Good evening, and welcome. All the information on this site was current at the moment you arrived. The content updates continuously 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. None.
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.
Today is Sunday, the 9th day of August and the 220th day of 2026. Most of the United States is under 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.
On the Jewish calendar, today is the 26th day of Av in the year 5786.
We are under a waning crescent moon. At the time you accessed this page, its exact age was 26 days, 14 hours, and 54 minutes. We will be under a new moon again on Wednesday, August 12th at 9:11 PM. The next full moon will occur on Thursday, August 27th at 3:33 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 Lunar and Solar System neighbors, we see that we are under the constellation of Leo.
For today, our sunrise and sunset times (at -96.852/32.847) are
6:40 AM
and
8:07 PM,
giving us 13 hours and 27 minutes of daylight.
There are 44 days until the end of summer, marked by the Vernal, or Autumnal, Equinox. On the day of the Equinox, the sun can be observed to be directly above the equator, and the night and day are 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. This year, the exact crossing time will be 9:51 am Greenwich Mean Time on Sunday, September 23rd.
On this day in 1898, Rudolf Diesel of Germany obtained patent 608,845 for his internal combustion engine, later known as the diesel engine.
Today we celebrate the birthdays of Francesco Cetti (1726), Amedeo Avogadro (1776), William Barret Travis (1809), Jean Piaget (1896), Robert Shaw (1927), Sam Elliott (1944), Melanie Griffith (1957), Whitney Houston (1963), Hoda Kotb (1964), Deion Sanders (1967), Gillian Anderson (1968), Eric Bana (1968), Christopher Cuomo (1970), Arion Salazar (1970), and Audrey Tautou (1976).
Today in History: Electricity Reaches the Laundry Room
It was on this day in 1910 that Alva J. Fisher was granted US Patent No. 966,677 for his invention of the electric washing machine. However, Fisher's machine had been introduced as the Thor in 1908 by the Hurley Machine Company of Chicago. It's not uncommon for inventors to prototype and produce their inventions before the patents are issued provided they follow the stipulations of US Patent law.
Exactly who first applied electricity to the washing machine is unclear, but it was Fisher who built the first machine of a unique and superior design, thus qualifying it for a patent. For centuries, there had been devices that had aided in doing the laundry, and as technology evolved, manually driven machines were introduced, but each had severe limitations. It's generally believed that the first electric washing machines were of the sort with an upright cylindrical tank elevated on stout legs with electrical and mechanical works underneath to operate the dasher that ran up through the bottom of the tank. The fancy models had wringer mechanisms mounted on top. Later models incorporated a perforated cage inside the cylinder that could be geared to rotate at a high speed to spin the water from the washed clothes, eliminating the need for the wringer. While there are many washer designs in use today, the two major categories are either top or front loading machines, each with an interior perforated cage that makes possible the spin cycle.
Now, here's where the story gets interesting. Fisher's patent describes what we call today a front loading machine. So, it turns out the earliest electric Thors were far different from the upright cylindrical tank sort generally believed to be the first electrics. The Thor machines, as described in the patent, were front loaders with galvanized perforated cages. However, the remarkable thing is that Fisher's design included a very intricate, but rugged mechanism that automatically changed the direction of the cage rotation after two complete rotations. And there's more... Fisher's design included vanes mounted inside the cage to lift the clothes toward the top of the cage, then drop them to create added force. Does any of that sound familiar?
Yes, over 100 years after the first washing machine was patented, the horizontal rotation/front loading machine that's common in today's households is virtually identical in operation to the very first electric washer. Pardon the pun, but it seems that our washing machines have run the full cycle.
Today's deep thought goes thusly:
I don't understand people who say they need more "Me Time." What other time is there? Do these people spend part of their day in someone else's body?
Jarod Kintz
This Book is Not for Sale
The Technology
This site is a working demonstration of on-demand PHP scripting. The code tightly integrates computed and imported 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 an in-house database. Raw data used in the financial and weather sections is imported at page generation time. All the other data, particularly the celestial stuff, is derived and rendered by several hundred lines of code at the time the page is generated at the Linux/Apache server.
Contact Information
Email: tony@tonysartain.com
Cell: 903-360-0002
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