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 Friday, the 7th day of August and the 218th 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 24th 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 24 days, 14 hours, and 52 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
6:39 AM
and
8:08 PM,
giving us 13 hours and 29 minutes of daylight.
There are 46 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 1620, Katharina Kepler, the mother of astronomer Johannes Kepler, was arrested for witchcraft in the town of Leonberg, Germany. Fourteen other women were arrested and tried. Johannes and his academic circle rallied in support of her innocence and she was set free. Eight of the women were executed.
Today we celebrate the birthdays of Mata Hari (1876), Billie Burke (1884), Louis Leakey (1903), Ralph Bunche (1904), Stan Freberg (1926), Edwin W. Edwards (1927), Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer (1927), "The Amazing" James Randi (1928), Ruth Carter (1929), Marilyn Manson (1940), Garrison Keillor (1942), David Duchovny (1960), Greg Serano (1972), Charlize Theron (1975), and Melody Oliveria (1988).
Today in History: Early Eco Friendliness Gets Patented
On this day in 1888 Theophilus Van Kannel of Philadelphia was granted US Patent No. 387,571 for his "Storm Door Structure." Van Kannel's door quickly became known as the "revolving door," and to this day is in extensive universal use as the most practical and efficient way to allow for the quick passage of a number of people--often in opposite directions at the same time--and for the conservation of heated or cooled air inside the building it services.
The claims section of the original patent cites a number of advantages the new door has over traditional exterior swinging doors. Kannel's door was intended as a way to provide an airlock for a building, yet allowing people to enter and exit by merely walking through without the need to open and close multiple doors. The door was to be operated manually and only turn in a counter-clockwise direction. The patent drawings show a three-partition revolving door. The patent describes it as having "three radiating and equidistant wings... provided with weather-strips or equivalent means to insure a snug fit". The door "possesses numerous advantages over a hinged-door structure... it is perfectly noiseless... effectually prevents the entrance of wind, snow, rain or dust. [...] Moreover, the door cannot be blown open by the wind... there is no possibility of collision, and yet persons can pass both in and out at the same time." The patent further lists, "the excluding of noises of the street" as another advantage of the revolving door. It goes on to describe how a partition can be hinged so as to open to allow the passage of long objects through the revolving door. Drawing upon his understanding of human behavior, Kannel anticipated that it was likely his revolving door would be rotated with greater force and speed than would be safe, especially if more than one person was passing at a given time, so he incorporated a mechanical governor to cap the maximum rotating speed.
In principal, the revolving door has changed little over the years. Early on, designers capitalized on the tremendous impacts aesthetic enhancements and automated power would have on the design, so the improvements were quickly incorporated. To date, other than the addition of a fourth partition and electric motors, the revolving door is pretty much like Kannel's original eco friendly design.
Welcome to Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.
Garrison Keillor, born on this day 84 years ago in Anoka, Minnesota
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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