Well today, the 14th March, is Mother’s Day 2010 in the United Kingdom. That’s why there is currently flowers falling from my website via my JR Effects plugin.

I’ve just found that according to a survey completed recenty, mothers believe that the best present to receive on Mother’s Day is a hug! That’s quite surprising, but is good to hear since it saves on some £££

Another interesting point is that according to the same survey, 66% of people believe that Mother’s Day has become over-commercialised. I totally agree with this. It’s the same with Father’s Day, Easter, Christmas and most other events. It’s a shame really, because we aren’t really celebrating the events in a traditional way, we’re just feeding into the big businessmen’s pockets with money.

Mother’s Day falls on different days in most countries too which is a bit strange, but let’s take a look at when they all are:

United States: Second Sunday in the month of May.
Australia: Second Sunday in the month of May.
Belgium: Second Sunday in the month of May.
Brazil: Second Sunday in the month of May.
Canada: Second Sunday in the month of May.
Finland: Second Sunday in the month of May.
Germany: Second Sunday in the month of May.
Greece: Second Sunday in the month of May.
India: Second Sunday in the month of May.
Italy: Second Sunday in the month of May.
Japan: Second Sunday in the month of May.
Turkey: Second Sunday in the month of May.
United Kingdom: Mother’s Day is called Mothering Sunday and falls on the fourth Sunday in Lent.
France: First Sunday in June or last Sunday in May
Much of South America (as well as Mexico), Bahrain, Malaysia, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates: May 10
Mexico: – May 8
Russia: – November 28
Poland: – May 26
Egypt: – March 21
Norway: – February 13
Sweden: Last Sunday in May
Norway: The second Sunday in February
Austria, Hong Kong, Netherlands, Taiwan, Hungary, Portugal, South Africa, Spain: First Sunday in May

Feel free to correct me on some of the dates or let me know dates for countries that I’ve missed off!

And thus ending this rather pointless blog post. Enjoy Mother’s Day for the people in the UK, and treat your mother well

I thought I’d make a personal post for a change.

So far in 2010 I have 3 concerts planned:

22nd March – Delain – I absolutely love Delain’s music! They’re probably my second favourite band (After Nightwish, obviously) and I’m really looking forward to seeing them.

1st May – Kiss – My dad wanted to see Kiss so I thought I’d go with him. They aren’t my favourite band but oh well, they’re still good.

10th May – Kiss – Yep it’s Kiss again. I hope they’re good the first time or this one could be quite boring!

Unfortunately I have to wait until 2011 for Nightwish to tour again, I don’t think I can wait any longer. I’ve seen them once so far in London on the 11th March, I had to travel for around 8 hours in total for that show and it was definitely worth it.

On another note, I really, really hope Nightwish release The Heart Asks Pleasure First soon. I think it would be a good idea to release it in 2010 to give Nightwish fans something to “put them on” until the next album in 2011. I absolutely love that song and all I have is pretty bad versions of it.

Yes, that is Finnish you can see in the title of this post. Nope, I’ve not gone completely insane, I’m starting to learn Finnish

I’ve learnt some of the basic words so far, but I haven’t really had time to get into any real detail yet. Luckily, thanks to a few nice CDs I found, If I so choose I can go up to a random Finnish person and say “Misså lentokone on?” without looking very weird. Okay, maybe I will if I ask where the aeroplane is.

Anyway, I just thought I’d make a personal post on my PERSONAL blog for a change, after all, if you look at the recent post history it basically just goes like this:

Wordpress plugin
Wordpress plugin
Wordpress plugin
Tech tutorial
blah blah blah…

So yeah, I might have to start making some different types of posts on here. Unless of course you’re only here for the wordpress plugins. In that case, I’ll do my best to keep pumping them out, although don’t expect many around Christmas (Which isn’t far away now, woo!) because obviously I’ve got other “family commitments”, but I’ll still make some attempt to code them.

Of course, I am running out of ideas for plugins as you can probably imagine, so if you ever have an idea for a plugin, feel free to contact me and I’ll see what I can do

Well I’m sure a lot of you will have heard about the story with the picture of Michelle Obama (President Obama’s wife, in the US) ranking 1st on Google image search. This however, wasn’t a normal picture of her. It was a fairly vile looking image, which made her look like a monkey – Quite racist, it seems. You can see it below:

Not the nicest image in the world, it must be said. As you can see from the image, Google’s answer to this problem was to run a few Google ads saying that some search results may be offensive. Does that really solve anything? Do people suddenly stop seeing this image? No. It solves nothing, and this picture is, according to Google, not “contradicting their Terms of Service”.

I’m not sure what President Obama thinks, or indeed Michelle Obama. Google did apologise for the image though.

What I find funny, as well as quite interesting, is how this image managed to rank so high on Google images to start with. For a popular person like Michelle, it can’t be that easy going straight to #1 on Google image search. The person who owned the image must have done some pretty good work to have pulled this off.

I’m sure which ever site is hosting this image is laughing right now, because they’ll be getting a lot of extra visitors from this. You know what they say, bad publicity is better than no publicity. Well, sort-of anyway.

I just managed to get a Google Wave invite from a kind person, so I can finally test it out!

I’m now giving out free Google Wave Invites! All you have to do is make a comment on this blog post, and I’ll do my best to send you an invite as of when I have invites available.

It would be preferred if you could include a name in the name field, instead of a keyword. That makes it better for me.

Also, Google Wave invites take around 1 – 3 days to arrive. This isn’t because of me, it’s Google Wave that sends them out like this.

Enjoy