I’ve had many people contact me since I launched my Calendar plugin to wordpress.org asking if it is possible to change the day the week starts on from Monday to Sunday. Now obviously I’m aware that some people do start the week on Sunday, but I had never realised quite how many people this was until the use of my plugin became widespread and I must say I’m still really perplexed as to why.

The working week the whole world over is Monday through Friday, with Saturday and Sunday being affectionately known as the “week end”. This being the case, how can Sunday be the start of the week on a calendar when it is one of the days that constitutes the week end? Surely it is a contradiction in terms? Visibly this would make the week end split up at opposite sides of the calendar.

Due to demand I will be allowing users of the next version of my Calendar to change the day the week starts on but in the mean time I’d very much like comments on why some might start the week on a Sunday. Any financial, economic, religious etc. reasons with online references to further explanations would particularly helpful.

It is without a doubt that one of the few anti-spam measures in place on my blog that has stopped me disabling comments is Akismet. The service catches literally thousands of spam comments on a daily basis. The problem is that while I used to get absolutely no spam through to my moderation queue such that all I had to decide was if I wanted a comment published, I’m now getting spam through as well and I’m having to mark various items as spam for submission to Akismet.

Critics will no doubt point out that this quantity of spam can’t be numerous and they’d be right, but as the solution didn’t previously let any through and Akismet is a continuously evolving anti-spam solution its worrying that its effectively getting worse over time as it means spam is evolving better than the defenses of Akismet.

Spam is without a doubt one of the biggest issues on the world wide web and while it hasn’t yet caused me to disable access to anything on my sites, if too much spam gets through to my blog moderation queue then I will be disabling comments. You might argue that disabling a feature is letting them win, but my take on it is that if I end up reading spam then I’m letting the spammers win because they have reached me as a reader. Likewise if there is a possibility that the comments might reach my blog then I’d be letting the spammers win by allowing the comments to reach a global audience.

Here’s hoping that Akismet doesn’t get any worse at blocking spam, or even gets better, as that way the comments can keep on flowing and I can be safe in the knowledge that I’m not in any way helping spammers reach their audience.

Lately I’ve replied to a few e-mails I’ve received only to be confronted by an automated response asking me to reply with the subject intact to prove I’m not a spammer. This kind of practice seems to be on the rise and in my opinion is completely pointless. I explain my reasons below.

To simply have to reply with the subject intact merely proves that the place you are sending from exists, not that the content you sent wasn’t spam. It would be perfectly possible to setup a server to reply automatically to any such message it receives (messages are of course easily identified by a long character string in the subject line). This would then allow the spam server to spam that address with everything and anything because not only would the first message then be allowed though but the sender would be white-listed and so any other spam that the spam server needed to send out could count on all of these white-listed servers to receive mail. Not a situation which is desirable in any way.

More fundamentally though, if you e-mail me asking for help or other questions and I take the time to reply to you, why should I have to verify I’m not a spammer? You e-mailed me first asking for a reply, surely you should have the courtesy to white-list my address so that my reply is as easy to formulate and send as possible?

As a point of principle I will not verify my address with any of these systems. If you e-mail me, I will reply. If you have one of these systems in place that requires me to verify my address, you might want to check your “holding bay” because you’re not going to get me to reply to these silly bots.

Finally some scientific evidence to support those of us that love a few pints of the good stuff now and again.

Apparently a pint every day could present sinilar positive benefits to that of the common aspirin tablet such as thinning the blood to prevent clotting and reducing the amount of cholesterol deposited on the artery walls.

All is revealed in this BBC news article. Even if you choose not to believe this, there certainly can’t be any harm in drinking a pint and thinking it might be doing you some good rather than harm, it simply enhances the enjoyment of your pub visits! Casting all that aside I certainly wouldn’t half mind my own copy of the featured poster on the left.

This is a small blog post aimed at those who have ended up graduating earlier than imagined, according to facebook that is anyway! There is however a very simple fix for this.

• Click “account” on the top right of the facebook homepage when logged in
• Select the “Networks” tab when the page loads
• Select “Edit info” on the network from which you have become an early graduate
• Change the “Class year” to the one in which you will in fact graduate from university
• Save the settings

After following these steps you should cease to be an alumnus on your university network on facebook. Have fun!

I’ve been a long time listener of Pandora, and while I’ve been sharing with you what I listen to on my home hi-fi in the sidebar of my site for some time, I’m now sharing my Pandora listening habits across facebook.

What this means is my facebook profile updates when I start listening to a different radio station and what’s more it gives you a link to listen to exactly what I’m listening to, plus some album/artist art to spark your interest if the name of the station alone isn’t enough.

If you’re into Jazz and Blues music I’d strongly recommend any of my stations to you. Please feel free to post up your comments on my Pandora stations to this blog post.

The mail arrived before 8 o’clock this morning for the first time ever in my area. Could this be a new trend? Is this an indirect sympathy response to my Harry Potter post? Who knows. It certainly would help me if Royal Mail did get their act together and do early deliveries as then I’d get all my mail before work/uni and save myself the huge trek down to the sorting office, which considering their opening hours is no fun at all.

What I do know for sure though is that my Harry Potter book arrived this morning and I’m already reading it

My copy of the latest Harry Potter book didn’t arrive this morning when it was supposed to, even though I’d ordered it back in February from Amazon. A Royal Mail van turned up with a parcel but there was only one and it was for Kat (my old housemate).

I’m very disappointed in both Amazon and Royal Mail - if I’d known this was going to happen I would have queued outside a bookshop last night. Now I’m going to have to become a hermit just to avoid all the reviews and spoilers that are already abound in every kind of media imaginable, not to mention word of mouth. I almost didn’t dare read the papers this morning. This sucks

Its seems that every single house around us is being gutted at present and the noise is terrible! We live in a back to back terrace house and there is work going on in the two houses to the right, the house behind and two houses along to the left (although the two houses next to us on the left are thankfully quiet.

What makes the noise so noticable and thus so annoying is the fact that all the major house walls are connected, so bang on them with any great force (for example to rip out an old kitchen) and you can be heard down the whole street. When this is happening in a load of houses at once it makes you want to stay out of the house as much as possible. Thankgully because I’m working I can do that most of the time, but it doesn’t make a pleasent wake up call in the mornings.

I was speaking to Heather last night and she told me that she’d found a really cool website called 43 Things. I was amazed because I discovered 43 Things ages ago and just figured that everyone knew about it by now but actually it turns out very few people do.

For those not in the know, 43 Things is a site that allows you to set goals to achieve in your life, comment on them, share them with other people, find out who else has the same goal and get support from people who have acheived it. In the past I have found it to be a big inspiration and confidence boost. The funny thing was I hadn’t registered on the site myself and last night I realised I didn’t know why so this morning I remedied that and set up my account.

For those interested, here is a link to my profile on 43 Things. There’s not much on it yet but I’ve added a few things I saw on the site that I’d like to do and will add more soon. If you have a 43 Things profile, why not share it in comments.