On the Start of the New (Hobbit) Year

Happy New Year! In the Shire, anyway. 🙂 If we were Hobbits, if we lived in the Shire, today would be the first day of the new year, the 2nd of the month of Yule. Yule is a strange month. It’s only two days long. The first of Yule is the last day of theContinue reading “On the Start of the New (Hobbit) Year”

On Long-Expected Parties

I fired up Opera this morning, looked at my own website, and there, in the sidebar, was the usual “this day in Middle-Earth” feature. And lots of things happened in Middle-Earth today. A few years ago I wrote a BASIC program to convert Gregorian dates into Shire dates. No, I can’t tell you why —Continue reading “On Long-Expected Parties”

On the Need for Hobbies

Being the hot, miserable day that it is, I worked on a Word macro coding project for work I’d started (and finished–or at least got something that runs) last week, to clean up the code, strip out some redundancies, and replace a brute-force search-and-replace with a much cleaner looped search-and-replace. And then, I turned myContinue reading “On the Need for Hobbies”

Again, On Shire Reckoning

I’ve been asked if my Shire Reckoning WordPress plug-in would ever be available as a WordPress widget. As of today, it is. Installation is a snap. Download the .zip file. Extract the file and upload it to your widgets directory. Activate the Shire Widget plug-in. Then on your widget management screen, drag it to yourContinue reading “Again, On Shire Reckoning”

December’s Greatest Hits

The top fifteen reasons people checked out allyngibson.com in the month of December. 15. “John Lennon atheist.” I wouldn’t call Lennon an atheist, per se, but he certainly had his issues with organized religion. Witness this quote–“Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I am right, and have been proven right. We’re bigger thanContinue reading “December’s Greatest Hits”

For Geekoid Fanboys Only

In the summer of 1999 I reread The Lord of the Rings for perhaps the dozenth time. With that particular reading I studied, really studied, Appendix D on the calendrical systems in use in Middle-Earth in the Third Age. I was drawn, in particular, to the Hobbit calendar and decided to write a quick-and-dirty computerContinue reading “For Geekoid Fanboys Only”

The Magical Worlds of the Lord of the Rings

David Colbert’s new book, The Magical Worlds of the Lord of the Rings bills itself as a reference to the “amazing myths, legends, and facts behind the masterpiece.” Colbert is no stranger to this sort of book having authored a similar book last year on Harry Potter. At a slim 196 pages (including bibliography, suggestedContinue reading “The Magical Worlds of the Lord of the Rings”