Good afternoon, and welcome to this website. The content updates continuously without the help of Internet monkeys. All the information was current at the time you arrived here. Absolutely everything you're seeing is generated by code developed TOTALLY inhouse. No commercial website design software is in use here. None.
About the fruitfly: Whether the fruitfly entertains or annoys, it serves a very real and useful purpose. Using recently developed sentinelware, the image is generated by the output of many, many active server monitoring processes. When abnormal server activity is detected by the "fly controller" 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. And now you know the fly story. If the fruitfly annoys you, click in the center of the lens flare to swat it.
Today is Sunday, the 26th day of July and the 206th 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 12th day of Av in the year 5786.
We are under a waxing crescent moon. At the time you accessed this page, its exact age was 12 days, 7 hours, and 21 minutes. We will be under a new moon again on Wednesday, August 12th at 9:11 PM. 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 Leo.
For today, our sunrise and sunset times (at -96.852/32.847) are
6:31 AM
and
8:18 PM,
giving us 13 hours and 47 minutes of daylight.
There are 58 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 1837, the first commercial use of an electrical telegraph was successfully exhibited by William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone, sent from Euston to Camden in London.
Today we celebrate the birthdays of George Bernard Shaw (1856), Carl Jung (1875), Pearl S. Buck (1892), Aldous Huxley (1894), Gracie Allen (generally believed to be 1895), Vivian Vance (1912), Blake Edwards (1922), Marjorie Lord (1922), Jason Robards, Jr. (1922), Stanley Kubrick (1928), Mary Jo Kopechne (1940), Mick Jagger (1943), Helen Mirren (1945), Roger Taylor (1949), Dorothy Hamill (1956), Kevin Spacey (1959), Sandra Bullock (1964), Jeremy Piven (1965), and Kate Beckinsale (1973).
Today in History: Protection From Various Vapors
It was on this day in 1850 that Benjamin Lane of Cambridge, Massachusetts was granted Patent No. 7,476 for his gas mask.
Only three years earlier in 1847, Louis Haslett was granted a facial device for filtering particulate matter from the air, or as he called it, "a new and useful Machine for Protecting the Lungs from Injurious Substances." Lane's device was unlike the filtering device because it literally enabled breathing from a closed system, not the atmosphere.
Lane's patent provided for a fairly complex mask that was designed to cover the mouth and nose and conform to the contours of the face to insure no atmospheric air would be inhaled. The invention came in the days before pure oxygen was available in large quantities, so Lane proposed large containers--perhaps two as an ideal number--that could be charged with compressed air. The patent document suggests a total capacity of five to seven gallons of air at a pressure of five to seven atmospheres. A regulator valve was to be operated by the user. The gas mask had clapper valves to insure that all inhaled air was from the supply reservoirs and all exhaled air was discharged into the atmosphere. Interestingly, Lane suggested that two cylindrical reservoirs could be strapped to the user's back. Yes, Virginia, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
About political correctness...
It's hard to imagine living in a society in which there are not those who bear the standards. And then, there are the sometimes dreaded and oft unappreciated enforcers of the standards. Without both forces, there is no civility. What we don't need are those who find it their charge to re-define the standards and set the course for the rest of us. May God either repair or silence the damn fools.
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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