Good afternoon. This website is a demonstration of smart content rendering. The content updates continuously without the help of Internet monkeys. All the information was current at the time you arrived here. Today is Wednesday, the 1st day of July and the 181st 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 times vary, as with the Sun as we see it, of course.
On the Jewish calendar, today is the 16th day of Tammuz in the year 5786.
We are under a waning gibbous moon. At the time you accessed this page, its exact age was 16 days, 16 hours, and 27 minutes. We will be under a new moon again on Tuesday, July 14th at 8:27 AM. The next full moon will occur on Wednesday, July 29th at 2:49 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 Lunar and Solar System neighbors, we see that we are under the constellation of Cancer.
For today, our sunrise and sunset times (at -96.852/32.847) are
6:17 AM
and
8:27 PM,
giving us 14 hours and 10 minutes of daylight.
This day in 1903 was the start of the first Tour de France bicycle race.
Today we celebrate the birthdays of Charles Laughton (1899), Estée Lauder (1908), Olivia DeHavilland (1916), Jean-Pierre Rampal (1922), Leslie Caron (1931), Tab Hunter (1931), Bobby Day (1932), Jamie Farr (1934), Jean Marsh (1934), Sydney Pollack (1934), Karen Black (1942), Dan Aykroyd (1952), Alan Ruck (1956), Princess Diana (1961), Carl Lewis (1961), Pamela Anderson (1967), Missy Elliott (1971), and Liv Tyler (1977).
Today in History: The Walkman Debuts
On this day in 1979, Sony introduced the Walkman portable cassette player. Sony's co-founder, Masaru Ibuka, liked to listen to music when he traveled, but he was tired of lugging a full-size cassette player with him, so he commissioned designers to come up with something more portable. Cassette player technology had been around since 1963, but Sony miniaturized it and made it portable as well as private, with no external speaker. They took the idea of the Pressman--a portable tape recorder that was popular with journalists--and removed the recording mechanism and added stereo sound. Skeptics doubted that it would sell, since it lacked recording capability, but Ibuka replied, "Don't you think a stereo cassette player that you can listen to while walking around is a good idea?"
The first Walkman model was the TPS-L2; it weighed 14 ounces, had a blue and silver chassis, chunky buttons, and two headphone jacks so you could listen with a friend. The Walkman was first available in Japan for a cost of 30,000 Yen, about $150 U.S., and Sony sold 50,000 of the players during the first two months, two and a half times more than they had projected.
Four years later, cassette tapes were outselling vinyl records for the first time, and in 1986, the word "Walkman" made it into the Oxford English Dictionary. Eventually, Sony came out with all kinds of new features--automatic reverse, AM-FM receivers, "bass boost," and weatherproofing--but the writing was on the wall for cassette tapes once compact discs were introduced in 1982. (Source: The Writer's Almanac)
Today's smartass quote:
A big vocabulary will take you a long way--even farther if you know what the words mean.
Tony Sartain
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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