Good afternoon. This is an unmanned website. All of the content updates automatically and was current at the time you arrived here. If you're here for the content, keep reading. If you're looking for information on the technology, it's at the bottom of the page. Otherwise... Today is Thursday, the 2nd day of September and the 245th day of the year. This is not a leap year, so there are 120 days remaining in 2010. On the Jewish calendar today is the 23rd day of Elul in the year 5770.
Today we celebrate the birthdays of Christa McAuliffe (1948), Mark Harmon (1951), Jimmy Connors (1952), Keanu Reeves (1964), Lennox Lewis (1965), Salma Hayek (1968), and Erin Hershey (1976).
On Wall Street
The New York Stock Exchange is currently closed. At closing today, the Dow Jones Industrials were at 10320.10, up by 50.63. The NASDAQ was up by 23.17 to 2200.01. The SP500 index closed at 1090.10, up by 9.81. Note: During trading hours all data is in real time. All data is preserved at the end of the trading day. It remains until the next opening bell.
NOT on Wall Street is Bernie Madoff. It's was over a year ago that he left town and retired to an efficieny apartment in Butler, North Carolina's Federal Correctional Complex, where he's now serving his 430th day. Wow, how time flies outside the walls. Bernie will have to wait 47,189 more days until Miller Time. Assuming he minds his manners (what the warden calls good behavior), his scheduled release date is November 14, 2139.
Earth and All Spheres
The overall weather conditions at NOAA reporting station KOCH were reported as fair at 4:53 pm CDT. The temperature was 80.0 F° (26.7 C°), and the the relative humidity was 74%, pushing the heat index up to 83 F° (28 C°). More [...]. For the seven-day forecast [click here]. We are under a last quarter moon. At the time you accessed this page, its exact age was 23 days, 22 hours, and 13 minutes. We will be under a new moon again on Wednesday, September 8th at 8:34 am CDT.
We are under the sign of Virgo in the 74th day of summer, which arrived at 6:28 am CST on Monday, June 21st with the occurrence of the Summer Solstice, the exact moment when the sun reached its zenith in the Northern Hemisphere and sunlit hours began to wane. However, the actual period of daylight varies according to latitude, so the Solstice does not necessary mark the longest day. At the moment of the Equinox, the earth's axial tilt is most inclined toward the sun at 23° 26' at all points north of the Tropic of Cancer. On the date of the Solstice, the sun rose at 6:14 am and set at 8:27 pm. For today, our sunrise and sunset times (at 31.580/-94.710) are 6:54 am and 7:41 pm, giving us 12 hours and 46 minutes of daylight. Summer will end on September 22nd at 10:09 pm CST with the occurrence of the Autumnal Equinox, the moment when our daylight and dark hours are approximately the same.
The Technology
This site is a working demonstration of on-demand scripting with server-resident PHP code. The code tightly integrates computed data with text, spewing forth natural-sounding narrative output with flawless grammar and syntax. The birthdays and the text below--which all change daily--are from databases created in-house. The financial and weather data are imported on-demand at page generation time. All the other information, including calendar, sun, moon and star stuff, is rendered by several hundred lines of custom code at the time the page request reaches the server. THIS SITE IS SELF-MAINTAINING. The daily content updates at midnight CDT. The weather target is 31.580/-94.710.
I'm pleasant. Damn it! I saw Drum Eatenton at the Piggly Wiggly this morning, and I smiled at the son of a bitch before I could help myself.
Shirley McClaine as Ouiser
Steel Magnolias, 1989
Email: tony@tonysartain.com
