Good afternoon. This is an unmanned website. All of the content updates automatically and was current at the time you arrived here. The server and Greenwich Mean Times at the bottom of the page sync with the server and update continuously while this page is visible. 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 Friday, the 27th day of January and the 27th day of the year. This is a leap year, so there are 339 days remaining in 2012. On the Jewish calendar today is the 3rd day of Shevat in the year 5772. Tu B'Shvat falls this year on Wednesday, February 8th.
Today is the birthday of Jean-Francois de Troy (1679), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756), Lewis Carroll (1832), Dmitri Mendeleev (1834), Samuel Gompers (1850), Jerome Kern (1885), Skitch Henderson (1918), Donna Reed (1921), Troy Donahue (1936), Nick Mason (1944), Mikhail Baryshnikov (1948), Cris Collinsworth (1959), Bridget Fonda (1964), and Jennifer L.B. Leese (1970).
On Wall Street
The process of retrieving stock info involves many links between the sources and what you're reading on the screen. At the moment, there's a technical issue up the line with the DJ average. Occasionally, the data appears as random characters. If there's numerical data on the screen, it's accurate. The other indicies are working and accurate. The New York Stock Exchange is currently closed. At closing today, the Dow Jones Industrials were up by /A to 0.00. The NASDAQ was up by 11.27 to 2816.55. The S&P500 index closed at 1316.33, down by 2.10. Note: During trading hours all data is in real time. The data is preserved at the end of the trading day. It remains until the next opening bell.
NOT on Wall Street is Bernard Madoff, former executive chairman of the NASDAQ stock exchange. It was over two years 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 942nd day. Wow, how time flies outside the walls. Bernie will have to wait 46,677 more days until Miller Time. Assuming he minds his manners (what the warden calls good behavior), his scheduled release date is Saturday, November 14, 2139.
Earth and All Spheres
The overall weather conditions at Love Field were reported as fair at 3:53 pm CST. The temperature was 67.0 F° (19.4 C°). More [...]. For the seven-day forecast [click here]. We are under a waxing crescent moon. At the time you accessed this page, its exact age was 4 days, 8 hours, and 15 minutes. We will be under a new moon again on Tuesday, February 21st at 8:46 pm CDT.
We are under the sign of Aquarius in the 37th day of winter, which arrived on December 22nd at 11:30 AM CST. On the date of the Solstice, the sun rose at 7:26 and set at 5:25 AM CST. For today, our sunrise and sunset times (at -96.852/32.847) are 7:11 am CDT and 5:50 pm CDT, giving us 10 hours and 39 minutes of daylight. The start of winter, the Winter Solstice, is the time when the the sun reaches its most southern point and the daylight hours begin to grow longer. In theory, the date of the Solstice is the shortest daylight day of the year, but the reality is that the rule applies only to points far enough
north of the Equator (the opposite is true south of the Equator). Winter will end with the Spring Equinox, which will occur at 12:14 AM CDT. Daylight Savings Time always begins on the second Sunday of March at 2:00 AM when we start recording time as 3:00 AM. There are places, notably Arizona, where Daylight Savings Time is not observed.
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, history section 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 CST. The weather target is -96.852/32.847.
Today's lesson is on myopic thinking.
This "telephone" has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.
Western Union internal memo, 1876
Email: tony@tonysartain.com
214.778.5014
