Good morning, and welcome. All the information on this site was current at the moment you arrived. The content updates continuously (per load) without the help of Internet monkeys. Absolutely everything you're seeing is generated by code developed TOTALLY inhouse. No commercial website software is in use. NOTE: You can click on the bright spot inside the lens flair to swat the fruitfly. If it doesn't annoy you, perhaps you're weird. [ more in the Technology section... ]
Today is Wednesday, the 4th day of November and the 307th day of 2026. Most of the contiguous United States is observing Daylight Saving Time (DST) at the moment. It will end on November 1st at 2:00 AM when clocks "fall back" one hour. While many countries observe DST, the beginning and ending dates and times vary, so as to add another layer of confusion to the scheme. Dates and times on this site are for the Central Time Zone in the United States.
On the Jewish calendar, today is the 24th day of Heshvan in the year 5787.
We are under a waning crescent moon. At the time you accessed this page, its exact age was 24 days, 5 hours, and 25 minutes. We will be under a new moon again on Monday, November 9th at 10:24 AM. The next full moon will occur on Tuesday, November 24th at 4:46 AM. For now, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter are visible in the night sky. Mercury can be seen in the eastern sky just before dawn. Looking into the night sky, far beyond our Solar System neighbors, we see that we are under the sign of Scorpio
for today, our sunrise and sunset times (at -96.852/32.847) are
6:38 AM
and
5:25 PM,
giving us 10 hours and 47 minutes of daylight.
We are in the 42th day of autumn in the Northern Hemisphere. Summer has ended, but not the hot weather. The autumnal equinox, which occurred on September 23rd, marked the end of summer. On the day of the equinox, the sun could be observed to be directly above the equator, and the night and day were the same length. The actual crossing of the sun over the equator takes approximately two and a half days. The equinox occurs halfway through the transit when the center of the sun is directly over the equator. Winter will begin on December 21st when our days begin to grow longer. It's weird, but longer periods of sunlight is when our weather becomes colder... more details as we get closer to the date.
Today we celebrate the birthdays of William III (1650), Will Rogers (1879), Luigi Lucioni (1900), Gig Young (1913), Walter Cronkite (1916), Art Carney (1918), Martin Balsam (1919), Doris Roberts (1925), Loretta Swit (1937), Laura W. Bush (1946), Robert Mapplethorpe (1946), Markie Post (1950), Dan Hartman (1951), Kathy Griffin (1960), Ralph Macchio (1962), Jeff Probst (1962), Matthew McConaughey (1969), Sean "Diddy" Combs (1970), and Alexz Johnson (1986).
Today in History: The Completion of the Erie Canal
The Erie Canal was completed on this date in 1825. An engineering marvel that was once called the Eighth Wonder of the World, it connects Lake Erie to the Hudson River. Construction on the canal began in 1817; it runs 363 miles from Albany to Buffalo, and traverses rivers, valleys, forests, and marshes. It was the first route from the eastern coastal ports to the Great Lakes that didn't require portage, it was significantly faster than overland routes, and it cut transportation costs by about 90 percent. It was designed for barge traffic, and was originally 40 feet wide and four feet deep. Expansion began 10 years after the canal opened, and it was enlarged to 70 feet wide and seven feet deep. It contains 36 locks, which manage an elevation change of almost 600 feet.
The canal was first proposed in 1807; it was the idea of Jesse Hawley, an entrepreneur who dreamed of an easier, cheaper way to get grain from the west to the Eastern Seaboard. Shipping costs had bankrupted him, and he had plenty of time to brainstorm while he was sitting in a debtors' prison. He envisioned a canal running along the Mohawk Valley, and got New York governor DeWitt Clinton on board. The state legislature finally approved the $7 million appropriation in 1817. They recouped the cost of construction--and then some--within nine years, through canal tolls. (Source: The Writer's Almanac)
Today's painfully straight forward insight:
• America's health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system.
• I can't imagine a person becoming a success who doesn't give this game of life everything he's got.
• We are not educated well enough to perform the necessary act of intelligently selecting our leaders.
...And that's the way it is.
Walter Cronkite (1916-2009), born on this day 110 years ago in St. Joseph, Missouri.
The Technology
This site is a working demonstration of on-demand PHP scripting. The code tightly integrates computed data with text, spewing forth natural-sounding narrative output with flawless grammar and syntax. The narrative sections--which all change daily--are from an in-house database. The real time data is derived [and rendered] primarily by PHP code at the time the output is generated at the Linux/Apache server.
About the fruitfly: Whether the fruitfly in the margin entertains or annoys, it serves a very real and useful purpose. The fly uses recently developed sentinelware. In short, the image is generated by the output of many, many active server monitoring processes. When abnormal server activity is detected by the "fly system," the fly's appearance deviates from the default, and a system exception raises a flag that is immediately addressed by the humans who monitor the server via the fruitfly's movements and morphology. Until fairly recently, server issues weren't always obvious, and if so, isolating and mending them was an arduous exercise. The fruitfly technology has made the plight of the server technician much more bearable. If the fruitfly annoys you, click in the center of the lens flare to swat it.
Contact Information
Email: tony@tonysartain.com
Cell: 903-360-0002
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