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…

I just received my first Finnish language spams ever. And when it rains, it pours. I got the same message several times (no wonder), and then also some different messages. Someone has inserted Finnish language files to some bots.

The first mail batch was peculiar. Nothing to do with the normal spam stuff, but it was about a nuclear reactor meltdown in Mikkeli. Rather odd message to be sent as spam, but probably tries to lure people to click on the link at the end to get them infected with spyware or something. Don’t know, didn’t try.

The message would have been more effective, if a) the sender would have had a Finnish name and b) there would be a nuclear power plant in Mikkeli. At least spammers got the name of the town right.

Jokes aside, I think that this development is alarming. There are a lot of people, especially older ones, that do not speak English or any other foreign language in Finland. They have been protected from spam threats by natural means, but now that protection is going to wear off.

I do hope that my parents are not fooled to click on the links, or I end up running anti-spyware tools all the time for them. Better call them tonight.

I’ve been forced to move out from my current hosting company (OnSmart) as they are moving out of business.

They first lost one domain for me (kept the money, though) and then had radio silence for a couple of weeks — until today they informed that they are swiftly going out of business. I had reacted a few days earlier and moved to HostMonster.com.

The site moving was surprisingly painless. I made a tarball of the files and dumped the databases, unpacked the files to the new location, and recreated the databases from the dumps. A few configuration file needed changing and then everything works ok. Or at least it looks like that. If you notice any glitches, please inform me.

Fortunately, nomadig.com is not registered through OnSmart. Better keep my domains and hosts in two different vendors.

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 recently received a huge amount of various spam messages that have been addressed to Gunnar Selheden @ various domains of mine.

In the past, the spam has arrived with various addresses that are just random. This behaviour has changed a bit for now, and maybe in the future there will be more poor Gunnars as recipients.

I’m curious to know where the name has been picked up. Probably I’ll never know (but you never know).

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.

The biggest newspaper in Finland, Helsingin Sanomat, run an article about LinkedIn, and I had the pleasure of being an average user with some people picked for short short interviews from my network.

I’m personally using the service for being updated what my former colleagues, friends and other aqcuitances are currently doing and where they are nowadays living. There were some other good reasons explored in the article, such as communicating, finding opportunities and so forth. Now I can also say that thanks to LinkedIn, I ended up in the newspapers…

The frequent readers remember that Nomadig.com has got its own share own spam comments. I used to handle the issue with Kitten’s Spaminator, but recently the sheer number of spam messages forced me to consider new alternatives.

I had read about Akismet now and then, but never had enough energy to give it a try. Then I installed it for a company that I’ve supplied blog, and the results were excellent. It went through the moderation queue and cleaned it up, and then continued sweeping the incoming comments.

I installed Akismet to Nomadig just before our trip to Thailand. After my return, I checked the status and there were over 3,000 comment spams in the Akismet spam queue. Everyone of those would have generated an email to me with Spaminator, so there were considerably less work to do for me.

The current count for the last 15 days (that’s how long Akismet keeps spam messages in the DB) is 4032 comments. I’ve had to check only a handful of spam comments that have slipped through Akismet.