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 Saturday, the 8th day of August and the 219th 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 25th 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 25 days, 14 hours, and 44 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
8:08 PM,
giving us 13 hours and 28 minutes of daylight.
There are 45 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 1960 "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini" reached the top of Billboard Magazine's chart.
Today we celebrate the birthdays of John Ward (1571), Paul Dirac (1902), Matthew Henson (1866), Dino De Laurentiis (1919), Rory Calhoun (1922), Rudi Gernreich (1922), Esther Williams (1923), Mel Tillis (1932), Dustin Hoffman (1937), Connie Stevens (1938), Jose Cruz (1947), Willie P. Richardson (1947), Keith Carradine (1949), Robin Quivers (1952), Donny Most (1953), Dave "The Edge" Evans (1961), Jeremy Scott (1975), J.C. Chasez (1976), Drew Lachey (1976), Vanessa Amorosi (1981), Roger Federer (1981), Bradley McIntosh (1981), and Princess Beatrice of York (1988).
Today in History: Mass Printing Reaches the Masses
It was on this day in 1876 that Thomas Edison was granted US Patent No. 180,857 for "Autographic Printing." Commonly known as mimeograph printing, Edison's patent impacted the way we do things in an enormous way, but it was not a scientific breakthrough such as the light bulb, motion pictures and his telecommunication inventions, so it's received relatively little attention from historians.
Edison's mimeograph patent involved several unique devices, each necessary for the production of mimeographed images. In 1876 there were several quite sophisticated processes for printing high resolution images, but there was no "instant" method. Thus, Edison ushered in a whole new industry with his mimeograph technology. Unlike all previous processes, Edison's new method used a stencil made of mulberry paper that had a thinly waxed printing surface. After etching the waxed surface to expose the porous paper stock, oil-based ink was applied to the non-waxed back side, which penetrated only the etched areas, and could then be used as a template to stamp images on paper. In Edison's patent, the device used to bring the paper and stencil together was a flatbed press with adaptations to fulfill a few unique requirements. The mimeograph printing technique proved to be popular, so improvements were quick to follow, eventually leading to a rotating drum to which the stencil was mounted so that it rolled over the paper, leaving behind an exact replica of the stencil image, thus increasing the speed of the process.
Edison's original 1876 patent covered the flatbed press for the actual stamping process, as well as an electric etching pen that was used for creating the images on the stencil. The patent document is quite comprehensive. Predating anything resembling standardized electric current, the patent includes a device for supplying electricity from wet cells. The patent diagram depicted here is of the wet cell device. Screw terminals for attaching the electric wires can be seen on top of the upper horizontal bar in the diagram.
Today's iconic opener:
In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the police who investigate crime and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories.
Law and Order opening narration
spoken by Steven Zirnkilton
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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