Good afternoon, 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 Saturday, the 14th day of November and the 317th day of 2026. On the Jewish calendar, this is the 4th day of Kislev in the year 5787.
We are under a waxing crescent moon. At the time you accessed this page, its exact age was 5 days, 7 hours, and 32 minutes. We will be under a new moon again on Tuesday, December 8th at 11:08 PM. 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
6:47 AM
and
5:19 PM,
giving us 10 hours and 32 minutes of daylight.
We are in the 52th 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 Friedrich Wilhelm Zachau (1663), Robert Fulton (1765), Claude Monet (1840), Jawaharlal Nehru (1889), Aaron Copland (1900), Dick Powell (1904), Senator Joseph McCarthy (1909), Rosemary DeCamp (1910), Barbara Hutton (1912), Veronica Lake (1919), Brian Keith (1921), McLean Stevenson (1929), King Hussein of Jordan (1935), King Charles (1948), Condoleezza Rice (1954), Yanni (1954), and Travis Barker (1975).
Today in History: Electrifying the Laundry
It was on this day in 1882 that Henry W. Seely was issued US Patent No. 259,054 for an electric flat iron. What is a flat iron? Well, these days we call it an iron, the hand held plug-in device used with an ironing board to press clothes and other textiles. Although the iron has fallen out of favor, it's estimated that 70% of American households own one. (Source: Tonypedia)
In the old days, irons were made of metal, usually iron, hence the name. They were generally placed flat side down on a hot surface and allowed to heat until they reached working temperature. The process was time consuming and not terribly fun. A few inventors experimented with fuel fed irons, but there were issues that proved to be less than satisfactory with every innovative twist--safety certainly not being the least of the concerns.
Seely's electric iron has erroneously been described as using a carbon arc for the source of heat. That was not the case. It used resistive heat, much like the irons of today. However, the conductive elements were indeed thin carbon rods. The original design specifies a flat metal base plate with grooves on the upper side to accommodate the rods. The main housing to which the plate was attached needed mass and was to be of a non-metallic material. Seely suggested solid plaster of Paris with an outer shell of metal and perhaps a layer of felt to insulate the shell and handle from the heat of the plaster of Paris and the iron plate. At the time the patent was issued, electrical outlets didn't exist, so a circuit designed for electric lighting was recommended to power the iron. The patent suggests using a "plug" that could be inserted into a bulb socket. Another key feature of the electric iron was a method of controlling the heat level. The current controller for the heating elements wasn't to be integrated into the iron itself, but accomplished externally by means of resistance coils, although there are no specifications for them in the patent. Because there were no standards for household current at the time of the Seely's proposed electric flat iron, there is no reference to AC, DC, voltage or power requirements. In fact, many early electrical devices were designed to be easily adapted to the power source available.
My father joined our party because the Democrats in Jim Crow Alabama of 1952 would not register him to vote. The Republicans did.
Condoleezza Rice, born on this day 72 years ago in Birmington, Alabama
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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