Good evening. 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 Wednesday, the 10th day of March and the 69th day of the year. This is not a leap year, so there are 296 days remaining in 2010. On the Jewish calendar today is the 24th day of AdarI in the year 5770.
Today we celebrate the birthdays of Bix Beiderbecke (1903), Pamela Mason (1918), James Earl Ray (1928), Chuck Norris (1940), Kim Campbell (1947), Bob Greene (1947), Osama bin Laden (1957), Sharon Stone (1958), Prince Edward (1964), Jasmine Guy (1964), Ricky Seagall (1969), Shannon Miller (1977), and Carrie Underwood (1983).
On Wall Street
The New York Stock Exchange is currently closed. At closing today, the Dow Jones Industrials were at 10567.33, up by 2.95. The NASDAQ was up by 18.27 to 2358.95. The SP500 index closed at 1145.61, up by 5.17. 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. He left town a few months ago and retired to an efficieny apartment in Butler, North Carolina's Federal Correctional Complex, where he's now serving his 254th day. Bernie will have to wait 47365 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 mostly cloudy at 5:55 pm CST. The temperature was 73.0 F° (23.0 C°). More [...]. For the seven-day forecast [click here]. We are under a waning crescent moon. At the time you accessed this page, its exact age was 25 days, 4 hours, and 11 minutes. We will be under a new moon again on Monday, March 15th at 4:09 am CDT.
We are under the sign of Pisces in the 80th day of winter, which arrived at 11:47 am CST on Monday, December 21st with the occurrence of the Winter Solstice, the exact moment when our days began to grow longer in the Northern Hemisphere. The real equality of day and night only happens in places far enough from the equator to have a seasonal difference in day length of at least 7 minutes, actually occurring a few days towards the winter side of each equinox. On the date of the Winter Solstice, the sun rose at 7:14 am and set at 5:20 pm. For today, our sunrise and sunset times (at 31.580/-94.710) are 6:32 am and 6:24 pm, giving us 11 hours and 51 minutes of daylight. Winter will end on March 20th at 12:32 pm CST with the occurrence of the Spring Equinox, the moment when our day will be equally divided between day and night.
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.
It is in the compelling zest of high adventure and of victory, and in creative action, that man finds his supreme joys.
Antoine De Saint-Exupéry
Email: tony@tonysartain.com
