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 Friday, the 6th day of November and the 309th 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 26th 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 26 days, 12 hours, and 24 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
6:40 AM
and
5:24 PM,
giving us 10 hours and 44 minutes of daylight.
We are in the 44th 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 Johanna, the Insane, Queen of Castile (1479), Alois Senefelder (1771), Adolphe Sax (1814), Charles Dow (1851), John Philip Sousa (1854), James Naismith (1861), Walter Perry Johnson (1887), Ray Conniff (1906), Mike Nichols (1931), Sally Field (1946), Glenn Frey (1948), Maria Shriver (1955), Ethan Hawke (1970), Rebecca Romijn Stamos (1972), and Pat Tillman (1976).
Today in History: Happy Birthday, John Philip Sousa
Today is the birthday of the "March King," John Philip Sousa, born in Washington, D.C., in 1854. He began studying music when he was six, and over the course of his life he studied voice, violin, flute, piano, trombone, cornet, baritone, and alto horn, as well as composition.
When he was 13, he tried to run away from home and join a circus band, prompting his father to enlist him in the United States Marine Band as an apprentice musician. He published his first composition in 1872, at the age of 18, and was conducting a Broadway orchestra--for Gilbert and Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore--by the time he was 21. He went back to the Marine Band in 1880, this time as its leader, a position he held for 12 years. During his tenure, he composed "Semper Fidelis," which became the official march of the United States Marine Corps.
After he retired from the Marines, he formed his own concert band; they were the first American band to go on a world tour, and they even had their own baseball team. He was a strict perfectionist: Everything they played was note perfect and was accorded the same respect, whether it was a classical piece or a pop tune. During World War I, he enlisted in the U.S. Naval Reserve and led their band; by this time he was a wealthy man, so he donated his naval salary to the Sailors' and Marines' Relief Fund.
He composed many kinds of music, including suites, fantasies, humoresques, and dances; he even composed several university fight songs, operettas, and other vocal pieces. It's his marches that he's remembered for, though. On Christmas Day, 1896, he composed one of his best beloved marches, "The Stars and Stripes Forever." It was named the official march of the United States by an act of Congress. In addition to his skills as a composer and conductor, he was also a fine marksman, and is enshrined in the Trapshooting Hall of Fame. His Hall of Fame biography includes the following quote: "Let me say that just about the sweetest music to me is when I call, 'pull,' the old gun barks, and the referee in perfect key announces, 'dead'." He wrote several articles about trapshooting; he also wrote a full-length autobiography and three novels. (Source: The Writer's Almanac)
Today's timeless insight and wisdom is from Charles Henry Dow (November 6, 1851 - December 4, 1902). Dow was an American journalist who co-founded Dow Jones & Company with Edward Jones and Charles Bergstresser.
Dow also founded The Wall Street Journal, which has become one of the most respected financial publications in the world. He also invented the Dow Jones Industrial Average as part of his research into market movements. He developed a series of principles for understanding and analyzing market behavior which later became known as Dow theory, the groundwork for technical analysis. (Source: Wikipedia)
The public, as a whole, buys [stock] at the wrong time and sells at the wrong time.
Charles Dow, born on this day 175 years ago in Sterling, Connecticut
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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