Tony Sartain, mba, ne

niche programming and process control

Good morning, 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 Monday, the 10th day of August and the 221st 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 27th 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, 21 hours, and 8 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 6:41 AM and 8:06 PM, giving us 13 hours and 25 minutes of daylight.

There are 43 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.



Today we celebrate the birthdays of Henri Nestlé (1814), Jay Cooke (1821), Edward L. Doheny (1856), Herbert Hoover (1874), Jack Haley (1898), George Crockett (1909), Leo Fender (1909), Richard Reeves (1912), Rhonda Fleming (1923), Marie-Claire Alain (1926), Jimmy Dean (1928), Eddie Fisher (1928), Lynn Cohen (1933), Rocky Colavito (1933), Ian Anderson (1947), Patti Austin (1948), Rosanna Arquette (1959), Antonio Banderas (1960), Nicole Bass (1964), Justin Theroux (1971), Angie Harmon (1972), and Devon Aoki (1982).


Today in History: Missouri Joins the Union

It was on this day in 1821 that the state of Missouri was admitted to the Union. Missouri is called the "Show Me State," a motto dating back to the 1890s and a speech where Congressman Willard Vandiver declared: "I come from a country that raises corn and cotton, cockleburs and Democrats, and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I'm from Missouri, and you have got to show me."

For the past several decades, the mean center of the population of the United States has been in Missouri. Missouri is the center of America in other ways, too: St. Louis, Missouri, is considered the farthest west of America's Eastern cities, and Kansas City, Missouri, is thought of as the farthest east of America's Cities of the West. In the past, Missouri was a Southern state; now it's generally thought of as a Midwestern state.

Missouri's what's called a "bellwether state" in politics. Missouri has voted for every winning U.S. presidential candidate since 1904, with just two exceptions: the 1956 election and the 2008 election.

Missouri was settled by German brewers and has always had among the most lenient drinking laws in the nation. When Prohibition fever swept the rest of the nation, Missouri never enacted statewide prohibition. State law specifically bans arrests for public intoxication. Open containers of alcohol are permitted in moving vehicles (passengers can drink).

Missourians count among their ranks: Mark Twain, Langston Hughes, T.S. Eliot, Sara Teasdale, Tennessee Williams, William S. Burroughs, William Least Heat Moon, Joseph Pulitzer, J. William Fulbright, Walt Disney, Walter Cronkite, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Jesse James. (Source: The Writer's Almanac)

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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