the transport problem could mean the year of the homecoming stays stuck in the starting blocks.

"The new government has taken tourism on board in a big way. However, there is still a lot of work to be done. If we don't start planning and thinking ahead now we are going to be left behind like we have been so many times in the past."

Skye is by no means the only part of Scotland to suffer from the problem; all of the nation's outlying visitor-draws are suffering to a greater or lesser degree: the rest of the Highlands and Islands, Dumfries and the southwest, the Borders, the East Neuk of Fife, among others, can all slip off the traveller's itinerary once they have considered the labyrinthine network of bus times and connections required to get anywhere.

For Harvie, the crucial question is not the quantity or quality of the services - although he admits those are also serious areas of concern - but the co-ordination between various services.

He believes that a national co-ordinator should be appointed to promote a more joined-up approach from Scotland's public transport operators. A rural transport tsar - although Harvie disdains that shopworn word - who can "speak tactfully but with a big stick to encourage operators to work more closely together to make services join up", is number one on his wish list.

Tourism attractions in the central belt do not have to face the same public transport challenges. Spear says she is sometimes "aghast" at the "vast sums of money" spent on improving the travel infrastructure between Scotland's two biggest cities. To rub a little more salt in the wounds, City of Edinburgh Council, Glasgow City Council and Scottish Enterprise last week announced an extra £300,000 of funding to attract more tourism and to improve transport links between the two cities.

Called the Edinburgh-Glasgow collaboration initiative, the money will be spent on improving all sorts of connections between the two cities, allowing them to be increasingly viewed - a spokeswoman for the project says - as "one shared economic space".

Add to that the guts of the SNP'S current plans to improve central belt travel infrastructure - promising to spend £1 billion on Edinburgh trams, electrification of the Glasgow-Edinburgh rail line, completion of the Airdrie-Bathgate line, finishing the M74 and new plans to extend the M8 to full motorway - and you have a national picture that rankles with small operators from Scotland's hinterlands.

Alan Keith, chairman of the Association of Dumfries and Galloway Accommodation Providers, says tourism businesses outside the central belt are resigned to playing second fiddle.

Keith, who runs a small bed-and-breakfast operation on his farm near Castle Douglas, says the few visitors who try to get to the southeast by public transport have to first travel to Glasgow and then travel back down, a less then satisfactory state of affairs. He says for that to change there would need to be a "radical change of approach" from government and public transport operators alike.

"It's chicken and egg. The provision of services would have to reach a certain level before it would start having any effect on visitor numbers. Less than a certain level of service would just not be viable, but the operators will not put on more services unless they are assured of the customers. It is a real problem - maybe the government could step in and help them?"

Back in marketing land, VisitScotland's chairman Peter Lederer says the quango's recent research shows that the majority of visitors to Scotland were "satisfied" with the ease of travel around the country.

However, Lederer concedes there is room for improvement: "Quick and easy access to and around Scotland is becoming ever more important for our visitors, as is the quality of their experience while travelling. The needs of tourists in terms of facilities - for example luggage provision on services largely designed for residents, commuters, or business travellers - can transform that experience."

In a joint statement from the Scottish government and Transport Scotland, a spokesman restated their commitment to 50% growth in the tourism industry by 2015 and stressed that the government believed improved public transport links would play a pivotal role.

He said the government had committed itself to reconnecting the Borders to the Scottish rail network and that improving transport links between Edinburgh and Glasgow and their respective airports would help tourists planning to travel across the country.

"As a government we are increasing investment in public transport, building new rail lines, improving the bus network and putting money into other forms of sustainable travel such as cycling and walking. This will improve the quality, accessibility and affordability of public transport throughout the whole of Scotland."

For Spear, such a commitment from government is welcome. But she feels the issue must be tackled with more urgency.

Referring to herself and the other tourism operators pushing for urgent action, she says: "They have to do something before all of us lot get to retirement age or otherwise we are going to be left with nothing."


The time has come to grasp the transport issue'
Paul Easto is director of Inverness-based Wilderness Scotland, an adventure tour and eco-tourism operator with 1200 customers every year and a predicted turnover this year of £750,000.

He says: "Public transport is a very interesting issue for us. Historically, the tourism industry has shied away from tackling it because it felt it was too difficult. But now the feeling is that the time has come to grasp this issue and make things happen.

"It's not been dealt with in the past because of the complexity of it. Just exactly how does the tourism industry take ideas and concepts and take them through to the strategic level? These are extremely difficult things for the industry to do, but the services the likes of FirstScotrail provide are an essential part of the tourism infrastructure. Heads need to come together at a strategic level to realise how important this is for the industry.

"Customers do get in contact with us about this. Three years ago we took the deliberate choice to begin all of our holidays from Inverness train station. The idea to encourage people to travel by train and not to fly was quite a bold decision at the time.

"From a tourist's point of view, the way the rail ticketing service works is so incredibly complex that an international visitor will struggle to buy the right ticket. That is something that can be fixed in the short term.

"The price of oil is only going in one direction and that is going to pose problems for all sorts of tourism businesses. There is real concern."

Red Gurnard prices soar!

The red gurnard fish which used to be thrown away or used as bait by fisherman has had a remarkable makeover in the eye of the consumer. It's price has risen by 16 times largely due to it being championed by fish expert and chef Rick Stein. You too can be part of this increase in popularity by owning the definitive domain name for this fish. If interested in buying this please contact me.
The domain name www.redgurnard.com is available for purchase.

Please see article from Independant below.

Gourmet fashion sees the price of red gurnard soar by 16 times

By Terri Judd
Saturday, 22 September 2007


Once cast aside by fishermen or sold off as bait for far more sought-after seafood, the red gurnard is enjoying a stratospheric rise in popularity.


Gourmets across the country are seeking out the previously unappreciated white fish in vast numbers, pushing up its price from 25p to £4 per kilo.

The secret of its success has been the patronage of such well-known fish experts as the chef Rick Stein who has been extolling its virtues for years as an alternative to over-fished cod and haddock. Together haddock, salmon, cod, prawns and tuna account for 70 per cent of the fish sold in this country. But the power of the celebrity chef is unquestioned and many have encouraged readers of their recipe books to broaden their horizons.

In his new book, Rick Stein's Mediterranean Escapes, the TV chef has included a recipe for red gurnard in sweet and sour onions. However he pointed out yesterday that he had become a victim of his own success.

"I have always liked red gurnard but the slight problem is that it has become rather expensive. It is causing us some concern in the restaurant. It is getting quite pricey," he said.

His customers and readers, he explained, were getting increasingly brave in their choices and picking alternatives to cod such as pollack and ling.

"It is just a question of giving them the right recipe, the right application and then people are very happy. Ling and pollack are not that big a leap. They are quite similar to cod."

A survey of 1,200 consumers by the Seafish Marketing organisation found that 80 per cent were aware of over-fishing as an issue and 64 per cent said they would be prepared to try something new. Last year the Marine Conservation Society produced the Good Fish Guide encouraging consumers to conserve fish stocks and suggesting red gurnard as an alternative.

"Back a few years and gurnard was an unwanted part of the catch. But people have discovered it is actually very tasty," said Paul Trebilcock, of the Cornish Fish Producers Organisation.

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/news/gourmet-fashion-sees-the-price-of-red-gurnard-soar-by-16-times-464580.html