When you have a personal website like this one, you derive no financial benefit from it. On the contrary, you pay for it: you pay for internt access and you pay for server space (though in my case, that doesn't apply nearly as much as in most people's). Furthermore, you spend an awful lot of time deleting unwanted comments from comments-enabled blogs such as this one, you spend time fiddling with pictures, and you can fritter away hours checking access logs to see what it is people are looking for anyway. For this reason, I've seen a lot of people who self-publish on the internt - whether it be trip reports, blogs on particular issues, or journals devoted entirely to things that I have a hard time understanding why anyone except the author would be interested it, but they have a readership - solicit some sort of "compensation". It comes in the form of wish lists with on-line retailers, PayPal donation buttons, or sometimes just put-upon rants about people emailing asking for updates and don't you know I have a life type responses.
I self-publish on the internet because I want to. This is something that, for whatever reason (more on that in a minute) I get something out of too. I like hearing from people. I don't do this because I'm developing some sort of career as a writer (I'm not), hoping for a book deal (nope), or want a portal site that will eventually generate advertising revenue (yawn. another buzzword). Nope.
Given the lead-in, you might expect that I'm about to start ranting (and no, the above paragraphs do not yet constitute a rant!). 
Not true. The motivation for this entry is actually very positive: I want to point out how great this site has been for me. A few people you've seen on these pages in the last couple of years were actually met on the internet, as a result of a few email exchanges that started with a trip report or blog entry. I think that's totally cool, even if it means having to say the inevitable, shifty-sounding "someone I met on the internet" when I'm asked how I know the person I'm off with this weekend, and it's the best part of having these pages. How else could I find out on Tuesday that I'm leaving for Finland on Sunday, and have a list of totally cool things to do there while I'm there - and a local to do some of them with? Meet Matti, who has commented on this site in the past, and who is a major reason why I saw as much as I did in a day's worth of free time in Finland.
Every year the Friends of Helsinki Zoo organize a Finnish and an international ice sculpture competition at Korkeasaari Zoo. This year's theme was "Animals and Nature". Teams got blocks of ice measuring 2m x 1m x 70cm, and they go to work. The postage stamp sculpture above was called something like "Here today, gone tomorrow", and, in hindsight, it was my favourite because it was true to the theme in more than the obvious way (let's carve an animal!) but also beautiful and didn't require knowledge of a Finnish folk tale to understand (as was the case with some of the entries in the Finnish competition. The one on the left is called "Antant", and it won the grand prize.
Getting to the Zoo requires either a ferry, which doesn't run in the winter, driving, a bus, or the metro (with a 1.8 km walk at the end). Fortunately, I didn't have to find my way myself since Matti came and picked me up at the hotel, and patiently answered the questions I peppered him with on the way out (between Matti and a particularly talkative cab driver that picked me up at the airport, I got a capsule lesson in Helsinki history and architecture. And I learned that, if your car gets fogged up as it does in Winter, turning on the air conditioning will act as a de-humidifier - advice I've put to use since getting back).
So, the ice sculptures at the zoo hit all the criteria for things I wanted to do while in Helsinki: something that I can't do anywhere else, connected to winter, involving going outside, with animals no less (we also saw live seals, lions, reindeer, owls, mountain goats, lynx, and a host of other animals - we were, after all, at a zoo).
But I also wanted to eat some "traditional" food - as in, I can go to a Thai restaurant anywhere, but how often do you get salsify, reindeer, and the like? Matti suggested the perfect venue, a place called Keittiö & Bar Juuri, which serves "sapakset" (traditional dishes?) tapas-style. That way, I didn't have to pick one of the many things I wanted to try: there were five of us for dinner, and we ordered the whole menu. Twice! And over dinner, Matti took my tourist map of Helsinki and circled places that would be interesting to check out the next day. So, even though I'd never been to Finland and speak not a word of Finnish ("sauna" does not count), I was now a step ahead of the average tourist. Except, I guess, the average tourist who actually does some research before getting on a plane and deciding to explore a city at 60 degrees north in late January/early February. But why do research, when you can simply get people who read your website to tell you stuff?