Good afternoon, 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 Friday, the 2nd day of October and the 274th 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 21st day of Tishri in the year 5787.
We are under a last quarter moon. At the time you accessed this page, its exact age was 21 days, 6 hours, and 46 minutes. We will be under a new moon again on Saturday, October 10th at 10:40 PM. The next full moon will occur on Sunday, October 25th at 5:02 PM. 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 Libra.
For today, our sunrise and sunset times (at -96.852/32.847) are
7:14 AM
and
7:01 PM,
giving us 11 hours and 47 minutes of daylight.
We are in the 9th 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 Richard III (1452), Czar Peter II (1715), Ferdinand Foch (1851), Mahatma Gandhi (1869), Groucho Marx (1890), Bud Abbott (1895), George "Spanky" McFarland (1928), Rex Reed (1938), Don McLean (1945), Donna Karan (1948), Sting (1951), Lorraine Bracco (1955), Kelly Ripa (1970), and Ayumi Hamasaki (1978).
On this day in 1915, John Logie Baird performed the first test of a working television system.
Today's quote is a compilation from Groucho Marx, who was disappointed with the quality of TV in his day. No doubt more recent programming has caused him to turn over several times in his mausoleum crypt. [Trivia note: Groucho's crypt is in a small room in the large mausoleum in the middle of Eden Memorial Park in Mission Hills, California. His marker is in the middle of the larger indoor wall.]
• I like television. I still believe that television is the most powerful form of communication on Earth--I just hate what is being done with it.
• If there's anything unsettling to the stomach, it's watching actors on television talk about their personal lives.
• Why should people go out and pay money to see bad films when they can stay at home and see bad television for nothing?
• Television is the first truly democratic culture--the first culture available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what people do want.
Groucho Marx, born on this day 136 years ago in New York.
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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