Wednesday seemed to be one of those normal hectic days at the office; emails were flowing and people were calling me at such a pace that I barely got myself out of the office to grab a sub for lunch.

The atmosphere changed drastically when I tried to savour my lunch between phone calls, and suddenly I knocked off a glass of Pepsi Max to my dear MacBook Air. It was a small wine glass, half full, so not that much of liquid — but it managed to splash shock middle my keyboard.

I instantly turned the laptop over and dried it with a bunch of paper. It seemed to be intact, so I continued working and went to a couple of meetings to a customer. While there, the keyboard started to send extra keypressed, from the QWERTYUIOP row. A dash of letters appeared three times during the afternoon.

When I got home, I plugged in my Time Machine hard disk to backup the system. I also opened Aquamacs to grab the keyboard input. When the backup was over, there were more than three thousand letters in the Aquamacs window. All from the same row.

Other rows had stopped working, too. I tried rebooting, but no avail. External keyboard worked, so I could log in and make another copy of my working files.

The rest of the evening was spent with friends, so I couldn’t worry too much of the computer. Thursday saw me copying files from Air to my old G4 12″. The old laptop wouldn’t recognise the backup disk at all, so I ended up copying 1.2GB of stuff with SCP.

While copying, I also upated Office, Thunderbird, Camino and Adium to newer versions — time seems to take its toll on software pretty fast.

Finally, the copy was ready and I walked to Humac, an Apple reseller and service center a couple of kilometers from the office. I (or Exove in fact) paid extra 75€ to get the system inspected and fixed right away.

They called me later on Thursday, informing that only the keyboard had got wet and changing it would cost 400€. What else can you do but just accept the price?

I gave the permission and they called me on late Friday afternoon. The laptop was fixed and available for picking up. I dashed to the store, got Air back with a shiny new top cover including the keyboard and trackpad.

Maybe I should invest to some kiddy mug or similar that can’t be spilled over…

Some of my Finnish readers may know that I’ve been participating in Enterprise 2.0 ebook project. My chapter related to doing business in the network in modern age has now been published. Unfortunately, it is available only in Finnish.

I’ve been involved in writing a book about Enterprise 2.0. The book will touch a lot of stuff floating around the changes in the industry, as ways of working and communication are in constant flux nowadays.

The book is only in Finnish, as it is intended for the domestic markets. It will be published first in the Internet and maybe later it becomes a tangible printed book.

My Finnish speaking readers can go to www.yritys20.com. For the rest of you, I’ll provide short summaries from time to time, if anything interesting pops up.

Google has opened a referral program for their AdSense website monetising program. The deal is simple: if you get someone start with AdSense, you’ll get $100 when the new applicant has reached his or her first $100. After that you don’t get anything.

I’ve added an AdSense referral banner at the very bottom of the journal pages. It should be non-distracting on its current location, but please inform me if it hurts your eye there.

Now keep on clicking and signing, so I could get my hosting costs covered…

I have opened a new section to the site: store. Currently, there is not that much, but I do hope that it will fill up in the future.

As Christmas is approaching on steadily pace, I have opened a special Christmas page for helping you to decide what you would like to give or receive. Hopefully you find something there. I’d rather receive most of them and could consider also giving some of them :)

Also, remember that No Windows, No Problems t-shirts and other merchandise would make a geek happy.

At the end of the nineties, I and a few friends were actively spending some quality time in a student club in Helsinki University of Technology. As usually, the club was pennyless, but our visions were big. I came up with a slogan No Windows, No Problems that went well with the geekish image of the club, and we designed a T-shirt and sold them with minor profit.

Of course, I got my T-shirt, but unfortunately the printing went bad quite fast. A few weeks ago I spotted one of the shirts on a page of City magazine and started to ponder on creating the T-shirts again.

The design was really simplistic but still striking. I didn’t find any digital copies as my hard disks have died during round the world trip back in 1998 — can you imagine, two 4 GB SCSI disks stop working after been on for 33 days?

I couldn’t scan the image from my T-shirt as it was partly vanished, so I had to create a new design:

The new design is still striking, but it’s better composed and maybe better controlled. It also shows the passion better than the previous black and white logo.

As we nowadays have Internet with a lot of possibilities, I yesterday opened a shop in CafePress to get the shirts printed and delivered to whom they may concern.

Check out the site at www.cafepress.com/nowindows and consider showing that you care about having proper operating system.

Most of bloggers that are hosting their blogs themselves, are trying to scrape some income from the net to cover the hosting and other costs. I’m not an exception. In fact, my dream (or fantasy) is that Nomadig.com would provide enough money and contacts that I could concentrate fully on being a digital nomad…

With the current ad rates, it will take ages. Maybe my grand-grand-grand-children would have some possibilities with the current set of growth.

When I started to ponder this, backed with the data in my ShortStat stats, I found out that 20-25% of visitors check the journal front page, 5% see the site front page (no ads) and additional 5% reads the blog with RSS (no ads). Some of the most frequently visited articles generate additional 3-4% each and the rest is scattered with the information pages (travel, gadgets, money).

So the blog generates roughly more than half of the traffic. No wonder, as it’s updated frequently and it seems to contain some interesting articles. But, I think that the people reading the blog, people returning to the site, do not click that much of the ads. My eye, for example, has trained itself to skip Google ads in other blogs that I read frequently. It’s safe to assume that other people active in the blogosphere have similar habits. Also the contents of the blog change so rapidly that Google is not able to match it with ads that fit the text. The content is quite mixed, too, so you can’t really have a good set of targeted ads.

But those people that find this site, especially the pages outside the blog, with Google or other search engines are more prone to click the ads, as the ads are targeted to the content of the page. The same applies, at least partially, to individual blog entries.

In order to get more money from AdSense, I need to get more visibility in search engines. Not by spamming my links everywhere, but by writing interesting content and getting people to refer to my site.

Keith Robinson had a recent article in his blog www.dkeithrobinson.com/asterisk/ an article about a successful blog. After reading the entry I pondered the message for a few days and today I read an article about service in Finnish leadership magazine Fakta and decided to form my own thoughts.

I have categorised the required items into two categories: crucial and good to have. If you fail with the crucial ones, you are doomed to be unsuccessful. If you fail with the good to have ones, your visitors do not get fully excited about your blog and you may loose them easier.

There is no good measurement for these things; it is more about how does it feel — about “the warm fuzzy feeling” or teddybear effect. People want to hug your blog.

First, let’s go with the crucial ones:

• Good content. You simply live or die with this one. If you cannot write anything interesting, why somebody would be interested in your writing? Be consistent, write to the point. Be witty. If you don’t have anything to say, don’t say it. Don’t allow your blog to degenerate into a link list or a collection of other people’s thoughts. Don’t get stuck to one or two subjects. Remember that to gather big amount of people to read your writing, you need to something that is universally interesting or has special appeal for certain niche.
• Update frequently. Have something to say at least once a week. If you update less frequently, people tend to slow down the pace for checking updates on your site.
• Know your audience and allow them to know you. Blogging is bi-directional activity. You write, they write. Provide thought provoking content and then get responded, argued and bashed by your audience. Interact with them! Show that you care that they care.
• Allow people to leave on better mood. People should be happier or wiser after leaving your blog. Serve them well, make the blog your labour of love. Be funny, be witty (once again), make people laugh (with you, not at you).
• Personality. You have to be a personal experience for your audience, not part of the masses. If you can’t spot the difference between your blog and randomly selected blogs, do something for it. Be proudly yourself and make friends through blogging.
• Get incoming links. Superb content doesn’t help, if nobody can find your blog. Post your links to several places, interact with people, get your blog to blogrolls, have proper Google rating and spread the word. Be so interesting that your audience spreads the word for you.
• Patience is virtue. No man is born as an angler. Learn while you go and publish your learnings, it makes your blog more interesting and can be really helpful for somebody in your audience. Don’t dream on success, act for it. But steadily, rushing will just repel your audience.

And then the good to have ones:

• Vocabulary and grammar. If you cannot write proper English or you have limited set of words in your arsenal, you are seen unintelligent. How’s that for a label? Study and practice. Being native in English doesn’t usually help, as you may still be bad with the language. I’m not native (and it sometimes shows), but I try my best and I’m going to improve over the time. Oh, one more thing: avoid profanity.
• Openness. Write about those things that you feel strongly. Remember that you don’t have to be open for every detail of your life — you act as in role; you are a blogger that may not be completely the same person as you are. If some topic is a sore spot for you, don’t touch it. Remember, onsistency and honesty are the keys here. You are not just writing a story, you are the story.
• Usable and well designed site. Your site has to provide means for visitors to go around and reach all the corners and dark alleys, the buried content. With ease. It doesn’t hurt, if your site is visually pleasing. These all add credibility for the site. Don’t get too excited with visuality, as world is already full of good looking blogs with not much content. Images add eye candy to your posts; use them wisely.

As the last advice: don’t overdo anything. Find the balance in content, design and attitude towards your audience.