I spilled a half cup of coffee on my laptop keyboard last week. Walking across the coffee shop, I stumbled as I approached my chair. Coffee sloshed from my cup in slow motion and fell toward my open laptop on the table below. Coffee splashed across the keyboard and up onto the screen and the wall nearby.

A frantic couple of minutes ensued while I powered it down and cleaned it up. Fearful, I started it back up. There were no sparks or smoke.

A week later, the laptop continues to run. The only side effects from it’s sip of coffee is it appears to be faster and I can’t put it to sleep.

The web is all abuzz with angst and handwringing over yesterday’s two hour Gmail outage. Opinion pieces are cautioning people against relying on the cloud too much — after all if you stick all your data in the cloud and the provider goes down, you’re without access to your data. (For the record, I use Google Apps for two different domains and didn’t notice an issue.)

For most uses, however, cloud computing is not only more reliable, but safer than the alternatives. This outage primarily highlights the issue with large numbers of users flocking to a single service. When that service goes down, many people are affected.

Email servers go down all the time. Ask any employee of a small to medium company about the last time the “network” went down. Whether it’s the corporate Exchange server, a login server, or the actual network gear, brief issues and outages are not uncommon. You don’t hear about them simply because there are only dozens of users affected, not millions.

Most email systems don’t operate at web scale. They are localized (even in global, Fortune 500 companies mail servers are often geography specific) and can easily be brought down for maintenance during off periods. Gmail is a global app and likely doesn’t have any periods that can be considered off-peak. Considering that, Gmail’s uptime record is quite impressive.

Amazon’s nine hour outage from a few weeks ago and Gmail’s two hour outage yesterday aren’t ideal, of course. You’d rather have perfect reliability. But perfect reliability is a pipe dream. Google and Amazon have fearsome infrastructures and crack teams managing their services. They can afford the best of the best of everything and can recruit the best talent in the world. If they can have an outage, how much more likely is it that your in house IT staff and data center will have an issue? And which group would you trust more to recover quickly and ensure the issue doesn’t arise again?

On that same thread, what are the backup and disaster recovery practices like at your company or local email provider? Would you like to take bets as to whether Amazon or Google have better ones? Is your data more safe simply because it’s on your local network?

Companies and individuals relying on the cloud would be advised to back up their data and have plans for what to do in the event they lose their data or services. You shouldn’t rely on a third party to safeguard your critical data — after all, it’s your business that suffers if your data disappears. But using a solid cloud provider reduces the likelihood that you’ll ever actually need your backups.

“I’m always relieved when someone is delivering a eulogy and I realize I’m listening to it.” — George Carlin, May 12, 1937 - June 22, 2008

I’ve become hooked on Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, the BBC show where restaurateur Gordon Ramsay spends a week with a struggling restaurant, trying to turn it around. It’s a show full of business lessons, from finding a market, to pricing, to product presentation, to accounting.

I’m going to be pulling some of the quotes from the show and posting them here over the next few days. Today’s is…

Don’t put your ego before your customers.

Said to an award winning chef who’s fancy pretentious menu and sky high prices scared away customers.

I can’t find wifi at Under The Radar, but I’m going to twitter as much of the sessions as my iPhone battery allows. Watch my twitter stream.

Update: Wifi is here, just not obvious. Still twittering, though.

Fred Wilson is running a series of quotes from a book about the father of venture capital, Georges Doriot. Today’s is from Dennis Robinson, CEO of one of Doriot’s portfolio companies, High Voltage Engineering.

At early board meetings, I would try to give an accurate accounting of the profit and loss. He would look through me and ask what I really thought about when I was shaving.

Fred asked if people were enjoying the quotes because he hadn’t received any comments. I commented that short quotes are like candy. They’re fun but without substance. They’re empty calories. What I’d really like is to talk about what the quote means, tie it to some examples, and start a conversation around it.

Doriot was looking for the true picture of an early stage company. What the numbers look like is important, sure, but in a very early company, what what Doriot wanted to know is what was occupying the CEO’s thoughts. Not everything that’s important can be measured. Not everything that can be measured is important.

I had dinner with a friend last night and we were swapping war stories from the dot com meltdown. He was working for one of the big interactive shops, running the technology projects for the company. He’d often attend analyst presentations and related how they’d share new projects or interesting technologies with the financial analysts. The analysts didn’t care. They simply wanted to know how many new seats the company was adding. How quickly is headcount growing.

Because the analysts were basing their recommendations on this measurement, the company was leasing space like mad. Their stock price tracked closely to how many square feet of expensive downtown Manhattan office space they leased. They were being judged on measurements that weren’t important.

What occupies a CEO’s mind can show you where a company is heading. What issues are being faced. Where the strengths and weaknesses of the company are. And where the strengths and weaknesses of the CEO are. In an early stage company, these questions are critical. What’s more, during down time, you’re more likely to think about philosophical questions. Big thoughts without tidy answers. Things that are important but not measurable.