January is the month when everything on the website traditionally falls apart. It is because there are so many places where the New Year requires new files, folders, and updates to old pages and scripts.

Yes, I make a note of the work that needs to be done.
No, I don't read my notes — if I do, I'm too lazy to do what's needed.
So, in January, you and the website pay the price of my inattention.

This is an especially fruitful time for you to click for our Contact Centre to report misbehaving pages. Maybe a wrong or missing page or broken link.
I am grateful for a nod to motivate me to make corrections.

Children should treasure their childhood, because, once it is over, it will never return...
...unless they are lucky enough to grow old.

You would be mistaken to think that LPMCC.net is for your benefit (alone). It is actually my toy.

As a child you had Meccano construction and Bayko building sets. Long before the enclosed plans became ripped, stained and tatty, you moved on to new, freestyle inventions and designs.

These days my construction set is the World Wide Web (WWW), with a basic HyperText Markup Language (HTML) starter kit, a colourful book of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and an electrifying supplementary pack of JavaScript. With those bits and pieces, tools and temptations, there is no end to the mischief that can be tackled.

I spend hours thinking up tricks to play, ways to do them better, simpler, quicker. Starting with a bug-ridden JavaScript program, smoothing it out using CSS. Finally, finding a new HTML5 element that performs the whole trick in a couple of lines.

When folk say cast your mind back to when you were a child
my response is my mind never left !

The problem is casting my mind forward to today. I have all these fancy tricks scattered over the 2000+ pages of LPMCC.net, and I keep reinventing the wheel. If I recall writing a function, chances are I cannot find it.

Away from the web and back in Real Life ©, I keep a journal of Lost Things that records what I have misplaced, when and where it is rediscovered, and tries to analyse why it was lost. I am now beginning to do the same documentation for fancy-pants items on LPMCC.net. Not in a Real Life © journal, but an admin web page that records the most up-to-date version (when I can find it).

Now where did I leave my screwdriver?

After the angel of death killed all the firstborn as the final, terrible plague of Egypt the Israelites were liberated and began their Exodus from slavery. By following the prescribed instructions, the Israelites were spared destruction and forever celebrate Pesach, or Passover. The actual date is the middle of the month of Nisan, based on the Hebrew lunar calendar.

Jesus and his disciples went to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover, so the Gospels place the events of the crucifixion about this festival. Emperor Constantine I convened a council of bishops at Nicaea (in present day Turkey) in 325 AD, to establish the divinity of Jesus and a uniform date for Easter. It was ruled that Easter should be independent of the Jewish calendar. Calculating the actual date was not specified at the time, and over the centuries different methods developed, leading to disagreements between different Christian traditions.

Generally it is celebrated on the first Sunday after the full moon following the vernal equinox, but always after the Jewish Passover. This method follows the ecclesiastical (church) calendar rather than the astronomical equinox and full moon.

Because of this formula, Easter can be as early as March 22 or as late as April 25 in the Western (Gregorian) calendar used by most Christians. Eastern Orthodox churches use the older Julian calendar, which often results in a different Easter date.

There is a robust — but complicated — formula for calculating Easter in any year between 1583 and 4099. Outside those dates, all bets are off.

Whatever Rachel from accounts, Truss or Farage plan for the UK economy, we have exclusive access to a secret method of producing a £20 billion surplus without raising taxes or borrowing. Click the REORGANIZE button to see how we can make the magic money tree bear fruit by changing priorities.

Keep the change.

For the past few years I've been sending out a fancy-pants News emails with a blue background, two column format and round corners.

The format threw up an annoying glitch, so I decided to knuckle down and fix it. After hours of trying I succeeded, but it was a complicated bodge. What's more, I expect I'm the only person to see the benefit, unless you use Thunderbird like I do.

So I took a deep breath and decided to dump the fancy-pants format for a white paper News in a single column of readable size text...
...and no round corners.

I've read the brochures and checked a few instruction books, but I cannot find any information on the device that allows drivers to see round corners. It must be fitted to cars - and motorcycles - these days judging by the number of motorists who pass on blind bends.

Then I found from New Scientist that Wenwen Li at the University of Science and Technology in China has developed a system that turns a rough wall into a mirror by deciphering the reflection of items hidden round the corner. Wenwen Li and team achieve this by applying special algorithms to the image of the wall.

I bought the above item from the middle of Lidl well over ten years ago confident that one day it would come in handy. I'm please to say that last week it did, to drill small holes round corners.

It's good to have obscure kit in your toolbox because you never know what task is round the corner.

Still round some corner there may wait
A new road or a secret gate,
And though I oft have passed them by,
A day will come at last when I
Shall take the hidden paths that run
West of the Moon, East of the Sun.

Part of the Hobbit Walking Song from LotR by JRR Tolkien