Floating with the current

Piece of Finland

suonenjok1lainen — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 10:29:07 +0000

Do you miss the old home country? Or want to give something special to someone special? Do you find it hard to describe something real Finnish stuff?

When I lived in New York in the eighties, I missed salmiakki candy, dark rye bread, Fazer sininen chocolate, strong Finnish coffee and some other items, mainly food stuff. Taste of Finland. In those days, it was not so easy to get these yummies, you had to ask a friend or relative to mail you your favourites.

Today the answer is Internet. You can order loads of cool stuff from: Suomikauppa. See my links to their website.

It is really easy to find anything from the net. From making travel reservations to buying special items or just looking for information or news. Anything for anybody. Even the answer to the question: are there polar bears in Finland: no there are not. But there are countless hot spots, namely saunas. And you may even find a long lost relative. Who knows!

Car rental is expensive in Italy

suonenjok1lainen — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 16:03:04 +0000

I had to pay 120 euros extra for a rental car in Italy, one year after the actual rental. Just received another “administrative fee” from the Italian Europcar on my last summer, ie. Summer 2008 rental. The amount is for 60 euros! In the end of last year I got my first invoice for the same amount. They say that these fees are for contacts with the local authorities due to traffic violations while renting their car. I admit one traffic violation, because we did not pay the highway toll, could not figure out how to work the darn machine. So there is the violation that I know of. But the violations have happened within one hour on the route from Turin to Sestriere, on the highway there, I assume based on the time stamps of the supposed violations.

The funny thing is that I have not received any fines from the Italian police so far. Well, maybe it takes more than a year for them to collect the fines. Anyway, there will be more to pay, when and if the authorities send their invoices for fines for traffic violations. And the other violation I don’t even know what I’ve done wrong.

But Europcar has charged a stiff charge twice for providing my name and address to the Italian police.

So pay attention when driving in Italy. You may get fined without knowing what you have done. And the car rental company can charge large sums on your credit card, relating to the administrative costs for the notification of traffic violations.

Websites getting better

suonenjok1lainen — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 05:49:20 +0000

Are the websites getting better, or is it just my way of surfing the net? This is what I have noticed anyway. Maybe it is the improved skills, better quality free tools, simply the amount of free information available for people designing the websites. But it is making me happy when looking for information from the internet.

However, I am really pissed of f because of the amount of various internet listings there are. Sometimes it is really hard to find websites of actual businesses when “googling the net”. Google listing is full of different directories but no real websites. I am not interested in entering to another listing since I am using one already! What I am looking for is an actual business website! There is still need for some serious SEO, or at least an effort to make your company’s website optimised so that it will appear on the search engine listings before these dozens of directory listings.

So it is not enough to have a nice looking but not enough optimised website for your business. Make sure the website is not lost in the net jungle. It is not really hard to make an effort for optimizing your website. There are some simple steps you or your web designer can do:

Title element, the one you see on top of your browser window, has to describe the content of that page, just a few carefully picked words. Then the content text, make sure that your website says something about your business. And the most significant text has to be on top of each page. Keep it short and simple. Your content text has to contain the keywords people are using when searching your services. Also, use heading texts correctly, you know those

and

s. When your website is interesting enough, it is obvious that there will be links from other websites to your website. Ensure that there will be those links because they are really important. Ask your business associates or friends to add your website link on their web pages. It may not hurt to include your website on some of the carefully chosen directories either. Pay attention to the meta tag “description” since this is often listed on the search engine listings and helps your potential customers to pick your website on the listing. There is another meta tag that you should pay attention to and that is the character encoding ISO-8859-1 which will show Finnish alphabets correctly. There are still websites that use frames. For heavens sake, forget the frames! You don’t need them. These are some of the features I use when designing websites for my small business customers. I am pleased with the outcome on search engine listings.

It is rather easy to have the website high on Google listing when your website is in Finnish, rather small language. But still there are companies that will never be on Google page 1 or 3 because there is no effort what-so-ever done for the optimisation of their website.

Are the websites really getting better. That remains to be seen.

Salmon farming is bad for world’s fisheries

suonenjok1lainen — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 06:42:35 +0000

I watched this program on Finnish TV about the overfishing for fish food for the farmed salmon in Norway. This partly illegal fishing threatens the world’s fisheries. This is true because the huge industry in Norway and Chile need large quantities of fish food. More fish are needed for fish food and oil than what is produced in fish farming. This simply does not make sense!

Roughly one-third of total annual fish catches ends up for fish feed, according to WWF. Aquaculture is the reason to the declining fish stocks of cod, haddock, anchovy, herring, and other commercial species. They’re the foundation of the food web. And this food is taken right from the dolphins, seals, whales, sea birds , as well as from the people. Families in coastal fishing villages are suffering from rampant overfishing and the destruction of their natural legacy of ocean fisheries and the ecosystems.

And again, greedy people are to blame. When is this robbery going to stop.

Finnish rye bread is healthy

suonenjok1lainen — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:31:14 +0000

Finland has a wast quantity of various breads. One third of the bread the Finns eat is rye bread. It is healthy according to general clinical studies of the benefits of that bread. The health enhancement of rye is based on the rye fibre.

It is said that eating rye bread helps stabilize blood sugar levels, minimizes the risk of heart diseases and lowers the risk of some cancers. And improves gut function. All this just by eating this wonderful food. Finnish rye bread is whole-grain which makes it different from that brand of breads in other countries.

Eating rye bread has always been popular among the elderly people but today especially younger women have taken it into their healthy diet.

The flavour of rye may feel rather strange in the beginning. But that unique aroma is exactly what separates rye from the rest. When travelling abroad, the Finnish bread is the taste I miss most. I cannot stand the rubber-like white breads which are most often available in the stores.

Now you can order this wonderful, healthy bread from Suomikauppa. They deliver abroad. See my links for their website.

Floating with current

suonenjok1lainen — Fri, 29 May 2009 05:41:13 +0000

I let the current take me. Sometimes the swirl grabs me, but I always manage to remain on surface. Is it just lucky me?

This starts my blog. Thought about the current came from the river that runs through my home town: Suonenjoki river. The name of the town is also Suonenjoki.