Many of these countries, including India, China, Nepal, and Pakistan consider the 1st of May a public holiday. Most offices, banks, schools, etc. remain closed.

Here in the U.S., Labor Day is not celebrated until September. It will be interesting to see if Google reuses this doodle when the time comes in a few months.

Wikipedia has a great breakdown of when Labor Day is celebrated in different countries around the world.

France gets a different doodle today for Fête du Travail:

Here’s a look at the doodles Google ran around the world last week.

Still, you may want to check with your pretzel vendor of choice before you make the trip. It’s entirely possible that they’re still trying to make money today.

Google’s Zagat has provided a slideshow of 11 places to eat soft pretzels today (it helps if you live in Philadelphia). Zagat’s Danya Henninger writes, “According to the Philly Pretzel Factory, Philadelphians consume 12 times the national average of pretzels per year – 18 pounds per person. It makes sense, since this is where German immigrants first brought the ancient snack to American shores. For National Pretzel Day, PPF is giving away a free soft pretzel to each and every customer at all locations.”

The beloved pretzel brand Snyder’s of Hanover appears to be dominating the Twitter conversation. Here’s the a snapshot of that:

Regardless of whether or not your’re getting your pretzels for free today, might I suggest a pretzel dog. Bucky knows what I’m talking about:

Here’s what that might look like (NSFW language):

[stuntbear]

On February 4th each year, the island country commemorates its independence from Britain, which became official on this day in 1948. Citizens celebrate the holiday with flags, parades, etc.

This isn’t the only doodle Google is running today. On its Canadian home page, the company is honoring the last day of the Canadian penny, as it is withdrawn from circulation.

Last week, Google honored Jackie Robinson with a doodle here in the United States.

According to the folk tale, six more weeks of winter are predicted by Phil if he sees his shadow. If not, an early spring is “just around the corner.”

The tradition of Punxsutawney’s Groundhog Day dates back to 1887. Since February 2 falls on a weekend this year, record crowds are expected to visit Gobbler’s Knob.

In addition to live-streaming the event, the Pennsylvania Tourism Office has again teamed up with Foursquare to offer a special Groundhog Day badge. The first 500 Foursquare users to check in from Gobbler’s Knob on February 2 will receive a Groundhog Day-branded Slinky toy. The Slinky was declared the official toy of Pennsylvania in 2001.

Last year, Phil predicted six more weeks of winter, as is usually the case. Still, there is always hope that the groundhog will predict an early spring, and that the prediction will happen to be correct.

For those who prefer to sleep in on their Saturdays, the movie Groundhog Day is currently streaming via Netflix Watch Instantly. It is, in every way, more entertaining than one of the real predictions. As proof, last year’s festivities (which consist largely of men in top hats making a spectacle of a terrified rodent) can be seen below.

Starting out as a Baptist minister, King threw himself onto the national stage in the mid 1950s. In 1955, he led the famous Montgomery bus boycott, and a couple of years later founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In 1962, he spearheaded protests in Birmingham, Alabama and at 1963′s March on Washington gave the most famous and influential speech of his career as an activist – the “I Have a Dream” speech.

He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.

King was assassinated on April 4th, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee by James Earl Ray.

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, of course. The holiday was established in 1983 by President Ronald Reagan and first celebrated on January 20th, 1986. A bill was introduced to Congress in 1979 to establish the holiday honoring King, but failed by a few votes. The cause was aided a couple of years later after a national petition garnered a massive 6 million signatures.

MLK Day was not recognized as a paid holiday for state employees in all states until 2000, when South Carolina finally made it an official state holiday.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is celebrated on the third Monday of January, which is always around MLK’s birthday of January 15th.

The firm claims to detect over 90% of all new iOS and Android device activations on a daily basis, thanks to 260,000 apps which utilize Flurry Analytics. Based on its numbers, here’s what the day looked like compared to the average of the first 20 days of the month:

“In order to appreciate the magnitude of new devices activated on Christmas Day, Flurry established a baseline using the average from the first 20 days of December,” says Flurry’s Peter Farago in a blog post. “Over this period, daily activations averaged around 4.0 million per day, with variance of a few hundred thousand in either direction per day. On Christmas Day, activations soared to more than 17.4 million, a 332% increase over the December baseline. By comparison, Christmas Day 2011 held the previous single-day record, having reached 6.8 million device activations. Christmas 2012 is more than 2.5 times larger than Christmas 2011, which surpassed its own baseline by more than 300%.”

Flurry also looked at app downloads on Christmas compared to the average of the first 20 days of December:

One very interesting thing the company found is that tablet activations were actually greater than smartphone activations. According to Flurry’s numbers, tablets beat out smartphones 51% to 49%, though for the first 20 days of the month, it was a much different picture at 20% to 80%.

Customers were affected in the U.S., Canada and Latin America. Subscribers in the UK, Ireland and Nordic countries were not affected at all.

On Monday, Netflix put a post up on its Tech Blog to explain what happened. Essentially, the disruption in streaming services was impacted by problems with Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancer (ELB), which routes network traffic to Netflix.

Both companies have apologized for the outage, which began about 12:30 PM (Pacific), but “grew in scope” later in the day.

“Netflix uses hundreds of ELBs,” explains Netflix’s Adrian Cockcroft in the blog post. “Each one supports a distinct service or a different version of a service and provides a network address that your Web browser or streaming device calls. Netflix streaming has been implemented on over a thousand different streaming devices over the last few years, and groups of similar devices tend to depend on specific ELBs. Requests from devices are passed by the ELB to the individual servers that run the many parts of the Netflix application. Out of hundreds of ELBs in use by Netflix, a handful failed, losing their ability to pass requests to the servers behind them. None of the other AWS services failed, so our applications continued to respond normally whenever the requests were able to get through.”

The Netflix site itself was up and running throughout the incident, so customers could still access some functionality, and new customers could sign up (Update: Some claim they have been unable to use various site functionalities). According to the company, streaming from Macs and PCs was only slightly reduced from normal.

“Even though Netflix streaming for many devices was impacted, this wasn’t an immediate blackout,” says Cockcroft. “Those devices that were already running Netflix when the ELB problems started were in many cases able to continue playing additional content.”

The company says it is working on ways to extend its resiliency to handle regional outages.

“It is still early days for cloud innovation and there is certainly more to do in terms of building resiliency in the cloud,” says Cockcroft. “In 2012 we started to investigate running Netflix in more than one AWS region and got a better gauge on the complexity and investment needed to make these changes. We have plans to work on this in 2013.”

On a related note, Netflix says it sees higher usage on Christmas Day, with increasing streaming rates until people go back to school and work.

Anyway, don’t give me any of that It’s a Wonderful Life crap. It’s not. It’s a tough life filled with terrorists, explosions, detonators, machine guns, broken glass, Bruce Willis’ grin, and redemption. Fortress of Attitude knows that. You should know that.

HANS GRUBER!

[FortressOf Attitude] via JoBlo]

“While we’ve been tracking Santa since 2004 with Google Earth, this year a team of dedicated Google Maps engineers built a new route algorithm to chart Santa’s journey around the world on Christmas Eve,” says Brian McClendon, VP of Google Maps and Google Earth. “On his sleigh, arguably the fastest airborne vehicle in the world, Santa whips from city to city delivering presents to millions of homes. You’ll be able to follow him on Google Maps and Google Earth, and get his stats starting at 2:00 a.m. PST Christmas Eve at google.com/santatracker.”

Google also has a new Chrome extension and an Android app for Santa tracking.

“Before Santa takes off on Christmas Eve, you can also use the extension to follow the countdown to his departure, play around with his blimp, elf bus, and write messages on a frosty browser window,” says Google Chrome developer Eric Bidelman.

And of course, you can follow the updates on Google+, Facebook or Twitter.

You can go to the Santa’s Village site to watch the countdown.

Google also lets you send personalized holiday phone calls from Santa to your friends and family with Google Voice. You can learn more about that here.